I’m a big fan of any automation that supports productivity. Keeping up with the latest industry developments, consuming articles, engagement, all important, but the stream of information can be overwhelming. Below is my method of shutting down the noise to discover and curate great content.

The content you discover, and share is only as good the sources. Do your research, follow influencers and authorities on their subject. Audit every month to see who is providing valuable insight, stop following those who make noise, are of little value or always selling.

Step 1 – Consolidate the Content

Rather than having to log in, view multiple accounts or feeds, I centralise my social streams into Flipboard. It allows me to plug in all of my social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube and Google Plus.

TIP: Twitter is a large part of the social stream so before centralising ensure you have created some Twitter lists. This will help immensely allowing you to define your Flipboard home page to specific topics of interest.

Also, note you don’t lose any native functionality of each platform integrating with Flipboard. I can still retweet, favourite, reply on Twitter, like or comment on Facebook, like a picture on Instagram, like or comment on YouTube and Linkedin, all within Flipboard.

Step 2 – Save the Best Content

Pocket is integrated into Flipboard on all devices, it is also integrated with Buffer, this is useful as you’ll see later. I use Pocket as a read later tool and memory bank to reference. Sending articles to Pocket from Flipboard is easy, I send my best content discoveries for reading, reference or to share on social. Pocket also has a good search tool and tagging features.

Step 3 – Automation with IFTTT

Aligned with my use of Flipboard and Pocket, sitting in the background are 2 IFTTT recipes I created to automate some of the curation of the content.

Recipe 1 – Any item I favourite in Twitter’s native app or Flipboard is sent to Pocket

Recipe 2 – Any new item that lands in Pocket are automatically sent to Buffer

Step 4 – Curation Review

Buffer now has a stream of my qualifying content that I have delivered for curation via favouriting on Twitter, Flipboard or sending to Pocket. It’s here the process does require some manual effort. I spend an hour or so a week reviewing the queue and optimising it before Buffer sends it back out into the world. Buffer also adds value here, scheduling to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus and Pinterest.

Conclusion

To re-cap, consolidate the content sources, consume it, select the best and automate it outward for curation to the world.

The added benefit of content discovery and consumption is you are always learning and alert to what is happening in the Digital World. The tools just make this a little easier and save valuable time. Sharing is caring too; curation is important for social growth and engagement, even better if that is worthy content.

My system isn’t perfect, could be tweaked a little and new options arrive daily with new applications, software updates and improvements from other platforms, but it works for me at the moment.

Are you doing anything similar or using a different blend of applications to achieve similar results? Let me know in the comments below.