For professionals looking to create a personal brand around their topics of expertise or SMBs and freelancers looking to create a content marketing strategy without creating original content, San Francisco-based Scoop.it has a solution. The company recently released a redesign of its content curation platform, adding features that give individuals and businesses the ability to better position themselves as thought leaders and discover new content relating to their respective fields or interests.
“We saw a lot of people using social networking…and on the other hand people starting to use content marketing by publishing blogs, company blogs, and we saw people struggling with that,” said co-founder and CEO Guillaume Decugis in an interview with BetaKit. “We saw people having a hard time consistently blogging…and the idea we brought to Scoop.it is that it’s not a creation platform, but a curation platform.”
Scoop.it launched in November 2011 to help people create their own curated news digest based around topics, and now has more than five million unique visitors each month. It redesigned the site based on user feedback, adding a new ‘insight’ feature so after saving or ‘scooping’ an article, photo, video, or link and posting it to their topic page, users have the ability to add their own perspective on the issue. Scoop.it has also added more editing capabilities to its bookmarklet, and boosted its recommendation algorithm to make it easier for its users to discover content that matches their interests.
Rather than following individuals, Scoop.it users instead follow topic pages, something Decugis said results in significantly less noise and delivers more of the content that people care to consume. Another key value proposition for SMBs and professionals is the ability to export their Scoop.it content and pages to their websites or blogs, which provides additional visibility for their thought leadership to existing and potential customers.
The company’s platform is free for anyone passively consuming content, and for those creating topic pages, they can create up to five for free, and can then upgrade to a Pro account for $12.99 a month for up to 10 topic pages and access to analytics and the ability to assign different social media accounts to each individual topic page. It also has a Business account targeted at SMBs that lets them create custom branded Scoop.it pages.
There are no shortage of of companies trying to aggregate and deliver content to readers, with Pulse, Hopflow, Flipboard, and Trapit focusing on personalized content aggregation for web and mobile consumption. However, Scoop.it wants its users to not only consume content, but add to it so they can build their brand and discover new content related to their field of expertise.
Now that they’ve launched the redesign and added new features, Decugis said the company’s next steps will growing the user base, and while they do have mobile apps, he added that they’re working on updating them to reflect the newly-added features. It will also likely build out its list of partners, with a number of notable ones already including Buffer, Hootsuite, and Slideshare. With healthy traffic numbers and a clear monetization strategy (something its competitors often lack), Scoop.it should be able to attract anyone looking to build a content marketing strategy.