Save Time & Energy Now: Aggregate Your Love

By Lori On February 7, 2012 · 8 Comments

Are you a Brand Manager? If so, social aggregators can save you a ton of time and energy.

Glad you asked! (You did just ask, didn’t you?) In simple terms an aggregator monitors and/or measures social media by using three basic components: data collection, analytics, and application.

Good News: Nobody can get on an aggregator and pretend to be you.

An API application integrates your primary social network accounts for you. For the API to be able to access a user’s actions from another platform, the user (you) have to give permission to the social aggregation platform, like Facebook, by specifying your user id and password for the social media to be syndicated.

Better News: It simplifies your brand management.

Social network aggregation services attempt to organize or simplify a user’s social networking experience, although the idea has been satirized by the concept of a “social network aggregator aggregator.” Oh dear…

Best News: It saves you precious time and energy!!

You can finally stop logging on and off from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and start managing them all in one place, at one time with a social media manager. Some social media aggregators also give you the ability to schedule messages across different networks at the same time, though I do suggest you strongly consider the personality and culture of the place where you’re sharing. You want to remain interesting and not become a “spam-a-lot” by clogging the newsfeed with irrelevant information to that group of people.

For example, updates about Twitter and Google Plus tend to be a real bust on Facebook!

Lifehacker came out with a Top Five post this morning and I was really surprised by some of their picks, though Hootsuite remains a majority favorite. I’m currently exploring SproutSocial for myself and FriendFeed for creating private groups for sharing and discussing news. This could be an extremely effective tool for crisis communication. Everybody on the crisis team, no matter what time of day or location can collaborate with everyone’s remarks being part of the conversation in real time. I like!