By Jessica Davis
Social media brings, to both big and small businesses, a host of options to grow their market and reach their target audience. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and many others allow you to engage with your audience, sharing relevant content with them, which not only helps them understand your offering better, but also helps you establish a relationship with them in the long run.
However, creating content on a daily basis though not impossible, is not an easy task. It involves looking for new topics and creating fresh content that will be of use to your audience. Particularly in the case of small and medium businesses, content creation could eat into the limited time and resources that business owners have at their disposal.
Content curation tools help you discover and share fresh, relevant content with your audience, which in turn ensures that you maintain visibility and reach on social media. Here are three free content curation tools that can help you save time on and improve the efficiency of your social media marketing activities.
DrumUp
DrumUp provides you with a fresh stream of content recommendations everyday based on the keywords you input at the time of setting up your account. Each account you connect can be tailored to generate content for a different set of keywords. You can select the articles of your choice from the stream of recommendations and schedule them for sharing on your Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin accounts. You can also edit suggested posts and add custom posts to the content queue. The tool lets you schedule any number of posts in advance, and there are no limitations on the number of accounts you can manage through it either. DrumUp acts as a central dashboard from which you can manage all you social accounts, freeing you from having to constantly keep a tab on when your next post is due. The tool also lets you connect your blog feed to your social accounts, so new posts get shared as and when you publish them.
Commun.it
Commun.it is a Twitter specific social media management tool. When it comes to framing your messages into bite-sized information of 140 characters, it is not only the content creation you are worried about. You need to sieve the productive part of your twitter community and focus on them for better business and market expansion. Commun.it helps you do just that. It uses analytics to identify influencers within your community. It helps you discover content shared by these influencers, which you can then re-share with your followers. It also prompts you to take different actions to build relationships with members of your community, such as thanking new followers, and replying to tweets that mention you. The free tool also lets you manage multiple profiles and allows you to schedule your posts, eliminating the need for you to check and update your Twitter account continuously.
Klout
Klout is a content recommendation and social authority ranking tool that helps you curate content for your business free of cost. It also helps you determine you social ranking based on your activity. To curate content on Klout, you just need to feed in the keywords into the tool which in turn will search the Internet and bring to you the most recent and relevant content suggestions. The Klout Score, which is a measure of your social authority, is indicative of the effectiveness of your posts on different platforms. Klout also helps you identify experts on a specific topic.
These three free tools can help you grow your business using social media. There are many more social media management tools out there each with their own distinct offerings. Using these tools will give you the freedom to focus more on your core business activities knowing that your social media presence is well taken care of.
Jessica Davis is a content strategist with Godot Media – a leading content marketing services company. She works closely with other article writers at Godot, creating engaging content for the company’s clients. Her other interests, besides content and social media marketing, are technology, sports and fashion. Follow at @godotmedia and @jess12davis.
