Being new to Feedly, I decided to sign up for it so I could see if that would help me keep up on my favorite curation sites without wasting time going from site to site. As a content strategist and social media manager, I find that I sometimes have trouble finding relevant content that I haven’t seen before or don’t have the time to bounce around multiple websites to find what I’m looking for.
When I signed up for Feedly, I was hoping to find a platform that would let me quickly and easily browse the sites I usually utilize, like Moz and the Content Marketing Institute. After experimenting with it, I found that I liked how I could have all of the blogs and news sources I follow in one place and easily categorized.
If you’re looking for a site where you can keep up to date with all your favorite content, look no further than Feedly. Feedly is a good way to find content that is relevant to your industry.
What Can It Do For Your Business?
It’s no secret that in order to bring fresh, new content to your site, you must be able to find and curate content from which to garner ideas. Unfortunately, finding relevant content to curate can be difficult if you don’t know where to look.
That’s where Feedly comes in. While you can search for specific sites to follow, you can also browse categories to find new sites that provide you with valuable information. That way, you can widen your range of content resources and see what others in your industry are talking about.
For basic curation, Feedly free can meet your needs. However, if you want or need something more advanced, you also share your content with “Shared Collections” and team collaboration. These advanced features can only be accessed via the upgraded “Pro” or “Team” version.
The Pro Version
If you want to be able to press “Enter” for searches (“Power Search”) and like having more control over your content, Pro is for you. Pro offers:
- All free version capabilities
- Power search, a quick way for you to find collections or tags you want to follow.
- Shared Collections, which allows you to share what you read and follow with your friends
- Ability to share and back up content to other platforms
The Team Version
If you’re a business who needs a way to collaborate with employees over multiple platforms, go Team to get:
- All free and pro version capabilities
- Google News integration, where you can add Google News to your Feedly
- Ability to curate stories with tags, which allows you and your team to easily categorize and find your favorite stories.
- Collaborate with others via Trello and Office 365
An In-Depth Look at Shared Collections
As I mentioned earlier, Shared Collections are available with the “Pro” and “Team” versions of Feedly. This feature is one of my favorite Feedly options. According to Feedly, Shared Collections “let you choose to share what you read with your teammates, colleagues, and followings.” You can also personalize it to “fit your company’s identity or personal brand.” Companies will want to personalize their collections because those collections will be reflecting their voice and what they want to accomplish. For example, if you’re a restaurant, you want to have collections that include:
- Improving your restaurant
- Improving customer experience
- Industry news
Shared Collections are an easy way for your brand to share that content with employees and followers. If you share content on more than one site, Feedly is an easy, convenient way to bring all of that content together. Don’t know where to start? Feedly offers a tutorial to guide you through the process.
Feedly vs. Other Curation Sites
Unlike other curation sites like Reddit or Pinterest, Feedly doesn’t show you content primarily based on what’s trending. When a site you follow updates, it appears in your feed. While curation sites like Reddit and Pinterest have their benefits and aren’t better or worse than Feedly, they don’t collect feeds from other sites automatically—users have to upload them. So if you want an easy way to keep up with your sites, Feedly is your best bet.
My Issues with Feedly
The only issue I ran across was that I couldn’t scroll through a feed until I had clicked on an article. This was rather annoying, as I don’t like being forced to click on something just so I can see other content. After some experimentation and logging out and back in, and the problem seemed to resolve itself.
Unfortunately, as I browsed, the problem came back. After a quick Google search, it seems I’m not the only one who has this problem and it may have something to do with the platform not playing well with Google Chrome. Feedly’s solution is to go into incognito mode, see if it works, then go into your extensions and disable them, which isn’t very convenient.
Thankfully, after leaving the site alone for a few days in frustration, I came back and the problem seems to have resolved. Which makes for a much easier and happier experience.
Final Thoughts
Despite the problems I encountered, I do recommend Feedly as a source for curation and staying up to date with content. Since it is cross-platform, you don’t have to worry about it not working on your smart devices. The basic service does everything that I need for it to do, so I don’t feel the need to upgrade to Pro.