How I’m building a content curation tool

This is a sketch from my notebook. It’s my plan for a ‘perfect’ content curation tool.

Let me talk you through the sketch…‌                                                          

There are 3 main parts to my idea for a content curation tool.

1. Content reader
2. Content bank
3. Publishing

Once the curation tool is built I’ll create an operating procedure for each step along with a content strategy for how the tool will be used. That way anyone would be able to follow the checklist and curate content for me, if I wanted.

Content reader

The purpose of the reader is to collate all of my sources into one location. It needs to have a pleasant reading experience and work on mobile.

An added bonus is if the reader can add a category to articles. The benefit of categories would be to control where/how content is added to the content bank.

A sensible option would be to use an RSS reader. Most blogs output an RSS feed and RSS readers are designed to provide a pleasant reading experience.

Content bank

I imagine this will be the main workhorse of the curation tool.

Here’s a close up of the workflow diagram:    

The goal of the content bank is to store all of the articles I want to curate.

There should be a way to easily add comments about the article. The comments would be used when creating social media posts or in an email newsletter.

For this reason it would be good to have a content bank that stores the data in a structured format. As this would make publishing out the content easier.

I’m also a big fan of categories and filters. So I want my content bank to be able to have these two options. This will make finding specific articles easier.

Publishing or rather distributing my curation

The whole purpose of curating content is so you can publish it for an audience, or anyone who is interested in your topic.

In my sketch I show social media platforms and an email newsletter as two examples of where the content would be used.

Some publishing would have to be done manually. Such as selecting articles and building an email template from them.

Where as social media platforms could easily be automated. The content bank would need a way to trigger an article being added to a social media scheduling tool. The scheduling tool would then handle the rest of the process (time, frequency, which platforms etc.)

How to build the content curation tool

I’ve actually built this tool using a number of 3rd party tools stitched together. I’m in the process of testing the tool to find ways of improving it.

If you’d like to know which tools are used and exactly how they work together let me know in the comments. If enough people are interested I’ll create a step by step guide.

Or you can hire me to build the same tool for your business. This would be an incredibly useful tool for any agencies who manage social media posting for clients. You could save many hours of finding content, curating it and scheduling. I know I am.