Social media touches nearly every aspect of our personal and business lives. It is changing the ways of how people communicate and how information is flowing. Organizations are using social media networks more and more as their communication channels and public engagement tools. It becomes more urgent for organizations to effectively manage and use the different types of social media network. This drives for the productivity and progress of the social media aggregator. A social media aggregator gathers posts from social media networks and displays them on websites or live event walls. These social walls help drive engagement with brand social media content in a powerful new way. Using social media aggregators can help organizations to communicate with social media more efficiently and effectively.
In this report, we will explain what a social media aggregator is, introduce and compare some of the different social media aggregator tools. Based on the features of the social media aggregator tools, compare these tools and make further recommendation.
What is a Social Media Aggregator
Any media that present in the social channels can be referred to as a social media feed. When a multiplicity of social media feeds takes place and such feeds are aggregated or compiled together, then this is simply known as social media aggregation. Social media aggregation is done with the help of a tool called social media aggregator. The social media aggregator tool brings together feeds from several social media channels and aggregates them to be ultimately displayed on live social media walls or be embedded on websites via the social media aggregator API.
Social media aggregators are used for a range of purposes, including displaying real-time user interactions, embedding social media networks to the website, and monotonous pattern of social media marketing. There are a few benefits of using social media aggregators:
- Time and cost efficient: reducing the time for data analyzing and duplicating work;
- Audience engagement: a most effective way to engage with the audience;
- Curate creative content: creating content wisely across the social media channels;
- Discover and create social media trends: keep up with the trend of what’s happening now.
Social Media Aggregator Tools
There are various social media aggregator tools on the market, we introduced the following tools based on the popularity and functionality: Hootsuite(https://hootsuite.com/), TweetDeck(https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) and Netvibes(https://www.netvibes.com/en). A more detailed description of these tools can be found in our report of the Social Network Aggregators Evaluation.
A SWOT Analysis has been used to compare these three social media aggregator tools.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Social network aggregators are the tools for collecting content from multiple social network services, such as Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. into one unified presentation. These tools help users consolidate multiple social networking profiles, consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social network sites and read feeds from multiple social networks. These tools simplify the users’ social networking experience.
There are different usages of social network aggregators. Using a social network aggregator to display social media feeds on the website, so visitors will be able to see the latest information from the different social media platforms on the website without the need to browse the social feeds separately. Social network aggregators are also widely used in running events. A social media streaming wall can be displayed in the live event to engage and give feedback to the audience, and give the attendees the chance to see what is happening in real-time. What is more often that organizations can use social network aggregators to manage social media communication more efficiently and effectively.
When it comes to choosing a social network aggregator, there is a huge selection including the free application and paid sophisticated tool. In this report, we only select three social network aggregators Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and Netvibes based on the popularity and functionalities.
- Hootsuite provides convenience to manage and publish posts across different social media platforms, although there will be a subscription fee for more than three social channels. And because Hootsuite is a third party tool for these social media platforms, depending on which social media platform you use, unfortunately, sometimes there may be some certain limitation of functions enforced by the social media platforms.
- TweetDeck is the social media aggregator special designed for Twitter and owned by Twitter. It is a free application and highly compatible with Twitter, although it doesn’t support any other social media platform.
- Netvibes is a web-based personalized dashboard publishing tool. It allows users to pull all social media streams into one central location, and organizes the content tabs, with each tab containing user-defined modules. It offers free trial accounts, VIP account for $2/month, premium account for $649/month for brand monitor and social analytics.
Read the full report to find out more detail: Social Network Aggregator Evaluation.