Last month I looked at whether content aggregation tools can replace ‘human’ content curation, and since then I have been trying out a nifty little curation tool called Scoop.it, which has a number of features that will support your content curation efforts and enhance your ability to provide quality content to your followers.
Within the tool you define your own topic or area, and then curate content around it, which enhances your position as a point of authority on the subject matter and adds depth to positioning you are doing elsewhere with individual updates and your own created content.
Scoop.it offers a more permanent way of sharing content with your followers, in that it allows you to present your chosen content in a visually-appealing, prioritised way; it is a more co-ordinated way of doing this than the immediate scatter-gun approach of Twitter, and yet avoids the depressingly common lowest common denominator of Paper.li.
With a straightforward sign-up process, the site allows a wide choice of sources for curation which, if you invest time in adjusting and managing, will allow a very refined selection of content that you can share, allowing you to target a specific audience with relevant content tailored to their needs. You can add further value by adding your own commentary to each link, again reinforcing your expert position.
Scoop.it: easing the content curation burden.
The basic Scoop.it tool is free to use, and there are upgrades to paid-for services that allow much more advanced use in terms of number of channels and customisation.
For maximum presentation with minimum input, Scoop.it offers a great way of sharing prioritised content with your followers in a way that they will understand and enjoy. If you would like to check it out, have a look at my topic of weekly digital news for UK businesses I would love to know what you think of this, and feel free to share your own Scoop.it topics in the comments below.
I also use Scoop.it and I like it for the reasons you mention.
My reservation about using it for anything that I really do not want to lose, is that Scoop.it might disappear.
It happened with Amplify.com and that has a similar capability.
I don’t know whether I saw the writing on the wall with Amplify or something else motivated me, but for a project that I care about (monitoring articles about colony collapse disorder in honeybees) I decided to take all the links in Amplify and copy them to a page on one of my own sites.
It is more time consuming to highlight a quote and paste a link in my own site than it is with Scoop.it, but at least I know that I have control over the future of the site.
[ I’m @DavidBennett on Twitter and that is how I found your article here – from one of your tweets ]
Thanks for your comment David – you make a good point, as no-one can really tell the sites with longevity and what will fall or rise over time, or who will be bought out by who and so change in what a service offers or costs. That would be a good skill to have though! You highlight the fact that the most powerful place for content longevity is a site that you control yourself and to which you can drive traffic as you add value; the content I deal with tends to be more trends based and time-contained, so I have fewer concerns about extending shelf-life, seeing tools like scoop.it as good ways of attracting in traffic and extending an audience.
That makes sense – Have you taken a look at
http://www.clipboard.com ?
I was migrated there automatically when Amplify folded.
I can send you an invitation if you would like.