Social Media Aggregation: Definition and Tools!

Pause for a minute, would you?

Done? Alright, in the time that you paused for, which was precisely a minute, do you know how much has happened? No? Let’s take a look at some of these statistics (source)…

527,760 snaps were sent by users on Snapchat
About 120 professionals joined LinkedIn
4,146,600 videos were watched on YouTube
456,000 tweets were sent on Twitter
46,740 photos were posted on Instagram
510,000 comments and 293,000 statuses were uploaded on Facebook

No, these statistics aren’t a joke! Every day, we create about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data and upload it on the internet (source).

Do you think it’s humanly possible to keep up with everything that is being posted on social media, let alone the internet?

We didn’t think so either! In the time that it would take for you to shuffle between social media apps trying to catch up with the updates, newer updates would be posted, and there would always be something that you’ll miss out on.

Is there a solution?

Well, if you cannot keep up with the amount of information that is being posted on separate platforms, a simple solution is to bring all this information together into a single platform from where you can read new updates and never miss out on anything! This simple solution is also known as aggregation.

Excited to find out more about aggregation? Read on!

What is Social Media Aggregation? (Definition)

In simple words, social media aggregation is defined as the process of collecting data from various social networking websites and presenting it singularly to you. The idea behind social media aggregation is to organize and simplify your social networking experience.

Like we mentioned above, shuffling between multiple applications and trying to aggregate content from different websites is a cumbersome task, and most businesses and individuals already know that. That’s where social media aggregators come into the picture!

Social media aggregators are tools that pull together information from different platforms into a unified location and help you consolidate multiple social media profiles into one profile.

Various social media aggregators allow users to aggregate messages, track contacts, merge bookmarks, scan multiple social media sites, read RSS feeds for multiple social media websites, see when their name is listed on multiple sites, view their profiles from a single interface, etc.

Still not entirely sure if social media aggregators are meant for you? Let’s take an extensive look at all the benefits that social media aggregators offer. Scroll ahead!

How does it Benefit Businesses and Individuals?

Social media aggregators are designed to help businesses and individuals interact better with the products that they made by creating aggregated social streams. These streams could be embedded in an existing website and personalized to look visually intriguing to the website.

What does that do? Well, it enables potential consumers/customers to engage with all the social media posts of the company, without forcing them to jump from site to site. It provides the advantage of keeping customers on the brand’s website for a longer period of time.

But wait, that’s not it! There are still more benefits to using social media aggregators! Let’s take a look at some of the major benefits in detail. Read on!

Benefits of Using Social Media Aggregator

1. Time and Cost-Efficient

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business and carries a significant part of a company’s investment.

However, in a lot of cases, the ROI is not that significant. The reason? You end up spending a lot of time on separate content for different platforms when you can easily curate existing social content.

Social media aggregators provide you with the ideal way to reap the benefits of your marketing activities with minimal investment. Similarly, a content aggregator also eliminates all resources that would otherwise be placed into data collection, knowledge demonstration, and engaging content production.

Time saved = Money Saved = Profits $$

2. User-Generated Content Creates Confidence and Authenticity

When it comes to what customers value the most while making a purchase, user-generated content is one of the most trusted and reliable sources of information as compared to any other type of advertising. It shows that user-generated content is extremely important for brands and companies. That’s where social media aggregators come into play.

Social media aggregators find and curate valuable user-generated content from social media. Social media acts as a hub of user-generated content as many users share content around brands and their products on social media platforms.

When you leverage user-generated content using social media aggregators, you end up improving your brand loyalty, and people promote your brand without getting paid!

3. Creates Audience Interaction

Audience interaction by social media aggregation tools is the most productive way to communicate with your audience. It also improves the bond between the audience and the brand. For example, tools such as the Instagram wall and the Twitter wall are highly efficient in controlling on-site interaction and engagement during events and exhibits.

These walls create a desire among people to be seen on a big screen at an event. Users post live updates to their social media, use brand hashtags, etc. The aggregated content and posts are then displayed live on a feed screen or a website.

This also generates interest in those watching or sharing social media feeds and walls.

4. Curate Imaginative Contents

If the resources of social media aggregators are used wisely, the effect of the curated content will be superb. Social media has billions of users who post content regularly, so the variety, consistency, and uniqueness of content are immense.

As a result, social media aggregators give you the ability to pick and curate the best content from this diverse hub that is important to your brand and can produce the best results.

You can choose the form of content including photos, videos, text, etc., you can choose from where you want the content like Europe, the US, etc., or you can choose the new and old posts as well.

Two things that work here are appropriate hashtags and interactive campaigns to get the most important and effective content. The combination of an engaging campaign and a relevant hashtag will make your followers engage and produce the best content for your brand.

5. Expand Your Social Media Reach & Brand Recognition

Social media aggregator is an excellent tool to build a powerful presence through social media networks across a variety of platforms.

When you add this social media content to your feeds and show it through various marketing platforms, such as blogs, email promotions, festivals, signage, etc., you will have the ability to display your social content.

Getting engaging and interesting social media feeds will help you funnel a huge amount of traffic to your social profiles that will lead to follow-ups more reach, brand recognition, and a strong social network.

This would be highly useful in your future social media and other marketing strategies as you’ll get more conversion opportunities.

6. Discover and build patterns on social media

In the midst of rivalry that is prevailing in the market, each brand must be conscious of the different trends in their industry. A social network aggregator can play an important role in this.

You can keep an eye on trending brands/campaigns by using the tool. Analyzing these patterns closely will help you recognize and incorporate different success factors for a social media campaign to establish a new trend.

By this point, we’re sure that you understand the importance of using social media aggregators, but which aggregator is the best?

We have the answers for you! Keep reading!

Tools for Social Media Aggregation

After doing some extensive research on the best social media aggregation tools out there, we have curated a list of the best of the best tools for you.

1. elink.io

First up on our list, elink is a social media aggregator tool that helps build and distribute beautifully aggregated social media content, blog content, social bio links, newsletters, and more in minutes! It’s a fast and professional way to share aggregated content on different topics in a visually appealing way.

Simply add links to articles, videos, photos, etc. that you want to share and the tool will create an amazing webpage in minutes! When you’ve finished aggregating, you can customize your fonts, background colors, text colors, and more with minimal effort!

You can also change the SEO settings of your posts by adding meta descriptions and keywords to make your content more user-friendly.

The content you aggregate on elink can be shared via any social media platform as a stand-alone web page embedded on your website, or as a newsletter via Gmail, MailChimp, or any other email provider.

With the Chrome Extension connection, you can save online content on the go, edit the title, definition, or image.

That’s not it! You can also read and aggregate content with the robust RSS feed reader of elink. Choose from an infinite number of RSS feeds to make sure you’re up to date with the latest content being uploaded on social media. Save and bundle digital assets at any time for quicker content recovery.

What’s more? You can also filter and search for content based on keywords and sources to easily discover and aggregate content. The automation feature also allows you to schedule and connect content sources to publish content automatically. Pretty sweet deal, right?

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a web-based social media aggregator, which means that you don’t have to go through a cumbersome installation process. Instead of aggregating content to a centralized feed, Hootsuite collects your accounts in a single dashboard to make them far easier to manage.

You can incorporate any type of website into this aggregator including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, WordPress, etc. It also allows you to schedule your posts in advance and lets you easily upload files, videos, and images along with your messages.

You can also create customized URLs for your content to track clickthrough rates and collect information about your audience by using custom link parameters, which can help you understand audience behavior. It also lets you bookmark pages, connect your RSS feeds, and provides you a seamless layout.

3. SocialMediaWall.io

One of the most commonly used social media aggregators for creating social walls is SocialMediaWall.io. It is a pretty simple tool to use which gathers all your social media channels in one place so that you can interact with your audience with ease.

Some of its best features include gathering content based on hashtags, RSS feeds, user handles, Twitter lists, and Facebook pages. It also acts as a moderator where it only displays the content that is the most relevant to your audience.

You should totally opt for this tool if you’re looking for something simple yet effective for basic social media management.

4. Spotlyte

Spotlyte’s primary focus is on user-generated content giving it the center spotlight (hence, the name). It was designed to aggregate content across all your channels, which includes aggregating content from your audience to see how they’re engaging with your brand.

It has an advanced filter that shows only the content that you want and weeds out all the junk. Moreover, it can also show you content from specific locations. One of the best features of Spotlyte is that it uses analytics to see how your posts are performing and how users are interacting.

It is best suited for enterprise-level brands, which need a lot of advanced features to aggregate social media content.

5. Netvibes

Netvibes is another web-based social media dashboard and a news aggregator. It can be used by brands and agencies in their browsers to create a personalized hub that aggregates content into a single location. It also serves as a great personal tool for designing a continuously updated collection of all your favorite content from across the web.

The platform is also easy to customize, making it a perfect tool for businesses and brands. You can manage all your social media accounts and keep track of everything in one convenient location. it also has a great RSS reader to help you keep track of the latest news and blog posts from your favorite websites.

Your Netvibes page is also sharable across platforms, allowing you to improve your user involvement. This tool is great for both users and enterprises.

6. Taggbox

Taggbox is among the top social media aggregators and works with various social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, RSS feeds, and YouTube. It also acts as a moderator where you can filter content based on custom filters.

It is also customizable where you can adjust the look and feel of your platform, according to your wishes. You could also display your content on any device with a fully responsive UI. Taggbox also enables you to build social walls, embed feeds in websites, create digital signs, and so much more!

This is a great tool for involving your audience and seeing how well they react.

7. Buffer

Last but definitely not least on our list, Buffer! Buffer is one of the most popular social media aggregators that allows you to manage social media accounts easily. It has a very convenient dashboard that gathers social media content from the top social media platforms in a single place. You can easily monitor hashtags, users, lists, and so much more!

Buffer allows you to plan, post, and interact with content coming in from major social media platforms, and organize them. You can also tailor and respond to posts in real-time, along with an extremely user-friendly analytics window!

Feeling overwhelmed and confused?

Not sure about which one is the best tool for you?

That’s okay! When you have so many awesome tools laid out in front of you, it’s only natural to feel confused about which one is going to be the right fit for you. But you don’t have to worry, because we’ve got your back!

How to Choose the Best Tool for Social Media Aggregation?

Here’s a quick guide on how to choose the best social media aggregator that’ll fit your needs…

1. Social Media Platforms Available

The first step in choosing a social media aggregator is to check all the available social media platforms from which the tool can discover and curate content. It should ideally support the maximum possible number of social media platforms.

Why so? Because there are billions of social media users across the internet and each of them uses a different platform. This makes your target audience extremely scattered. So, a social media aggregator with a large number of social media platforms available will help you reach the maximum number of people ensuring the maximum possible content curation!

2. Customizability

Customizability is extremely important as it refers to the modifications and changes that you can make to your aggregated feed to make it look more engaging and visually appealing!

It could include layout, font designs, theme options, color schemes, call-to-action buttons, designs, background design, banners, and basically everything under the sun! The more customized your feed is, the more interactive and creative your campaign can be!

3. Content Moderation

Since social media is a hub of both positive and negative information, it is important to moderate the content that is available on it.

It is impossible to manually scour through thousands of posts filtering out the content, which is why you need a powerful moderation tool that can limit irrelevant, violent, or competitive content in your social media stream. Content moderation also ensures the highest filtered quality content reaches your users.

4. Compatibility

Your social media aggregation tool should ideally be able to work with major website building platforms like HTML, WordPress, Wix, Weebly, etc., along with digital signage tools like Nivisgn, Mvix, ScreenCLoud, etc. It should be responsive and adjust itself according to the device on which it is being used.

5. Insightful Analytics

Performance assessment is central to any campaign, as it lets you understand both the strengths and limitations of your campaign and analytics is the best way to understand that.

Getting informative analytics can ensure that you get comprehensive insights into how the content works, the level of user interaction, most active users, views, clicks, and more.

Final Words

There you have it, folks! Our A-X guide on the what, why’s and how’s of social media aggregation. We’ve also mentioned some of the best tools for you to choose from, and ease your process of aggregating content. Given the number of benefits that aggregation has in store for you, we don’t think it’s an opportunity that you should miss out on.

What’s the wait for? Hurry and pick the best tool for your needs and get aggregating! Cheers!