Every week we strive to gather timely and insightful content to share with our readers. Sounds simple enough, but finding those rare gems of great content is actually one of the more time consuming jobs of a social media manager.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B and B2C brands have increased the amount of content they created over the past 12 months and are planning to spend even more. As many organizations begin a new year launching their latest digital strategy, we wanted to share some great places to scout out content.

Google Alerts

Creating a Google Alert is a first step. You can create a Google Alert with your email address. Make sure to create search terms such as your company name and key phrases that describe your organization’s offerings. (e.g. mobile marketing, web design, social media, branding, etc.) You will receive notifications with articles and online posts that have these key phrases. Need some more tips? Click here to get step by step instructions on how to set up an alert.

Twitter

As Twitter is known for its real time info in bite size tweets, it can be a good resource when looking for specific content on topics.

Go to Twitter Search and use a hashtag with the terms on which you would like content:

Tweets with this specific hashtag will show up in your feed and help you narrow down the best content.

Slide Share

Slide Share can be a great resource for finding some great presentations on a key topic such as digital marketing. Not only are there some great visual graphs, but many times there are helpful statistics and other data available.

Alltop

Alltop is a helpful tool that gathers current, popular stories. The topics are organized by topic, by site, and alphabetically. The results can also be customized according to your search criteria.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo provides insights into the most popular content online, as well as the influencers who are sharing it.

As an example, if you go to the site and enter the phrase “content marketing”, it will pull up the top posts on this topic and how many times it was shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, etc. From here, you can select the most popular content, based on the virality of the post, to share with your readers.

We know that there are many other great sites and tools for finding content. What are some of your favorite tools or sites to gather the best content?