Content curation is a highly effective inbound marketing strategy and because of this there has been a rise of content curation tools and platforms. So we did what we typically do, we tried to get a good handle on all the options that exist in the market. What follows is our best collection of tools that allow you to easily curate content.

If we missed any tools please leave a comment down below and we will add it to the list.

A quick note about our Ultimate Lists… due to our highly popular list The Ultimate List of Real Time Search and Trending Websites we thought we would do something similar here. Most of all of these platforms we’ve tested, we own or we use. With some we simply give a quick overview but many we add our own thoughts and observations.

First up, we have a completely over the top shameless plug. We’ve created what we consider one of the best content curation platform on the market, it’s called:

Curation Traffic Theme & Plugin

Curation Traffic is a WordPress based content curation platform. It comes in two main flavors a theme version and a plugin version (or you can get the all in one bundle).

Curating content from around the web  is push button simple with our custom built bookmarklet CurateThis. CurateThis also integrates with HootSuite, Pinterest, Buffer, Bit.ly, and other popular social sharing websites allowing to easily engage and share with your curated content.

The Curation Traffic Theme has 2 main high impact magazine layouts (with 14 different sub layouts), a top bar and social sharing built in, and it’s highly customizable. Most importantly the theme has been designed from the ground up to convert. You can see it in action here were we do daily curation at Marketing News and Curating Content.

Now the Curation Traffic Plugin allows you to easily add content curation to any existing blog or website. It comes with all the power of CurateThis and as a bonus includes the Ultimate Call to Action, a plugin that is designed to increase your conversions by allowing you to create niched focused calls to actions.

We could go on for pages but it’s time to end our shameless plug if you want to learn more please visit CurationTraffic.com, so let’s get going!

Storify.com

Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media. This platform allows more of a long form social curation. Some of the most popular events of the last few years have been curated on storify. They also have various sections such business, design, technology. The platform also really leads the way in providing an easy way to curate content.

In addition, it has a Storify WordPress plugin (although the way it’s implemented can sometimes break some themes).

Paper.li

Start an online newspaper today. Paper.li is a content curation service. It enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they like and treat their readers to fresh news, daily.

Here’s what they say… we believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this “massive content world” we live in.

They also have a pro version where you can add your own logo/branding, remove ads, plus a few more features.

List.Ly

What if you wanted to create a list and you wanted that list to be social, visual, and easy to set up? How would you do that? That’s where list.ly comes into frame. It’s good looking self pops in and allows you to easily create lists of anything. People can then vote up or down on, add items, and even embed a list into their own site.

Here’s a few lists we’ve created:

• Top Marketing Books
• Top Storytelling Books
• Top Sales Books
• Top Books That Could Change Your Life
• Top Business and Entrepreneurial Podcasts
• Best History Books

If you need to create a list of something (anything) this is place to go. The co-founder @NickKellet also shared a pretty sweet implementation of “the story of Listly”, or as he also mentioned create a stylized list of all your guest posts. List.ly also has a WordPress plugin allowing you the easy ability to embed lists within your own site.

Kuratur

So this is how a Klingon would spell Curator, and just like the famous warlike race I think there’s a battle happening. It’s Kuratur on one side of the solar system and Paper.li on the other. Kuratur has a few standout features that sets it slightly apart. Namely you have various themes to create a magazine. From there you can drag various blocks of content. Content such as Twitter mentions, hashtags, keywords, Facebook pages and keywords, RSS feeds, and a few more interesting additions. If you like Paper.li and looking for something that maybe has a few different options or a different take on the magazine style curation then check this out. Definitely one to watch.

Snip.it

Snip.it lets you express your interests through what you’re reading. You can “snip” any article, video or image, add your own thoughts and organize it into a collection.

Very inspired by Pinterest. Still has some great features worth diving into.

Zemanta

Zemanta adds a sidebar in your WordPress admin. It then pulls in related articles, images, text links, and tag suggestions. The tool is a hit and miss and will depend on your market and content subject matter. It’s still worth a try but it works best as an addition to your own unique content.

They also have expanded a bit and added some community functionality  When you sign up you can add your blog ( and the promise there is they will help share your content as additional sources).

Bundlr.com

With Bundlr you can select the most relevant content about your favorite topics, be it photos, videos, tweets, presentations or articles. With Bundlr you can create bundles with any kind of content: articles, photos, videos, tweets, quotes and links. Real-time breaking news from your sources, event wrap ups with a collection of online feedback, a selection of the most relevant content on your area of expertise.

TumbleCloud

Tumblecloud is a place for collaborative digital storytelling, where users can easily arrange, display, co-create, share and manipulate multimedia content. You set up what are cloud pages (get it tumbleCloud) around a subject of your choice. You then can pull in media such as images, text, and video.

PearlTrees

Pearltrees is your digital library. It lets you collect, organize and share everything you like.

It is a library of your digital life where you can collect web pages, photos and notes about the things you like. Then you can organize them as you please and keep them at hand. For example, if you like movies you could organize a pearltree about « cinema » to make it easy to relocate your favorite finds in your library with just a few clicks.

In addition, it’s social: you can discover millions of pearls organized by other people that share your passions. It’s ideal for enriching your library on any topic you care about.

Did you know people scan before they read? That’s why socially enabled pull quotes are highly effective… see below to learn more.share this quote:Get social enabled quotes 

Pinterest

Okay we probably don’t need to write much about this one but here it is…

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Juxtapost

Juxtapost is here to help you remember all the amazing things you see while you browse the web. From planning a wedding, to furnishing a room, there is no end to the number of things people use the web for. However with all its infinite options, managing what you find has become a massive undertaking. For years, web users have relied on a browser’s bookmark tool to save what they find, however this has become far too ineffective when attempting to organize more than a few dozen pages. That’s where Juxtapost steps in. Its sole ambition is to provide members with easy-to-use tools to “bookmark” the photos they find into categorized postboards (collection of posts) that they can easily curate, even if their collection spirals to hundreds of websites.

Dashter

Dashter helps you listen to real-time conversations. Curate fresh content to your site. Cultivate social relationships. Amplify your site’s social reach.

It’s a WordPress plugin – so it installs and runs directly inside your administrative dashboard. Your website instantly transforms from a website to a powerful command center for your social media activities. And best of all – since it runs on your site & your servers – there are no subscription fees, usage limits, or ongoing charges.

Eqentia

Eqentia is a new generation of web content publishing, distribution and engagement platform featuring advanced curation, real-time aggregation, text-mining, personalization, semantic extraction and social media integration capabilities.The Eqentia platform can be branded across personal, departmental and organizational boundaries with solutions for competitive intelligence, knowledge tracking, content monitoring, thought leadership, custom content, hyper-local news, content marketing and social newsrooms. Eqentia users benefit from time savings, leads generation, SEO, engaged customers and productive employees.

Scoop.it

Free and paid version. The layout is similar to a magazine layout. Curating content is easy with their bookmarklet, they also have a community built right in. Scoop.it is one of few platforms we still use these days. This is a system we use quite a bit. We curate stuff  on new media and Scott curates stuff on history and All Out Massive Action. It’s free to use and you can upgrade to get some additional features such as your own domain and branding.

GageIn Publisher

Use News Portals to easily curate content relevant to your internal and external audience. Create different boards, called Portals, and share them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Chatter, Yammer, and other social networks.

Intigi

Intigi is a content curation tool that builds your thought leadership and website traffic.

The current process for content marketing is tedious and involves cobbling together multiple tools and manual activities. Our main goal at Intigi is to reduce the friction involved in content marketing so that marketers and companies can focus their efforts on creating and curating valuable content for their prospects and customers.

XYDO

XYDO tracks the social actions of over 3 million online tastemakers to match you with content that your audience will love and share. No other application is more fully integrated with the major content marketing platforms, social networks, and email service providers. XYDO’s powerful curation tool is the linchpin to any successful content marketing strategy.

HeadSlinger

HeadSlinger is a new way to read and discover news. On your home page, you’ll find all of your favorite sources, as well as article suggestions made by your friends.

Spundge

Spundge helps you connect with the best content creators on the web. Collaboratively curate the web and create relevant, influential content. Publish and track your content via Spundge’s smart social containers.

The Tweeted Times

The Tweeted Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account. This one barely made the cut because in the end all it really does is aggregate tweets. That’s not to say we don’t like this system, it’s one we use quite a bit but it’s not quite a full curation platform.

Addict-o-matic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.

.Collected

Collected is a service where you easily gather feeds and news sources in to collections where you (and others!) can get a good overview and follow them on a daily basis. You can even export your collection to a new feed that you can use in your favorite reader such as Google Reader, Net News Wire, etc.

NewsPin

You choose from your topics, they scan articles, and you can then post to Twitter and Facebook. They have a tagline “become a social media rockstar”, which we are kind of unsure of what that means. Look this list isn’t called ultimate because we’ve trim down the list, it’s called ultimate because it includes all the platforms we could find (and we update it often).

LiveBinders

Your 3 ring binder for the web—it gives you the ability to drop web pages, videos, pdf’s, and images into a binder. You can then share these binders with the world. From what we could figure out it seems like this platform is being used by quite a few educators (if you click on the featured binders you’ll see what we mean). We like the concept here though and it’s easy to use– something every curation platform should be.

WP-Drudge

WP-Drudge is a Drudge Report style (no affiliation) WordPress website template that makes it easy to post external articles, your own blog posts, and links to other sites. Add images, display featured content, and insert ads easily. With many different configuration options, you can make your website look just how you want. Add colors, change fonts, and choose the layout that works for your project.

CurationSoft.com

Discover, review, and curate content from Google Blog Search, YouTube, Twitter, Google News, Flickr and any RSS Feed you want. We are pretty familiar with CurationSoft having used it quite a bit. It’s best described as a stand alone program that allows you to connect to multiple WordPress blogs. It has a discovery engine built right in but we’ve seldom found it to be super helpful. We are a little biased though because we feel you should be finding unique sources and when everybody has access to the same search results  you seldom achieve that goal.

Qrait

A realtime curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators and reduce information overload for the rest of us. In a way though this platform feels like paper.li, it allows you curate images, videos, and text from various sources. It also presents it in a long page format.

Kippt

This was recommended as an addition in the comments down below. After poking around a bit it looks promising. It has a feel of a new version of email with a little bit of Twitter added on top. You can follow people, you can discover new topics, but it also has some good curation features built right in. You have access to a feed of the people you follow, an inbox, in addition to a read it later. There’s also an extension you can install in your browser to easily save, share, and archive any page.  You can also set up syncing to various services such as Twitter, GitHub, Pocket, Readability, Buffer, plus a few more. So if Diigo, Twitter, and Evernote had a baby I think it would look a little like Kippt.

Liiist

Okay, well liiist has some pretty interesting features. It’s basically a way to create lists, such as movies you want to see, want lists, food lists, just about anything you can put in a list. First, I like the way the lists look, they are highly visual and when you open an item you can easily cycle back and forward. It also has voting and commenting per item built right in. Next, the only thing that was a little confusing is once you sign up there’s not a ton to do except create your own list, while they have some stuff going for them the features and community has to grow a bit to catch up with list.ly who we mention above. Still worth checking out if your looking for a list curation tool.

Entreprise Level Curation Tools

The following tools are what we would classify as enterprise level. Sure some of the tools above you will see large organizations us but the tools listed below seem to really focused on larger cost, footprint, and different feature sets that an enterprise level user would expect.

Curata

Curata enables you to easily find, organize and share content on specific topic to help you save time in managing your content flow for your organization. The Curata team are true thought leaders in content curation and if you want a reliable enterprise solution I would start here.

Curation Station

Curation Station® is a proprietary, hosted software solution which allows users to gather information, select the items that fit their goals, and then distribute them effectively, easily and with minimal IT costs.

PublishThis

The PublishThis Content Curation Platform enables businesses to take advantage of curated content to engage their customers, automate content marketing, improve competitive intelligence and reduce digital publishing costs.

MassRelevance

We believe that social experiences should be designed to engage your audience with visually compelling displays of the most relevant social media content. These experiences drive interactivity, loyalty, and lead to real business results for brand, media, and entertainment companies. We’ve created a powerful social engagement platform which supports advanced sourcing, aggregation, curation, moderation, display, participation, and integration capabilities around social content.

Darwin EcoSystem

Weeding out irrelevant results and discovering significant information has become a critical challenge for business. The Darwin Awareness Engine can help accomplish this for a wide range of information specialists. This is one of the few systems on this list we haven’t used, still worth checking out if your in the market for a enterprise level solution.

BagTheWeb

BagTheWeb helps users curate Web content. For any topic, you can create a “bag” to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web.

Beyond most curation tools’ capability, BagTheWeb enables users to build networks of bags. This way bags can be linked together to provide rich and complete information about any topic.

Storination

To create in less than a minute a beautiful Storyboard with awesome content curated by you and others. Storination lets you create online communities called a Nation, where people share social stories on the same topic. After opening your Nation, you organize your Storyboard, a virtual space where anybody can contribute by adding his own Storify story.

 

Secondary Content Platforms

These are platforms that we would consider straying slightly from the curation mold but they are worth mentioning.

SurfMark

Surfmark allows you to save all the effort you put in seeking knowledge from the Web, and turn it into something that you can keep for ever. When you combine these efforts with those of millions of other people, the impact can be so profound that it may just change the way we look at the Web.

FlashIssue

Email newsletter curation. FlashIssue is designed for people who want to create marketing content quicker and easier. It’s based on the premise that you shouldn’t need a double Phd in HTML Formatting to get a newsletter out the door. The goal of the platform is to allow you to discover, organize and package content (aka curation) for online marketing in an insanely easy way. We hope you agree.

ZooTool

Zootool is about collecting, organizing and sharing your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the internet. More of a bookmarking tool but it made the cut because of the cool name.

MySyndicaat.com

mySyndicaat is a news mastering tool that allows you to retrieve, filter, mix and monitor content from remote content sources available on the web. Collected content is cached by mySyndicaat and can be retrieved later on either by using mySyndicaat content viewer, or by subscribing to is using any RSS 2.0-compliant RSS aggregator.

Once you have registered to use the service, you start by creating a feedbot. FeedBots (i.e., feed-robots) are the means by which you specify the sources that you want to monitor. In most instances, they are RSS- or Atom-compliant feeds. Alternatively, they can be publicly available search engines that return their search results as RSS feeds.

Utopic

Save any web page quickly with browser extensions. Your links are auto-tagged by keywords to find them fast later. Discover not just content, but also interesting people – those similar to you.

Keemix

Keemix allows you to gather loved content from the web, mix it into your own custom-designed pages, and share it to inspire your friends and colleagues.

Curation Reading Platforms

The platforms that follow are more built for reading and consuming content. They work great for setting up what are called listening posts and a curator is only as good as the content they curate. This is something you will learn in our Curation Mastery Training.

Feedly

We use Feed.ly every single day. When you have over 900+ feeds in Google reader pulling them into feed.ly makes all the difference. Feedly allows you to easily browse, read and share your favorite sites. The layout is awesome and if you’ve broken down your feeds into folders you can easily get an overview of any niche market.

Pulse

Pulse is an elegant news reading application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. It incorporates colorful panning story bars and fills them with content from your favorite sources. Pulse redefines news, giving you the opportunity to experience the news you desire from traditional sources, your favorite blogs and social networks – all in one beautiful interface.

Pocket (formerly Read it Later)

Okay, pocket might seem like this tool where all you do is run around with your mobile phone and tablet clicking on things you want to read later… but it’s not. It’s so much more if you dive in a little. It’s really your central place to pull in content from all your devices. With some tagging and connections to over 300 web and other platforms you can setup a pretty nice curation push station. We weren’t sure where to classify Pocket but ultimately it’s primary function is still consumption so it’s regulated down here.

Google Currents

Favorite publications, tuned for your tablet and smartphone. This app looks good on the Nexus 7 and does  a good job of helping you discover new content and sites.

Zite

We all want to be in touch with the “Zeitgeist” — the spirit of our times. We want to know the current events, important ideas and smart opinions that are circulating in our world-what’s happening and what’s interesting. And we want to be challenged with experiences that are new and unexpected.

With so much information available online today, it’s increasingly difficult and time-consuming to find the content we want. That’s where Zite comes in. Zite evaluates millions of new stories every day, looking at the type of article, its key attributes and how it is shared across the web. Zite uses this information to match stories to your personal interests and then delivers them automatically to your iPad or iPhone.

YourVersion

The best way to discover new content that’s relevant to you. YourVersion is the best way to discover the latest stories on the topics you care about, all in one place.

Link.ly

We built lynkly because we want to connect everyone together to find the most talked about stories in the world – before they become popular. We were inspired by Nicholas Christakis’ TED talk about how social networks can predict epidemics. In a similar fashion, we predict the popularity of stories that are being shared around the world by using social networks. Help us achieve that goal by connecting your Facebook and Twitter feeds with lynkly!

Faveous

Faveous collects your favorites from Twitter, Google Reader Youtube & Facebook “likes on links” in one single place. Easy to curate, easy to manage. Gathering your favorite content is now fast and painless.

iFlow

iFlow is all about delivering the content that matters to you right now, rather than just following the crowd. At the heart of iFlow are topic-based streams called flows that allow you to stay connected with the topics you care about on an ongoing basis. iFlow gives you the ability to automatically and manually aggregate content from a variety of sources, with advanced features to filter and forward content from one flow to another in real-time as it happens.

Prismatic

By connecting with one of your social networks, Prismatic learns about your interests and gives you a personal newsfeed.

PostPost

They’ve changed a few times (when I first learned of PostPost they were doing Facebook curation) but the latest iteration is toplines from people you follow on Twitter. Basically a Twitter aggregation and search engine. Haven’t used it much lately but it’s worth checking out to see if it’s something you will like.

News.ME

Your top stories from Facebook and Twitter delivered to your inbox. They have an iPhone app, an iPad app, and a daily email that deliver the best stories shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook.

Trap!t

Trapit works for you 24/7, capturing what you want, serving it up fresh and spam-free all day long.

Retickr (for Mac)

Let us stream your news and social media. Read. Share. Back to what you were doing. They have an interesting take on curation reading and if you are a Mac person check it out.

Postano

Aggregate, Integrate and Display Social Media Content Anywhere. Social media operates at lightning speed, with thousands of post and tweets going live every second. It’s no wonder that brands want to harness its marketing power.

Other Mentions

• http://www.kweeper.com/
• http://pinboard.in/ – Social Bookmarking for Introverts. Pinboard is a fast, no-nonsense bookmarking site.
• http://www.hitpad.com/ (iPad app)
• http://www.flud.it/ – looks to bring together companies and teams around social and industry intelligence (in private beta)
• https://wavii.com/ – Instant news feeds for any topic. Lots going on. Keep up with everything you like, love, and love to hat
• http://inagist.com/ – individual channels of content ranked by social signals.
• http://bonzobox.com/ – When you bookmark a website with BonzoBox you get to decide where to put it on your BonzoBox homepage. Then we take a picture of the website and keep the picture updated for you.
• MyCurator – a wordpress plugin that’s a little rough around the edges but has promise.
• https://www.taptu.com/ – DJ Your News : Taptu provides instant access to all your interests in one beautiful little app.
• http://www.nextmags.com/searcheeze – Create a magazine around your topic. You can also have collaborators.
• http://historio.us/ – Finally, bookmarking you can love historious saves you time by helping you find webpages you saw before. Bookmark sites with a single click, then find them again by searching for any word in the content of the page!
• CurateXpress – CurateXpress helps you curate content. Using CurateXpress, you can share great content and get credit for it! In a limited Beta right now.
• http://storyful.com/ – Storyful is a news gathering platform developed and powered by journalists for journalists.
• http://polystory.com – Curate topics with friends… most of the stories were in a language that I wasn’t sure what it was, but it has a pinterest like layout and some good social features built in.
• http://ClipBoard.com - Okay, I get Pinterest is popular and it’s all the rage but I’m begining to wonder if it’s a crutch for design these days. ClipBoard is essentially a pinterest clone with a few interesting features. Instead of re-pinning you re-clip, you can like, and create your own clipboards.

Additions and Updates

• November 14th, added Pocket to the curation reading section
• November 16th, added List.ly – how did we miss that great service?
• November 19th, added Kippt, Liiist, and Kuratur (that’s how a Klingon would spell “curator”).
• November 20th added Polystory to the bottom,