Every minute, 571 new websites are created, 347 blog posts are published (in WordPress only), and 684,478 pieces of content are shared on Facebook 1. Where does your brand stand in the middle of this ever-expanding conversation? Let’s face it: finding brand-relevant content in this chaotic World Wide Web can feel overwhelming.
What does our audience want to read about? Which articles, infographics, videos, and images are trending around these topics? How do we go about finding them? The act of finding relevant information to boost our brand’s content strategy is often referred to as content discovery.
Once upon a time, before search engines were available (yes, there was such a time), all users could do to discover interesting content was cross their fingers and dedicate hours to browsing the available “internet directories”, which grouped existing pages by category. Someone would literally hand-pick new pages and publish them to online listings which you would then have to dig to find relevant content. Thankfully, the birth of search engines brought about all kinds of powerful algorithms that are now able to recommend content based on a myriad of fascinating criteria.
My goal with this article is precisely to introduce you to this algorithm power. Stop digging and start enjoying: there are now tools that will bring relevant content to you. Boom.
Throughout this article, I will share 10 amazing content discovery tools to hack the (often excruciating) task of finding brand-relevant content to share.
1. Topsy: This social search engine allows you to look at the most popular tweets, links, photos, videos and influencers around a given topic, for a certain time period (which you can establish).
2. Daily App, by Buffer: This user-friendly mobile app fulfills its promise of letting you find “awesome content, fast.” It also connects with your Buffer queue to speed up the publishing process. Currrently available for iPhone only.
3. Pinterest: Browse through Pinterest’s popular pins page and you will easily get a glimpse of what topics are trending within the community. You can also refine this search by selecting a specific topic and looking at its most popular pins.
4. Flipboard: Configure your own magazine by selecting a list of relevant topics and start receiving content automatically.
5. Quora: Use Quora to discover questions that your audience may have, and plan your content strategy around answering them. Using the other tools introduced in this article, find insightful answers to your potential customers’ questions and share them using your brand’s social media profiles or blog.
6. Subreddits: Reddit is a platform that organizes content around different topic areas, and ranks it according to ratings assigned by community members. Subreddits are site sections that focus on single topics and provide a ranked list of related articles. They are a great place to spot articles that are trending within a given topic area.
7. Buzzsumo: This platform connects you with the most shared content and key influencers within a certain topic. They also rank content according to the amount of shares that it has provoked, which helps us determine how much engagement it could potentially generate for our brand.
8. Prismatic: Select a list of topics that your audience is interested in and sit back while Prismatic builds a feed of emerging, highly relevant content.
9. Google Trends: With a renewed interface design and Google’s highly effective search algorithm, Google Trends offers a unique overview of trending content in different geographical areas around the world.
10. Paper.li: Build your own online newspaper and have Paper.li scrape interesting content around the web to fill it up every day. You can even share this newspaper with your followers with its automatized social media sharing capabilities.
1 According to a study by Business intelligence company DOMO, via Mashable. http://mashable.com/2012/06/22/data-created-every-minute/