By Jessica Davis

Content discovery is a crucial, and often overlooked, component to successful digital campaigns.

Whether for social sharing or to fuel ideas for your content marketing plan, searching quality, targeted content is key.

Often one of the first steps to create an awesome blog, mind-blowing video, or insanely useful infographic is to know what topic to tackle.

You can count on a fresh supply of ideas online, but doing the research can be time-consuming.

Content discovery tools address this challenge by finding the most-shared, trending content and providing relevant content suggestions for your weekly editorial calendar.

Here’s a look at four content discovery tools that can add meaningful value to your audience engagement efforts.

Swayy for Personalized Content

Swayy delivers personalized content to your dashboard based on the topics you select and what’s trending in your social circles.

To get started, you need to connect to the tool with your Facebook, or Twitter accounts.

What Can You Do?

• Choose from 31 categories, by adding or removing five categories at a time.
• Get topic suggestions based on your audience, your previous posts and shares, what’s relevant and popular to your profile, or what you read.   
• Share from the platform or save for later.

Swayy is free to use for a single dashboard.

For multiple dashboards to manage more social entities and collaborate with team members, you can choose from monthly packages charging $9, $49, or $119. The tool offers real-time analytics, weekly analytics reports, and one advanced content dashboard.

Why Use Swayy for Content Discovery?

• Swayy crawls nearly 50,000 pieces of content every day to match them to trending topics relevant to you.
• The content recommendations are useful.
• It’s an easy-to-use tool that has a clean and uncluttered dashboard.
• The analytics dashboard gives you valuable information and graphics indicating shares, likes, new followers, and the social media posts that work best.

One thing to keep in mind: The emphasis of Swayy is on your previous social media posts and shares the topics you pick from the suggestions.

You don’t have the flexibility to move around your interests manually, but this is a trivial issue given the quality and relevancy of content recommendations.

Spundge for Content Discovery 

Spundge aggregates content from a variety of sources to help you with content discovery for your WordPress blog, social networks, or other content publishing platforms.

This content discovery tool works differently from Swayy in that it allows you to create “stories” and “notebooks” around keywords and topics relevant to you.

What Can You Do?

• Discover relevant content around keywords.
• Follow different notebooks that you can use and curate to your unique content publishing needs.
• Create original content using the story editor.
• Collaborate with other Spundge users to share and create new content.
• Publish posts to social media, blogs, and websites.
• Add the Spundge It button to your browser toolbar to save content from any website.

Why Use Spundge for Content Discovery? 

• All the sources within notebooks are presented in a single, filtered stream, saving you the time to review and curate relevant content.
• You can collaborate with experts to position your content authoritatively before your audience.
• The tool’s Discover button introduces you to authors, reporters, influencers, and journalists who are subject matter experts contributing their knowledge and insights to help create and disseminate valuable content.

• You can use the tool’s basic Word-like editor to drag and drop texts, tweets, sound clips, presentations, and videos into your story.
• The story editor automatically adds content sources when you drag and drop items from notebooks. By providing attribution, it protects you against potential copyright issues.
• Under the premium plan, the tool gathers relevant content from top news sources such as NPR, Reuters, and Getty.

DrumUp for Efficient Sharing

DrumUp is a new free content discovery tool that removes the manual effort from social media content publishing for busy small business owners.

It discovers, queues, and ranks stories of interest to your target audience for sharing on your Facebook page and Twitter account.

What Can You Do?

• Add keywords or themes relevant to your industry.
• Include negative keywords to filter out irrelevant stories. In the example below, we’re looking for stories based around android smartphone technology.

• Review stories from an automatically generated queue of stories relevant to your keywords.

• Edit posts and delete them if needed.
• Add custom posts to the queue.

Why Use DrumUp for Content Discovery?

• The DrumUp auto content discovery, scheduling, and posting functionality makes it ideal for businesses that can afford to spend only a few minutes each day on social media efforts.
• The content suggestions are relevant and engaging.
• You have the flexibility to tweak the posts and scheduling according to your needs.
• The tool offers a keyword selection guide to help you add the most relevant keywords aligned to your niche.

Klout for Content Discovery and Curation

Klout is a content discovery curation tool that ranks users based on their social influence.

The ranking, which is called the “Klout Score” can range from 1 to 100.

While Klout often gets a bad rap, it can be used effectively to bring brands and their influencers together on a single platform.

One useful way to increase your influence on Klout is by recommending content that goes with the choice of your audience.

What Can You Do? 

• By clicking on the create tab, you can see a number of articles suggestions and based on the interest of your audience, you can choose the stories you would like to share on your social media pages. There is an option called Content Filters on the right that lets you filter the content by changing topics.
• If you are unsure of the kind of articles you want to share with your audience, there is a feature that tells you why a particular article has been recommended.
• There is also a hidden gem feature that allows you to share content that your audience may not have seen before.

Why Use Klout for Content Discovery? 

• The compose message feature of the app allows you to publish content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites based on your area of expertise, which in turn helps improve your Klout Score.

Currently the platform is available for free, but the developers are planning to launch more tools for  marketers. For instance, the ability to manage multiple accounts at a time.

The only constraint with Klout is its limited options for sharing and analytics.

For most small businesses, free content discovery and curation tools will be adequate in building engaged and active communities.

Try out these tools to increase efficiency, discover new content and trends in your industry, and transform your brand’s social experiences on the web.

photo credit: Shutterstock