Curata, a curation platform targeted at B2B content marketers, announced today that it will now give its users another means to populate and schedule social posts through a partnership with Buffer. Originally founded in 2007, the company has seen a marked uptick in adoption over the last six months, with content marketing becoming a staple for many businesses, yet resources still lacking for marketers to devote the necessary time and effort to continually research, write, and produce original content. Currently, it sees its platform used across the board with startups, media publishers, SMBs and several Fortune 500 brands as clients.
The new integration with Buffer was motivated by the fact that the two companies’ existing users were using both tools, and though the company also has built-in post scheduling and the option to share to multiple channels the move is part of its larger goal to be more specialized in curation while integrating with whatever publishing platform a client may use.
“Our goal is to really become the hub for great and relevant content that’s specific to the subject a user has chosen or the domain that is specific to them,” said Bivha Singh, VP of Product at Curata, in an interview with BetaKit. “We have a pretty end-to-end solution…but we took a step back and said we want to do one or two things and do an amazing job there…being able to be that content hub for making publishing very seamless.”
The company’s platform helps marketers discover content by picking their own sources and selecting their own taxonomy and categories. Users are also able to edit content before publishing, adding their own snippets or images to a piece of content, or they can author blog posts directly from Curata. The dashboard also shows trending topics and provides recommendations on what content to share. Companies can push content out to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks both through Curata, and now additionally with Buffer.
The SaaS startup charges a annual subscription based on the number of topics or areas on which a user wants to focus. It does have different tiers, with both standard and customizable features, however Singh said they’ll be revealing a more streamlined pricing structure down the road.
In terms of competitors, in the past BetaKit has covered platforms like Scoop.it, which is more focused on individual brand-building, though it is also after the enterprise space with SMBs able to build custom channels and integrate them with their websites. But according to Singh, the company’s biggest challenge is convincing companies to abandon what she called duct-tape solutions that may be pieced together in-house in favor of its technology.
The company will continue on its track to focus on finding and curating the most relevant content while partnering with other solutions to streamline the integration process. It wants to help its customer go beyond keyword searches and RSS feeds to find content to share, and move them towards accessing both mainstream and niche content that they normally would not have stumbled upon. With its current focus on B2B marketers, it could see expansion into other verticals down the road, but to do so it will have to cut through several different tools, whether in-house or third-party platforms, that are powering the content marketing industry.
