What real-time discovery tools can I use for curation, engagement and sharing?

The impact of search on content beyond Google, Bing and Yahoo is pretty amazing when you think about it. Just consider all the social media monitoring platforms that have launched over the past few years – they’re all essentially search engines.

Real-time content discovery tools are helpful to marketers for a number of reasons, especially the ability to identify upward trending content aligned with topics or entities you are tracking.  If you can share upward trending content early and even add to the conversation, you can capture the draft of that upward swing in attention – reaching new audiences and better connecting with those you are already engaged with.

There are a number of tools including Google itself that are useful for surfacing this kind of content. Content curation tools are certainly an option and so are some social search and social media monitoring tools. Everyone wants a piece of the action that will provide a fast track to content popularity.

Here’s a growing list of real-time content discovery tools and content recommendation platforms that you might find useful whether you’re an independent consultant or a marketing leader at a Fortune 500 company:

• Buffer– Within the Buffer dashboard there is a new, free feature that suggests stories which you can filter by: buffer picks, marketing, inspiration, business & startups, life hacking and design.
• Viral News Chart – is an analytics tool which daily tracks thousands of news stories. It uses social metrics to find most engaging web content to discover trends in real time. You can filter results by category, language, recency and by popularity method (raw social shares or something called VNC Rank).
• Prismatic– A free tool that taps into your Twitter and/or Facebook network to surface stories of interest. These stories are recommended based on your indicated interests, Twitter or Facebook connections and content. You can view globally popular stories and those that are popular on social networks. You can explore content from “friends”, topics from your own social shares, popular content from your friends and other recommended topics. You can also search by interests, people and publishers.
• Spike– A free tool that offers topics, places, timeframes and open search as well as watch lists to track specific stories. With each story recommended, you can see how it’s doing on Twitter and Facebook. You can also get email alerts. Interestingly, there is a “pre-viral” category as well.

For any marketer interested in tapping into the real-time web and what topics and content are trending, this list of tools is a great starting point. Of course you can still use search.twitter.com, Google results filtered by the last 24 hours or Google News as well. It’s a matter of preference and aligning the right tool with how you’re going to use the stories that you discover – social sharing, curation or simply to understand what’s current.

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