Monitoring with Aggregators

If you’re responsible for managing your own reputation, as well as that of a brand online, social aggregators will save you a surprising amount of time and energy.

What are aggregators? Glad you asked! In simple terms, aggregators monitor and measure social media.

The thing to remember is that aggregators make your life more convenient by collecting your social network activity information all in one place so that you can monitor all your major networks easily.

Here are the commonly monitored social media channels:

Facebook profile

Facebook brand page(s)

Twitter

LinkedIn

An API (application programming interface) 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) has to give permission to the social aggregation platform, like Facebook, by specifying your user ID and password for the social media to be syndicated. This built-in security keeps someone else — like your competitors — from creating an account with an aggregator and obtaining all your information.

Social network aggregation services allow you to organize or simplify your social networking experience. With them you can finally stop logging on and off from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all the time and start managing them all in one place. Most give you the capability to schedule messages across different networks at the same time, although make sure you tailor your message to fit the personality and culture of the network — updates about Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, for example, tend to be a real bust on Facebook. You want to remain interesting, not become a spammer and clog the newsfeed with irrelevant information.

Figure 1-1 shows my HootSuite account. I show you lots more about setting this popular aggregator up in Chapter 5.