Social media can benefit your business in many ways. Whether it’s content marketing, social selling or customer service, social media presents to you an avenue to reach your target audience and boost your brand.
However, with multiple platforms available out there and coupled with heavy competition across all of them; it can be difficult to set your brand apart. For instance, carving out your space on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can be tricky and time-consuming.
So, what can you do to build your brand and outsmart your competition without wasting your time and financial resources? All the finest answers point to one tool: a social media aggregator.
Whether you run a startup after the first project phases or a Fortune 500 company, aggregators such as curator.io are indispensable when it comes to driving brand awareness, powerfully engaging your audience and staying ahead of the competition.
But what is a social aggregator?
A social media aggregator tool helps you to pull social media feeds from different platforms and strategically display them under one platform. These display platforms could be on websites or streaming screens.
The pooled updates can be grouped according to topics or subjects for easy consumption by the target audience.
For instance, let’s say you are running a contest where you require all the participants to use a unique hashtag designed for the event to make it easier to locate the content.
Using a traditional approach, it’s quite challenging to locate all the posts on all the social media platforms containing your hashtag. Even if you do manage to pick out some posts say from Instagram, you might miss out on other updates on Twitter or on Facebook.
But with the help of a content aggregator such as hashtag aggregators, you would hardly get it wrong. You simply need to search the hashtag, extract all the posts bearing it and stream them on your display walls. And your audience can now engage with it: thus increasing your brand’s visibility.
So, how can a social aggregator be your branding weapon?
According to a recent study by eMarketers where they asked marketers to name their top challenges as far as content marketing is concerned, a whole 43% of them mentioned that they had little or no time to create new content. Also, three out of four marketers admitted that they were facing rough time producing original content.
You see, content is king. Content is what enables a business to attract potential customers to their doors. If you are have limited time to create content, how will you stay ahead of the competition? How will you provide value? How will you drive leads into your funnels?
Content aggregators came as a boon to power your content marketing efforts and build your brand through user-generated content.
Here are reasons why social aggregators can be your secret branding weapon:
-
You get original and authentic content
Social media aggregator tools provide you with unique user feedback. As the customers make conversations regarding your products and services, they leave behind honest feedback as well as reviews as far as your brand is concerned. You can then collect the posts and use them to power your brand awareness campaigns without spending a dime.
-
You stream updates in Real-Time
Aggregators have the capabilities of pulling data as it happens. You can leverage on this to stir your audience excitement. As a user makes an update about your brand on social media, the post reflects immediately on your live social media walls. You can reap tremendous benefits by requesting your audience to share their positive experiences with the brand and display the same on your social walls.
-
You get to be in control of your brand
All the designs, colours, as well as the themes, are all under your control. You can now tell your brand story in any way that suits you best. And besides the branding aspect, you can control what goes live on your walls. The Internet is full of scammers nowadays. And they can hijack your campaigns to advance their malicious acts. But with social media aggregators, you are in full control of your brand.
What channels can you use to display social media feeds?
Here are some of the ways you can display your aggregated content:
- You can embed it on your website
This is best suited if you are currently running a campaign across all the online platforms. Also, you can embed it if you want to build a buzz that revolves around your brand. To help you achieve this, you can dedicate an entire page on your website to display the feeds. Here, your readers can view the feeds as they happen in real-time.
-
You can stream the feeds on digital screens
This works best in an open space like in your office, on the streets or strategically planted around a live event.
-
You can use projectors to display the feeds
Projectors work best if you are in dealing with huge crowds like concerts, live events and charity events. As you pull the aggregated feeds, the attendees get a chance of witnessing in real-time.
What should you consider when choosing an aggregator for your brand?
Now that you know how social media aggregators can increase your brand credibility. What should you look for when shopping for an aggregator that will meet your needs? You need to consider the following:
-
Reliability
With the rules changing concerning the user data privacy, tables are turning on what third-party data applications can access. This may seem a little bit of a setback to you as the marketer. But since you want to create a unique experience for your audience and a reputable brand image, you should ensure that the aggregation tool you invest in has explicit permission to aggregate content.
-
Access to analytics
After sharing the content, you’ll want to know how well they are performing out there. Also, with analytics, you can curate your content according to your audience’ preferences. Do more of what they love. For these and other reasons, you may need to consider an aggregator that comes with inbuilt analytics tools.
-
Ability to monitor and moderate
The internet is full of trolls nowadays. If you are planning to pull updates on a hashtag and stream them in real-time, you might want to consider moderation aspect. The fact you own the hashtag doesn’t mean there’ll be no spammers and some inappropriate content posted along with your hashtag. Moderation means that you have full control of the reviewing process and approval of content. This saves your business a lot of trouble and potential damages.
Final word
In a nutshell, a social aggregator helps you to collect your desired content from various social media channels, moderate and share the curated feeds to enhance your customer experience, engage your audience and finally analyse results to assess the performance of your campaign.
As you can see, social aggregation is crucial for anyone who is keen on creating a community for their brand, build social proof in their niche as well as interact with their audience.
If you need help or have a question on anything related to social media aggregation, feel free to contact us here.