Heidi Cohen, a marketing influencer, once described content aggregation in its simplest form as “the collection of information based on a common topic involving one or more related keywords.”
If you’re a modern marketer, this probably sounds very familiar.
After all, aren’t the content marketing journeys that you create based on a bunch of keywords in one place? Isn’t your content related to some part of your business or a current market opportunity? For instance, your blog engine may publish a few blogs every week (if it doesn’t – it really should) that you promote on your social media channels. Before your writers start working on original content for these blogs, they’re fed with keywords around which the content pieces are expected to revolve.
Similarly, aggregators provide web content cues based on which your marketing strategy can be formulated. They are the backbone of your sales or marketing campaigns because they give context to readers about your credibility and capacity to deliver great content.
What does content aggregation mean in 2020?
First, here’s the good part.
There are more ways to aggregating content than before. From the results on search engine pages to RSS feeds and hashtags, you can create a central content repository based on selective topics, categories, and purposes. A recent report even said that “Facebook is responsible for directing 27% (up to 70% for some) of all traffic to most news sites.” Needless to say, popular social media platforms have become the top content aggregators.
But, the hyper-acceleration of content discovery and news aggregation has led to challenges, as well.
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Some of them are:
- Higher chances of running into low-quality aggregated content
- Experience disruptors like ads, unverified sources, etc.
- Lack of alignment with your content marketing strategy
- Missed content attributions due to inefficient filters
Questions to ask yourself during the content aggregation process
- Are you looking at credible content sources with verifiable digital assets like websites, social media channels, etc.?
- Will topics you search for provide meaningful information to the audience?
- Can you add your own unbiased insights to the aggregated content?
- Will the content aggregator website help create open and engaging discussions?
- Have you summarized the content so that the audience will better understand the context?
- Have you given proper credits to the sources?
Three quick steps to be followed by a content aggregator
- Use AI-powered data analytics, instead of a human-driven process, to define specific search criterion and discover the right content sources
- Avoid poor-quality content, promotional material, and spams by using automated quality assurance filters
- Aggregate content into a single place of truth, with a seamless search engine to discover content pieces by publication dates, names of sources, etc.
Now, you might be thinking that it sounds easy as lemon pie. And thanks to Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, it sure can be. But that’s like saying it’s easy for a surgeon to perform a minor operation.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy for anyone who tries it! It’s why you need a content aggregator.
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Ok, but why a content aggregator?
Today, time-consuming manual processes are going out of style, and in their place are automated content aggregation journeys. There are content aggregation tools that can empower you to gather, classify, and share information.
Despite the growing number of disparately-placed content distributors, news aggregators can help you pluck the right information from the best sources to up the ante on your marketing momentum.
A content aggregator can also provide comprehensive filtering features to sift through the content clutter and unearth both the most popular gemstones and those diamonds in the rough.
Advantages of utilizing content aggregators
Increased productivity
It’s simple. The less time you spend on content aggregation, the more you and your teams can focus on growing the business through more customer-centric marketing activities. Let the content aggregators effortlessly scout the World Wide Web for treasured insights and classify them in easily-discoverable formats in one place. And give yourself more time to promote instead of aggregating content.
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Better-quality research
While content aggregation doesn’t quite require the same finesse that cataract surgery does, there are undoubtedly unique skills involved that can’t be self-taught within a short timeframe. Content aggregators are undoubtedly likelier to cast a wider net to find high-quality data from search engines and social channels – across a more diverse group of topics and categories.
A deeper level of customization
As your business grows or your sales executives and product teams unearth new and exciting opportunities, there may arise a need to finetune your content aggregation. Or else your content faces of risk of sounding misaligned to your company’s growth objectives. With a content aggregator, a simple service request is all it takes.
More reader-friendly
With a content aggregator by your side, you are likely to attract a larger reader base – thanks to the sheer breadth of their aggregation. It leads to more organic traffic while establishing a credible sense of authorship with users.
Existing knowledge of content consumption
Unless you’re selling extremely niche products, services, or solutions, your users probably have a reading pattern that the content aggregator already understands. It means that a content aggregator may also have a clear understanding of their interaction, engagement, and transactional behaviors. You can utilize their existing knowledge of your users to push your content further.
What content aggregators can do for you
- Get started on content aggregation by building a content discovery engine – track down the right content.
- Set up alerts/notifications and stay tuned to the changing needs of users– adapt to the perennially-evolving landscape of content distribution
- Monitor other brands and keep a close watch on the competition – don’t miss the boat on knowing the type of content that your users would love to read.
- Aggregate content to improve reader experiences – personalize the content to address their key issues and concerns
- Save time, effort, and resource efficiency by minimizing the role of content publishers and other manual touch-points
- Get backlinks for websites or blogs and add to your SEO firepower
- Amplify your social traffic through organic means
The last one might arouse your curiosity the most – if your business is dependent on brand awareness in the digital world. Let’s take a closer look into:
How content aggregators can help in growing traffic for your social media posts
In the landscape of social media, content aggregators play a critical role because they help you cope with the pace at which content gets distributed. A content aggregator collects information from popular social media channels and showcases it for curation in a clear and concise manner.
More importantly, they help you aggregate content that boosts your social reach and amplifies organic traffic by helping deliver proven content journeys. They equip you to share exciting content pieces that can even grow revenue through your social media channels.
Think of it this way – social media channels have billions of users who regularly post quality content that cuts across a variety of topics, categories, and themes. And in many cases, whether for B2C or B2B businesses, they are powerful indicators of the type and flavor of content that may attract the most attention in their respective industries
Best content aggregator websites
Content or aggregators play a key role in sharpening your marketing efforts by helping identity, discover, and curate top-quality information from the largest content sources. Let’s look at the best content aggregator websites.
Feedly
Feedly is a content aggregator helps you gather contextual content based on your preferred keywords and simplifies the process of following the topics that interest you. All you need to do is subscribe to content categories or content publishers. Then, this aggregator website will display all the news related to their content in your feed so that you can read them at your convenience.
Alltop
AllTop collects the news, articles, blogs, and other pieces of content from some of the largest aggregator websites. Depending on your topic of preference – technology, politics, fashion, healthcare, or retail – you get access to the latest trending content like viral stories, as well as the best-forming stories over a determined period of time.
Reddit, a leading aggregator website, tends to be associated with controversy and gossip, but the fact is that they’re one of the largest and most audience-heavy websites in the world. This news aggregator provides a space where breaking news is reported, along with truly exciting perspectives that are starting to gain momentum.
Growth Hackers
Growth Hackers is an aggregator website that says that they provide “High quality trending articles on growth hacking, marketing channels, user acquisition, engagement, product launch, and more.” They certainly deliver on that promise, as they continue to be one of the best news aggregators for techies, C-suiters, entrepreneurs, and freelancers.
Techmeme
Techmeme is an excellent news aggregator platform for technology-related content. It showcases the best content creators in the world of technology, such as tech websites, news publications, industry thought leaders, and industry research giants. If you’re itching to offer some tech news to your readers, Techmeme is a good place to begin this journey.
10 other content aggregator websites
- Google News
- NewsNow
- Hacker News
- Panda
- Popurls
- Fark
- The Web List
- BlogEngage
- Travel Blogger Community
How to use a content aggregation tool to grow your brand online
Social Animal is a powerful content marketing tool that makes your brand go on beast mode to deliver great-quality content to the audience. It can take your content aggregation to the next level by managing the entire journey – from content discovery and creation to analysis and tracking.
You can go beyond mere headlines and unearth buried keywords that truly impact how users engage with your brand.
Feature highlights
- Analyze millions of articles in a matter of seconds – irrespective of industry or geography
- Stay tuned to top-performing content trends based on hashtags, topics, etc.
- Share great content that sticks with the audience
- Partner with influencers by publicizing their content
- Measure content performance and continuously improve content journeys
Four key content aggregation goals
Improving content curation
Building a responsive audience for your brand starts with curating great content. But it’s more challenging than it sounds because to keep your audience in the loop – you should become a part of it! And that’s no bed of roses, given the amount of content you’ve to deal with on a daily basis. But with an effective content curation tool, you can share relevant content that will have your audiences coming back for more.
How Social Animal can help
- Keep your social media feeds alive and kicking with just one click, without a considerable budget or additional resources to manage the content curation process
- Build a credible pool of followers based on niche interests that are in sync with your brand’s content strategy
- Use NLP-based techniques to rigorously look for meaningful content sources and impactful influencers and get a Daily Digest newsletter to stay on top of all the latest happenings
Enhancing content discovery
Finding the right content spark can’t be left up to digital serendipity! You must proactively identify patterns that have been consistently working for leading content creators and distributors. That way you can discover trending content topics in categories that cater to the niche expectations of the reader.
How Social Animal can help
- Save a massive amount of time and money by using advanced filters to search our massive database
- Leverage a spiffy-looking dashboard to set up alerts based on selected keywords so that you can track preferred keywords, hashtags, and topics
- Measure social media engagement of competitor’s articles and be in a better position to increase content marketing effectiveness
Content research
Knowing the type of content your audience loves is all fine and dandy, but does that make your job, as a content marketer, any easier?
In short, “Nope.”
Sorry. It’s just how things are. With countless articles and counting that need to be analyzed, raising the bar on content performance can be a tricky business if you intend to do it yourself. It’s not just the content quality that should be assessed. It’s equally crucial to assess the top-performing content types and formats.
How Social Animal can help
- Scan millions of articles based on targeted keywords or domains in a matter of seconds – it usually takes 10 hours!
- Go deep into analyzing the tone, style, and sentiment behind every article and identify valuable data points in the most popular articles
- Receive detailed updates on popular industry content and customize filters any time you want to, to get channel-specific results
In 2020, as a social brand, it’s hard to lose your voice once you find it. Even if you’re unable to churn out world-class original content on even a semi-weekly basis, a content aggregator can discover enough shareable material to keep your blog or website engines going strong.
One of the significant advantages of sharing other people’s content is that you get to cherry-pick those that meet your quality standards. But until you find the best content aggregator, all the content you share may end up eluding your users.
We hope this article could give you a quick understanding of the importance of content aggregators. Trying to be one yourself can cause hiccups along the way. If you find the right one, though, your content is bound to reach more readers.
