Open source social media aggregators make social media more effective
Once upon a time, it was only the businesses with deep pockets that could reach a wide and deep audience. With the proliferation of social media, cash is no longer the roadblock.
You can now reach a targeted audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional print, audio and visual marketing channels. You can reach them and interact with them in real time, making your marketing both more relevant and more effective. This brings us to the social media marketing conundrum. The issue that smaller businesses and coaches face today is not the financial budget, but the time budget.
Marketing on multiple social media channels
Most people use more than one social media account and they use them for a variety of reasons. According to GlobalWebIndex, the main uses of social media are:
- To stay in touch with friends (42%)
- To stay up to date with news and current events (41%)
- To fill spare time (39%)
- General networking (34%)
Interestingly, almost one in three people use social media to research and find new products and services.
To reach out and find these customers on social media, you’ll need to use, manage and monitor several social media accounts. These may include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more. It’s a hard, time-consuming job keeping up with everything that is happening on social media. People interact when they wish to. They expect timely responses. If you are not careful, you’ll be spending every hour of the day on social media. Your social media marketing will consume your business, instead of feeding it.
What you need is a social media aggregator
Technology has an uncanny way of making technology work. The time it takes to manage an overarching social media strategy eliminates the leveling of the marketing playing field, and swings it back in favour of the big boys – because they can afford to invest more money and employ people to run their social media marketing campaigns.
Social media aggregators are the solution that redresses this balance again. They let you bring all your posts, updates and social media conversations together. They organize your social media into an easy-to-use format. This means huge time savings, though this isn’t the main reason to use a social media aggregator. Other benefits include:
- Running in real time, allowing you to share your latest updates across multiple channels in the moment
- Amalgamation of content, allowing you to manage your marketing strategy more consistently and effectively
How does an open source social media aggregator work?
You can invest in a social media aggregator ‘off the peg’. However, the long-term benefits may be limited. It can’t be customized, modified, or shaped to your unique requirements. Analysis of outcomes is undertaken to pre-set parameters. The answer to these issues is to use an open source social media aggregator. This will allow you to evolve to your needs, and not rely on the updates that the social media aggregator developer gives you.
Social media gives coaches real marketing power. An aggregator helps you to better target your marketing efforts by providing the in-depth analysis of outcomes that aids strategy building. You’ll learn whether the traffic on each social media site is favourable as you:
- Discover which posts are most popular
- Learn which content receives the most interaction
- Understand which of your ads receive most clicks
- See at a glance how many likes, shares and positive comments each of your posts receive
A social media aggregator enables coaches to reap the full benefits of social media without spending all their time on it. It bridges the gap between large and small business capabilities, and enables you to get closer to your customers through the social media interaction they prefer, as well as providing the content they most appreciate.
To simplify your strategy, regain your time, connect with your audience, and grow your business by maintaining a valuable presence on social media, a social media aggregator is a must. Making it open source will allow you to develop features pertinent to your unique requirement.
Have you started social media marketing, but then let it slip because it takes too much time? Let us know your biggest challenge when it comes to social media marketing in the comments below.
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