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How We Do Content Discovery

Content Discovery usually refers to platforms and algorithms to help you discover content you or your community may enjoy.

We tend to use a broader definition of Content Discovery: for us it means all the activities we do related to finding excellent content, no matter the tool or channel.

The main goal of content discovery is to find interesting content to share with your community, by retweeting, or repackaging into listicles or short introductory blog posts.

Whether to do this or not depends on several factors: how much your community asks you for it, how much of your own content you have to share, and if there are others already doing a great job of it in your community or not.

At Balsamiq, we've gone through different phases:

  1. At first our founder Peldi would manage the @balsamiq Twitter account and retweet interesting articles as he came across them. He also wrote some short blog posts about interesting books he read or videos he watched.
  2. As we grew, we decided to invest in this, so we set up some process to find lots of interesting content (described below).
  3. As we grew even more, we decided this was no longer a good use of our time, because we had enough content to share ourselves, and because there are already a lot of accounts dedicated to sharing good UX-related content around the web. We decided we don't need to add noise to what's already a noisy Internet.

If you want to do content discovery, for you or for your community, read on.


To help us "see what's new", we created a page in our internal wiki, containing a growing list of sources to look at: websites, blogs, newsletters, Twitter accounts, Facebook groups, online communities, etc.

We browsed these sources and carefully read and vet a lot of articles. If we were not sure, we asked our teammates if something was worth sharing or not.

It was a time-consuming task, but we wanted to be very sure that the content we were sharing was worth our Community's time.

Another source of links to share — my favorite — are my colleagues. Thanks to Balsamiq's Professional Development Policy, a lot of us spend quite a bit of time studying and reading, so it's common for us to discover amazing resources and read extensive articles on what interests us.


Once you have a collection of resources to share, you need to manage the sharing queue. There are several tools to do this, even a Google sheet or a table in a wiki page could do the work. What matters is that you save following information:

  • The title of the article.
  • Its URL.
  • Where to share it (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn...).
  • The author's Twitter account (we like to @-mention them on Twitter, they deserve the credit!)
  • The short message(s) you plan to use to share the content.

One final piece of advice: ask a colleague to review your messages — they'll catch your typos better than you can! ;)


Do you have any advice for us? How do you do Content Discovery at your company?