A year and a half ago Jerry Tian quit his job as a software engineer to join the startup game. But like many who set out on their own, he found himself lacking focus. “I was in Vancouver pulling my hair out because I couldn’t find the right idea,” he said.
For his first venture, he jumped into building an online tutoring platform. To build buzz and the product’s user base, he started messing around on Twitter, mostly sharing cool articles on education technology. “I found that I was getting all of these retweets, gaining something like 1,000 followers a month,” Tian said.
To piggyback on that engagement he began reaching out to those who shared his content. “Whenever someone retweeted me, I would tweet them back a link inviting them to subscribe to a weekly newsletter for more cool ed tech content. So with this large Twitter following, I also had a growing subscriber list, all thanks to sharing articles. I was essentially hacking on Twitter when I realized that content marketing was a real thing, and what I was doing was actually quite valuable to other startups”
But as all content curators do, Tian quickly realized that collecting and sharing the good stuff takes time…lots and lots of time. And thus, he found his right idea: a content curation platform that does the heavy lifting for you. Content DJ helps curators with each step of the content curation process: finding, sharing and tracking engagement.
Find Content
Once you connect your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and WordPress are the current options), Content DJ will prompt you to enter a handful of keywords relevant to the content you want to share. For example, I picked social media, digital marketing, content marketing and startups. I can now head over the content tab to find articles that are trending in each of the categories that I selected.
Content DJ scans millions of content pieces online to find relevant articles that fall under each of these topics. Using an algorithm based on number of retweets, freshness, and Klout score of the user, each article is given a rating on a 100 point scale. On the tiled content page, you’ll see results ranked according to this “shareability” scale.
Click on an article title to read (yes, you should definitely still read it), then hover over the image and click “preview” to begin the sharing process.
Here, you’ll customize your tweet and either share now or schedule for later.
Schedule Content
That brings us to the calendar function. As mentioned, you can schedule external articles ahead of time, automatically slotting each post into predetermined, adjustable time slots (use this tool to optimize post time). You can also build your own custom messaging with links and images just as you would on Hootsuite, Sprout Social or any other social media management platform. The coolest part of the scheduling function, though, is the WordPress integration. By connecting your self-hosted WordPress blog, you can pull up recent posts in a column next to the calendar and then quickly drag and drop them right into your social editorial calendar to reshare.
Track Engagement
Last but not least, Content DJ provides a set of analytics tools to help you track follows, favorites retweets and mentions.
Give Content DJ a whirl with their 14-day free trial — it’s a lightweight alternative to the time-consuming rabbit hole that is sourcing shareworthy content (RSS feeds, Twitter lists, Google searches…you know the drill). And for more social media and content curation tools, check out our digital marketing toolbox.
