#SocialHub or Social Flub? 

(or The Advertisers Guide to Social Content Hubs.)

Perhaps you’ve already heard about this new favorite plaything for us at Innity – the #SocialHub.

Social hubs are nothing new, but most of the traction gained has remained in the States or European countries. In our attempts to bring in the social media hub to the Asian market, one thing remains true across borders – while most brands would agree that it is necessary to build and maintain relationships with audiences on social, a social hub may not be a necessary move for your content marketing plan. Granted, depending on the industry and brand itself, there are also various approaches that would allow social hubs to better serve a particular community.

While the solution varies based on its providers, one thing social hubs have in common is their ability to aggregate content from various social media platforms and display them cohesively in one place. Innity’s #SocialHub sets apart itself from other providers by allowing brands to extend a brands social content reach by re-purposing them and highlighting them via display ads on top of content curation. If you are interested to know more about that, check out this FAQ. Through this article however, we wish to paint a general overview as to how social hubs in general could serve a brand well.

A Unified View of Your Brand’s Content

  Discretion disclaimer: Huawei is an existing client of Innity.

Social brands are usually a variety on social media platforms, and a social hub provides brands the convenience of monitoring conversations on all these conversations while managing their brand image. Through further customizations of the hub, or even with its primary purpose of curating conversations across social media platforms and sharing branded content, brands can highlight and guide conversations to reemphasize their values and create a unified brand story with audiences.

With hashtag campaigns or other socially driven campaigns, social hubs give users the convenience of participating through the social platforms that they are already used to. Tabs can be used to pull from hashtags to create a specific social landing page for campaigns, and within the social hub itself, brands can encourage dialog within its community while managing its image. Travelocity’s I Wanna Go campaign is a brilliant execution of a community driven social campaign with occasional brand postings. And because social hubs are often an extension of a brand’s website, audiences can always acquire further information they need just a click away.

Or taking a different approach, social hubs can also host only aggregated branded content, and acts more of a central hub for the brand’s audience to be updated on the latest information that the brand has to share. This could be a convenient solution for brands with multiple communities to convey a consolidated view of the brand, and fuse social content from various communities to a single page, with posts categorized to facilitate smart discoveries for users. Higher education provider MIT’s social hub is an elaborate effort to engage its audience with curated content across various departments, with a directory that highlights key accounts of the school.

The Blending of Paid, Earned, and Owned media
Social, despite being the most popular method for audiences to engage with businesses through the convenience of their own smartphones or computers, have always existed as a silo apart from most digital marketing efforts. But it shouldn’t be so. The biggest benefit of these platforms in our opinion, is how social hubs opens up opportunities for brands to leverage social media content through complementing designed copy with authentic conversation.

In the face of challenges towards transparency that social posits, brands have emerged to be more open and genuine online, and this honesty gives brands credibility that permeates social media. Through aggregated social posts with ad copy placed contextually across websites or digital ads, one-dimensional elements are brought to live and can further unlock more opportunities through further distribution on paid channels.

And this is essentially what being Social should be isn’t it – expanding one’s circle?