If you plan on using social media for your business you need to build up an engaged following that sees you as an authority i) worth following and ii) worth sharing content from. It’s a self-fulfilling regime, the more followers you get, the more a share from them is likely to bring in more new followers. You want to make that trickle down factor become more of a downpour and that is best achieved by sharing high-level content on your social media streams. You probably knew that, but time, knowledge and possibly inclination probably mean it is not a priority for you just now. Yet, what if you could post as normal to your social media channels, manage them, analyse them and find relevant content to share as well as scheduling them for a time those following you were most like to share. Better still. What if that was free?

It is….. or it can be with a number of content aggregation and social media management sites and tools now all battling in a growing market. Here’s six to have a look at:

NewsNow 

If you want to find how well a topic has been covered in the mainstream media and a variety of different reporting angles then news aggregator NewsNow is an essential bookmark. Updating constantly from feeds across the internet including the main trusted news stories in the country you can find out what the ‘current affairs’ are both as a nation and in specific topics, providing you links to articles to read and subsequently share with your audience.

Topsy 

More an analytics tool than a content tool, Topsy helps you analyse use of certain keywords by others on Twitter. With the ability to focus on types of content and also pinpoint on main influencers in that field, you can find out what others are sharing and talking about, giving you the option to re-tweet, or use those links to build your own articles to be socially shared.

Reddit 

The user-generated news link site is still going strong and often the starting point of various trending posts that will be picked up by other platforms a few hours later. That said there is also a lot of dross on there. Using the filters and pin-pointing particular areas and topics you are interested in is the best way to make Reddit work for you, rather than just looking a mess – its user interface is very old school and not very pleasing on the eye.

Buffer 

Built to allow people to manage their social media when they wanted to, Buffer has always been about sharing content you have found, but sharing it throughout the day when you want to, usually by scheduling. With a great content team themseves Buffer now provides some suggestions for suitable content to share on your networks, making it a simple case of clicking links to build your content stream.

Klout 

Originally rose to prominence as a scoring mechanism to help social media users rank themselves against each other. Now boasting 500 million scored profiles their latest focus has been to help those profiles use Klout to generate content via a series of suggestions from chosen topics. You can schedule these, choose to post to Facebook or Twitter and even find out what time of day your audience is most likely to engage with your posts.

Scredible 

The newest to the market – it’s still in Beta testing – aims to go a step further and actually get to know you via a series of algorithms that learns what you like and also how that goes down with your followers. Scredible aims to become your point of call for all news too, serving up relevant stories to your own interests and allowing your read, bookmark and share them to your social streams.

By using the above six tools you should be able to identify some golden content to share on your social platforms making your social media research less of a chore and more relevant to you too. Remember however that simply sharing isn’t enough, you need to have read the articles yourself and hopefully will have space to make a small comment too. It is your expertise people buy into on social media and the links are just part of that.

Happy reading and happy posting.