The World’s Best Content Curation Application Just Got Better

We haven’t stopped for a breather since releasing the first iteration of our content curation application last Fall. Since then, we’ve spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations and amassed a growing and diverse customer base of all sizes. These organizations leverage content and content curation across an unfathomable number of applications and use cases. As you can imagine, these engagements have given us a wealth of insight into the content and curation needs of businesses. We’ve put this knowledge into action in the form of sweeping upgrade to the Trapit application. On behalf of the entire extended Trapit product team, it is with great excitement that I get to fill you in on the details of our new release – available today.

All new user interface and simple workflow

The most noticeable improvement in this release is a completely new user interface and workflow. We believe that even “enterprise” applications should be easy and fun to use. So, we’ve loosened the tie and undone a button or two, infusing the interface with a sense of exploration and serendipity inspired by our days as a consumer app. The result is a greatly-simplified user experience that combines elegance and ease-of-use with the most powerful content discovery and curation capabilities in the industry.

Highlights

• Flattened, content-first design offers intuitive navigation and improved workflow.
• Review all the newest content across all of your traps in one view.
• Drag and drop traps and sources to create smart bundles.
• Quickly access your most important traps from the Favorites section at the top of your traps list.
• Filter the trap list to show all of your team’s traps or just your own.

Add video to your content mix

Whether as a marketing tool, learning aid or just plain old-fashioned eye candy, video has become an integral part of any digital content strategy. Though our initial focus was helping our customers discover and curate traditional web content from blogs, magazines, newspapers and other primarily text sources, our customers alerted us to the sad state of video discovery and asked us to do something about it. We looked into it and found that not only is the ratio of quality to junk an order of magnitude lower for video than traditional web content, but the descriptive meta data used by search engines to find relevant results is sparse and unreliable. We soon realized that finding great video content is a really big problem. And if you know anything about the Trapit team, you know we love to take on big problems.

So we went to work adapting our patented content discovery capabilities for video. As a result, Trapit customers can now trap and create personalized streams of highly-relevant video content, in real-time or from our library, using the same great content discovery capabilities they’ve come to know and love for web content.

Highlights

• Discover and curate highly relevant video content, both archived and real-time.
• Growing video library of over 5,000 expert-vetted sources of original high-production value content.

Search & Discover

Another revelation made In working closely with our customers is that there is no “one size fits all” approach to surfacing relevant content from the massive firehose of information that’s out there. Different subject matters and objectives sometimes require different approaches. Our response to this realization is to offer expanded toolbox for surfacing relevant content. In addition to providing the discovery capability we’ve come to be known for, Trapit customers can also easily create complex Boolean search-based traps. Any time new content is published that meets your search criteria, we’ll trap it right away.

Discovery is great for the exploration of bigger and conceptual topic areas – say big data, healthy living, or Latin American cuisine. Search is ideal for those instances when you know precisely what you are looking for – say every single mention of a specific person, organization, product or place. Our customers desired the ability to do both, and now they have it. Give both a try – it’s easy and fun.

Reports

What good is a content strategy if it cannot be measured? We’ve expanded our reporting capabilities to provide a vital feedback loop that helps our customers measure the impact of the content they curate. They can then use those insights to continually inform their strategy as time goes on.

Highlights

• Optimize your curation strategy with insights into what’s resonating with your audience and on which platforms.
• Measure impact by understanding how your audience engages with the content you curate. Are they reading your articles? Watching your videos? Sharing with friends? Trapit can tell you.
• Understand your audience with data on where and how they consume your content, and even how long they spend on your site or application.
• Ensure maximum productivity and adherence to best practices with a bird’s eye view of curation productivity, distribution across channels, and diversity of sources.

Make it your own with annotation

There’s no better way to enhance your value as a curator and establish your own voice than by adding commentary and context to the content you publish and share. When curating to the web, this practice also happens to be the best way to maximize the SEO value of curated content.

Now you can add your own original thoughts to any piece of content before sharing or publishing right from Trapit. Think of this as a curation-specific application of blogging.

Give it a name

Content Curation Center, and even its acronym, is a bit of a mouthful. So, in-line with the simplified user experience and clean design of the new application, we thought it was time to simplify its name too. It’s now just Trapit.

A new website to go with our new application

We figured as long as we were upgrading things, it was time to give our website a fresh new look. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out here.

Finally, I’d like to conclude by extending my heartfelt thanks to the entire Trapit team for their continued dedication and commitment to providing our customers with the best content curation service available anywhere. I also want to offer anyone out there who is curious about what Trapit does and how it works a guided tour of the service. Just drop me a line or contact me on Twitter.

Until next time,

Henry

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer