3 Tools to Create a Social Media Hub

Are you using user-generated content in real-time?

Do you want to display all of your social media updates in one place?

Streaming social updates to a social hub encourages your audience to share more, in real-time.

In this article you’ll discover three tools that pull your social conversations to a single hub.

Why Use a Social Media Hub?

Using social channels independently simply won’t do the job anymore.

Social media—including your website or blog—rely on interaction, so why isolate each conversation? Bringing them together in a single place (a hub) has a bigger impact and motivates your audience to converse across platforms—carrying your message to an even wider audience.

Social hubs bring a whole new dimension to your social media marketing. You can use them for everything from displaying cross-platform updates on a big screen at a live event to embedding multiple social media timelines in your website.

Below I tell you about three tools you can use to create a social media hub for your business.

#1: Moderate and Display Real-Time Interaction

Postano is good for integrating social media marketing campaigns with events or shows. It’s an ideal tool to promote concerts, trade shows or sports events.

Postano lets you put your fans’ social updates on the big screen in real time.

With Postano, you can show audience updates on a big screen at your event, motivating your fans to share their experience with friends across multiple social platforms. People want to see their updates on the big screen!

Postano lets you curate posts and updates so you don’t accidentally share negative or inappropriate user updates.

During football season, the ASU Sun Devils’ social media team encouraged fans to vote for their favorite players by using a specific hashtag, and then showcased the live results on the video screen in the stadium.

According to social media coordinator Grace Hoy, ASU collected more than 10,000 pieces of fan-generated content during the 2013 football season.

“Now that we have [Postano], I can’t imagine not having it because the fans, the student section, people watching it really increase the game day experience and help build the energy level,” Grace says.

#2: Combine Multiple Feeds in One Website

RebelMouse is for digital publishers who want to use their own website to share posts and pull in related content from other sources. The result is a complete hub users can come to for the latest updates regarding your industry, niche, company and more.

General Electric uses the RebelMouse platform to publish their #pressing campaign website, a dedicated digital newspaper that offers “Unique views on policy, from the best in the news.” The site funnels stories and opinions by different publishers (e.g., CNN to NBC or VOX) to a website page that links out to each story. It’s a one-stop shop for the latest news.

A new way of publishing curated content: The #pressing campaign by GE.

“With #Pressing we were trying to find a way to convene different points of view, do it in a single place that was easy for busy people to visit and have a take away and to make sure it was amplified and distributed,” says Linda Boff, executive director, Global Brand Marketing at GE.

#3: Encourage Audience Participation

Tint offers a way to add timeline-style social media feeds to any website or screen. You have the option to personalize the way the timeline is displayed—for example, you can show photos as squares or pin-style.

As with Postano and RebelMouse, you can moderate users’ contributed content to prevent undesirable posts from popping up in your stream.

Tint is the all-arounder in the social hub space—it meets a wide array of needs. For example, companies can use Tint to track hashtag-powered contests or client testimonials, embed social media timelines on websites or create interactive live event screens.

The Kansas City branch of the National Heart Association (NHA) used Tint’s services to set up a social media display hub at their event. Participants used the dedicated hashtag (#KCHeartWalk) to post comments, photos and more during the fundraiser. They could see their tweets, messages and pictures pop up on the Heart Walk’s social media wall in real time.

The extra interaction helped Kansas City NHA reach their donation goal and their Heart & Stroke Walk hashtag trended on Twitter for hours during the event.

“People would post and then snap a selfie with their tweet on the Tint wall in the background,” says Ciara O’Brien Murray, communications director of Kansas City NHA and the social media lead for the NHA’s Midwest affiliate in Overland Park.

Over to You

There’s no doubt social media hubs are useful tools for building an audience on the web, but how can your business benefit from it? Think about how you’re currently using your social media platforms. Are they working together or separately? It’s time to bring your audiences together and encourage larger conversations.

What do you think? Do you use a social media hub? Which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!