Did you know you can now integrate two of the best apps to help you find and share content daily?
Scoop.it is a fantastic free content curation app, as I wrote in How Curation Fits Into Your Content Marketing.
HootSuite is an excellent way to manage your social networking streams (see 5 No-Clutter Apps to Manage Your Entire Freelance Life Online).
Now you can integrate Scoop.it into your Hoot Suite dashboard. Use them together to find and share content on your chosen topic.
I guarantee you’ll find it quick and easy.
Here’s how
If you already have Scoop.it and HootSuite accounts, scroll down to Next step!
If you don’t have a Scoop.it account
Sign up at www.scoop.it.
Scoop.it lets you do 3 important things:
1. Make your own topic-based magazines.
2. Follow other people’s topic based magazines.
3. Search for content on a specific topic.
Here we’re only concerned with finding content to share, so I’m only going to talk about 2 and 3.
You’ve created your Scoop.it account. Now you’re going to search for content.
Searching for topics in Scoop.it
I’ll search for “fashion” as an example.
Scoop.it search results for “fashion”
Now you’re going to “follow” the magazines that provide the best content. Click on the name of the curator and hit “FOLLOW”.
Do this until you’ve followed enough magazines to generate an interesting stream of content.
If you don’t have a HootSuite account
Get the free version at www.hootsuite.com.
Here’s what the dashboard looks like. You can see I have several content streams across the top.
My Hoot Suite dashboard
To create these streams, link your social accounts to HootSuite. Click your profile photo at the top of the menu on the far left. This launches a page where you can select “Add a Social Network”. Choose the network and repeat for all your networks.
Add social networks
Next step OR
If you already have Scoop.it and HootSuite accounts – start here
Hoot Suite offers loads of apps that you can use to create a content stream. You find them in the App Directory – click the icon that looks like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle in the menu at far left.
In the pop-up box click on “Featured Apps”, scroll, and you’ll see Scoop.it.
Hit “Install App” and you’re done. (Go back to the App Directory later and see if you want to add any others.)
Install the Scoop.it app
This is what you’ll see afterwards. You get your content stream from your followed magazines on the left. But there’s more! You get the option to search Scoop.it from inside HootSuite.
Search box inside Hoot Suite
So if I search for fashion again, I get a whole lot more content.
Search results inside the Hoot Suite dashboard
An aside
Now, you don’t have to follow magazines in Scoop.it as I outlined earlier. You could just use this search function.
But there are powerful reasons for following other Scoop.it users besides having a ready-made content stream inside HootSuite.
1. If you need good content to share regularly, the magazines you follow will keep you supplied with a steady flow. You don’t need to spend so much time searching.
2. More importantly, following other Scoop.it users makes you a part of the community around your topic. This is a powerful feature of Scoop.it.
It’s a place where you find the leading experts. You will learn from them, benefit from their high-level curation, and connect with them. Some of them will become friends.
After a bit more than a year, I have an incredible knowledge network of friendly, helpful people in my Scoop.it community. I have learned a huge amount just by following their magazines. Some of them have kindly agreed to be interviewed by me. Some have given me recommendations for my work.
I can’t emphasise enough the good things about being on Scoop.it.
But back to HootSuite. Time to share
Now you have set up your Scoop.it content stream and search in HootSuite, it’s time to share the goodies you find with your social networks.
Find a piece of content you want to share. At the top you’ll see “Scooped by ….” Hover to the right and you’ll find 3 symbols. They allow you to 1. rescoop (that is, add the content to your own Scoop.it magazine), 2. thank the curator, or 3. share.
To share, click the small arrow (the third symbol).
HootSuite captures the link to share and lets you select which networks to share it with.
In this case, I’m sharing “Strategic Storytelling | Business Truisms” on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my Google+ page.
You can share as normal – right away, schedule manually or autoschedule.
Share content to all selected networks
HootSuite hub
HootSuite was already my preferred hub for sharing content.
The free version has a lot of great functionality, including the ability to draft and schedule updates, share manually, and see a record of your shares. (The Pro version has much more for enterprise use, but let’s keep it simple.)
I already made extensive use of the Hootlet bookmarklet, which allows you to grab the URL of any web page and the images associated with it.
I use the Hootlet to share new posts on this blog, articles I select from my Google Reader streams, and other material I find by chance.
Until the Scoop.it app came along I hadn’t found a satisfactory way to quickly uncover great content from inside HootSuite. (Bear in mind I’m not a HootSuite expert – rather, I’m a freelance content writer, blogger and curator who shares content as a way of interacting with my social media communities).
I wanted a quick and easy way to do more of my work from inside Hoot Suite – and this is it.
It should speed up your daily curation and social media work. Let me know in the comments how it works for you.
