How to share and discover content in 2017
Sharing and discovering content is a huge pillar in every marketers’ plan of action.
When managed correctly and systematically, content can make or break a marketing strategy. But the bigger part the content plays in the marketing strategy, the bigger the pain experienced by the marketers.
There are two main reasons for this ‘marketing content pain’
- No one reliable source — Let’s take blogs for example. Any blog that you subscribe to, will create posts that are more relevant to you as a marketer, and some that are less relevant. Now, multiply this relevance gap by the amount of blogs you are subscribed to.
You may be gaining access to larger amounts of expert content, but simultaneously, you’re inviting less relevant content your way, too.
This marketing content overflow is hurting your efficiency and your focus
- The current share-and-discover platforms that we use for content exchange are too easy to manipulate — There are only a few content share-and-discover platforms in the marketing industry.
Although they do an amazing job in facilitating marketing content and generating tons of traffic for the best performing articles, marketers have now learned how to manipulate their algos and how to give their shared content the extra boost and exposure they need.
This hurts not only the content credibility, but its relevancy too
What’s missing is a tool or platform that will cut through the noise, and serve you the relevant, up-to-date content that caters to your interests and career level.
A few weeks ago, we launched a new tool in a closed beta mode that aims to fill this very void. Our open alpha version was around for a couple of months and in a span of a few weeks, this tool, which is a Chrome new tab extension, has gained a nice momentum, getting almost 2,000 installs in the Chrome Web Store. This number represents some of the marketers out there who are eager to consume better content in a better way.
Moderating and categorizing your shared content
This tool of ours called Zest . Essentially, it’s a place where marketers share and discover stellar marketing content.
In Zest’s case, marketers can suggest any content they think is aligned with Zest’s strict quality guidelines, and a Zest moderator (me again 🙋) manually review each content suggestion, categorizing it by:
- The marketing field it covers (e.g. SEO, B2B, Social and so on)
- The professionalism level of the content itself (Intermediate / Advanced)
We’re approving 45–65 articles each day. We believe that this is the amount of actionable, in-depth and insightful articles that are created by the marketing industry, for the marketing industry.
Personalizing your discovered content experience
Marketers can also sort their Zest feed by amount of clicks the content got on Zest, or by the amount of shares the content had throughout the different social networks and by most recent.
This personalized content consumption experience that starts with two humans (a suggester and an editor) and finishes by the user’s preferences, results with a different, much more efficient way for marketers to consume (only) high quality content.
The feedback we get is stimulating
Some Zest users are saying that the content is so good and relevant that they are actually afraid of clicking on articles in the Zest feed — as they know it might change their marketing strategy or that it will create for them homework to do, as the added value they get by reading these articles is larger than life.
Three things for you
- Question: How do you cut thru the noise of content share-and-discover? Please let me know in the comments here
- Our open alpha version is available here
- If you want to try out Zest’s 2.0 closed beta version- email me at yam@zest.is
I really hope that together with the marketer community, we can bring back the glory to marketing content.
