7 Best Content Discovery Platforms In 2021

“I wish there were more content” isn’t something that anyone in your brand’s online audience might be thinking right now. Can they even stay online without receiving content, as advised by their Amazon Alexas or your delicious website cookies? Every day, they are served content that is not just personalized but engaging. Marketers are already aware...

“I wish there were more content” isn’t something that anyone in your brand’s online audience might be thinking right now. Can they even stay online without receiving content, as advised by their Amazon Alexas or your delicious website cookies? Every day, they are served content that is not just personalized but engaging.

Marketers are already aware of that.

If not, we’d hate to break that bubble, but that’s how things are – unless your content marketing strategies are leaps and bounds better than your competitors. Your product may be better. But it doesn’t mean that people will gravitate towards your content.

What they’re really saying is – “Oh boy, I wish there were more content that I could like.”

Hence, there’s always room to make it better – more engaging, contextual, and purposeful. Otherwise, your audience members will see themselves out.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of content, remember? And the average attention span of your preferred customer persona isn’t exactly expanding, is it? One may find that the data shows the opposite has happened.

It’s why even the best content providers – whether media distributors, news publications, technology providers, or customer-facing companies – are under pressure to increase the level of content stickiness.

And how do they go about it?

Well, that’s the tricky part.

With the emergence of new technologies like AI, metadata, and machine learning, traditional content discovery approaches can’t cut the mustard anymore for content publishers.

You will need the latest content discovery tools if you want to post valuable information that customers are dying to read. With the content discovery tools, you lay the foundation of managing the way you engage with people along their purchasing journeys or brand awareness campaigns. It helps you build a smart content calendar to keep your social media platforms, website, or blog engine alive and kicking. You get to knock on the doors of your customer’s devices and give them access to unforgettable information.

But what is this great content we are referring to?

It’s a mix of reading material that includes branded and owned content, as well as industry reports, and studies. To formulate a content strategy, you must assess sales and marketing priorities. However, one can follow best practices like the 30/60/10 principle used for social media content.

30% – owned

60% – curated

10% – self-promotion

Why access to content discovery is as important as content curation

  • Share information to show your audience that your brand is motivated beyond the number of sales
  • Leverage external perspectives to give credibility to your company vision
  • Expand your lead generation strategy – armed with great traffic-friendly content
  • Become a top thought leader by creating a community reading experience
  • Make your editorial calendar stronger

Content discovery tools

Great content discovery tools can help publishers post the right content. You can grow your reader base by giving them unique content that addresses their pain-points, provides the latest solutions, or gives them an immersive 360-degree perspective of what everyone else is talking about.

11 reasons why content discovery tools are fantastic for marketers, brands, and the general user

  1. Analyze millions of online articles in real-time every single day that cut across various industries and domains
  2. Share meaningful insights that cover the needs of micro and nano niches
  3. Leverage a centralized interface to manage the whole content discovery process
  4. Edit content discovery settings to find new growth opportunities and accelerate new business ventures
  5. Make your blogs, websites, or social media platforms friendlier with search engines to increase organic brand engagement – make users excited to follow you
  6. Develop multi-channel marketing strategies
  7. Breathe new life into your social media platforms and post information that gets more traffic
  8. Build trust and confidence in your brand’s resources by giving people a solid reason to follow
  9. Improve user retention and reduce churn through sticky campaigns
  10. Increase brand advocacy and SEO by consistently sharing high-quality content
  11. Help the user cut through the noise and clutter of mediocre content and get to the good stuff

Creating memorable content from scratch can be expensive, time-consuming, and unproductive. You are rolling the dice, no matter how much research and expertise go into your content production. As a modern marketer, there are tons of items on your to-do list, from product launches to monthly metrics. So, in most cases, you don’t have the time or the resources to keep churning amazing content that is original.

But here’s the good part.

A lot of the content that you share on social media platforms can be from other sources. All you need is a little help.

It’s what your competitors are doing. Not just them – but the whole world has been onboard the sharing bandwagon ever since social media exploded.

It goes to show the critical role that relevant content discovery platforms can play in your sales and marketing resources.

And to make your search for the best a lot easier, we have created a list of the most useful content discovery platforms that have been widely used. You can leverage them to take your brand closer to people in the social world without asking them to buy your products or services.

Top 8 content discovery tools to drive traffic

Social Animal

Social Animal can be your content marketing Swiss knife, starting with cutting through the complexities of the discovery stage. With its AI-powered software, you can browse through millions of articles and posts to find what’s new and trending while categorizing them out based on how well they are performing across all social media platforms.

When it comes to advanced content research and strategy, Social Animal to dig deep into the best-performing articles and gives you all their main keywords, wordcount details, and more SEO-friendly details.

With highly sophisticated data science techniques, Social Animal gives you valuable marketing insights into:

  • How a given keyword has historically performed
  • When might be a good time to publish new content
  • Which title and article lengths have maximum impact
  • What content recommendation matters the most
Main features of Social Animal’s content discovery platform
  • “Trending” feature: Discover the most shared articles in a few seconds and crush it with your latest blog, website update, or social post!
  • “When and where to post” feature: Speed up your content marketing curation by directly sharing/scheduling using the dashboard.
  • Advanced filters that search Social Animal’s massive database to find trending content topics in niche categories in real-time

Keep up with the topics and trends you care about.

Set up alerts for specific keywords from any niche.

What you can do
  • Go beyond headlines to unearth buried keywords
  • Stay tuned in to changing reading expectations with alerts
  • Set up discovery alerts based on preferred keywords
  • Track keywords and topics that are specific to your brand and get the best content recommendation
  • Receive dashboard notifications and get daily digest emails
  • Measure social media engagement of relevant content of competitor’s articles/services

Scoop.It

With Scoop.It’s engine, your business can easily discover and organize all the industry news, reports, and thought leadership articles so that you can curate them to your readers and spruce up your content strategy efforts.

Main features:
  • Integrate Blog/CMS with WordPress, Tumblr, Drupal, etc.
  • Add context easily with WYSIWYG editing and insights
  • Monitor views, reactions, unique and clicks
What you can do:
  • Use big-data semantic technology to automate discovery
  • Curate and improve the most relevant content
  • Publish to social media platforms, websites, blogs, etc.
  • Create one or more topic pages on content curation topics
  • Post a relevant topic and get intelligent recommendations on what readers want

Twitter

Social media platforms are where people go to get their fill of content. So, by tracking the reading habits of Twitter users in real-time (for free), you may keep your finger on the pulse of the audience and improve the reach of tour content marketing efforts. Using a simple hashtag, you can unearth the latest and top-performing tweets.

A few years ago, Twitter even announced a major update to their Discovery and Real-Time Alert functions that included the expansion of the Explore tool.

What you can do:
  • Get news customized to your needs based on your searches and the accounts you follow.
  • Update your Interests to get the latest tidbits on any topic or niche.
  • Catch up on related news, events, and stories based on your interests, region, and other categories like Entertainment, Politics, Sports etc.

Also read: Twitter Best Practices For 2020

Reddit

One look at Reddit may have you wondering, “How is this still active?” The design is rather poor. The level of toxicity may be high, depending on what you’re looking for. But it continues to be a goldmine for generating great content ideas (for free), considering the sheer volume of content that comprise over 1.5 million subreddits!

You might also like: The Ultimate Reddit Marketing Guide

What you can do:
  • See what’s ranking on one of the most popular websites in the world
  • Use the search engine feature to look across thematic communities
  • Discover trending subreddits that are hosting discussions about niche topics
  • Provide multi-word phrases to get exact phrase matches

Feedly

Feedly is a news aggregator/content discovery platform that makes it easy to find fresh content and expand marketing reach by analyzing general news sources, related topics, and even Twitter feeds. Another service it provides is that one can also track sources and articles in the organization by harnessing the power of board analytics in this tool.

What you can do:
  • Search based on popularity, relevance, and engagement
  • Manually search for a topic or scroll through the list of top-ranking topics
  • Integrate existing users’ feeds to share create a lead-focused content strategy
  • Use Feedly RSS extension and directly add websites to your feed

Other discovery platforms

Pocket

Pocket is a tool, with powerful features, that can help you save content that can be shared later. You can seamlessly compile images, articles, links, and videos in a single place. One can also categorize the content by using tags. Pocket’s search functionality will make it tremendously easy to find those articles later.

Flipboard

Flipboard is a tool that is all about storage-based content strategy too. But what it does differently is that it heightens your reading experience by visually presenting it in a printed newspaper or magazine format. Some of its features enable you to curate content based on topics you’ve selected, any publications you might be following, and some of your previous reading preferences.

Exclusive newsletter content experiences can be more useful than all-inclusive ones, simply because there’s more than just AI algorithms at work. A newsletter is an effective way to consume the latest news, the hottest trends, and the most reliable tips (for free). Your newsletter also puts the reader in control of the experience. In that sense, there’s no need to scourge through bookmarks to find a blog, an article, or a website that you like. You can simply open the email and use the information in the newsletter.

For instance, Content Marketing Institute‘s newsletter is a wonderful source for content marketing news whereas Import AI, written by Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, is an industry-leading AI-focused newsletter.

Conclusion

Content discovery tools can be your catalysts of user engagement. By delivering undeniable value to your audience, companies get promoted. So, instead of pushing a sale until the user gets annoyed, you get to share immersive content experiences until they come back for something more.

Sometimes, there’s no other way for content publishers to get on the radar of audiences for the first time. Especially if they didn’t know who you are, how likely are they to spend their energy to read your original content? How can you motivate them to visit your blog or website and like or share your social media posts?

Through advanced content discovery services, you get to hook and bait them so that the reader sticks around for long enough to realize your tangible value.

Get insights for any keyword or website. Try now!


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Christy Bharath is a writer, with 13+ years of content marketing and branding experience. He helps clients tell their stories across industries like Banking, Retail, Healthcare, IT Services, etc. He also trains writers to help them generate authentic and creative content. Christy is a birdwatcher, and he tweets @contentbirder.