Curating content? 5 top tools for finding hot content

Connecting with your customers on social networks depends on two main activities:

1. Responding to your friends, fans and followers when they’re talking to/about you.
2. Pointing those same friends, fans and followers to useful information — whether about you or not.

Each offers value to your customer. But finding the right things to say to your customers, whether you’re talking via a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare or something else isn’t always easy. Here are a handful of tools I find incredibly useful:

1. Twitter. I love Twitter. Follow individuals interested in the information you and your customers care about, then share/retweet that information with your audience. Today it’s as much about curation as creation. Twitter (or more precisely, the folks you follow on Twitter), can help you figure out exactly what you ought to curate.
2. Summify, Percolate and focus.io. Of course, keeping up with Twitter can be a chore. I used to use Summify to get a quick summary of the topics trending among the folks I followed, but they’ve stopped accepting new customers since getting acquired by Twitter. Happily, Percolate and focus.io offer similar functionality and are worth checking out.
3. LinkedIn Today. Not content to leave the market to newcomers, LinkedIn Today shows you what’s hot among your LinkedIn network. Very useful tool.
4. Google+. Because you have to.
5. Google Reader. Even though it seems RSS will never catch the casual consumer, it’s still a great way for you to aggregate the best of the web in your space. Subscribe to your favorite blogs (like this one, for instance) in Google Reader, then use its search tools to find out what your world thinks about trending topics in the marketplace. Handy stuff.

Are there tools you like better for finding hot content? What have I missed? Tell us all about it in the comments, OK?

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