Best Practices for Social Media networks Hubs - for Brands & 9 Examples

Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media networks , social media icons Social content curation and social content creation are often the core of many brands’ social networking efforts. Curating and sharing useful content associates the topics with the brand and creates an affinity for the brand as what I like to call, “the best answer” for their areas of focus. Growing social participation is motivating many companies to aggregate content produced and curated by the brand’s employees. This is a compelling opportunity to harvest the brand’s collective wisdom. A single destination for curated social content fuels a brand publisher model that supports brand storytelling, content marketing, PR, and even SEO objectives. Additionally, curated and aggregated customer interactions with the brand on the social web can surface advocates and provide customers with a view of how the company is referenced on social networks. Third-party endorsements, observations, and interactions are the most powerful, so why not curate them into a social networks hub? In 2009 I wrote about the now-defunct Best Buy Connect social hub. Maybe the idea was ahead of its time because today many companies are curating brand and customer social content as social media hubs. The growth of social media and the impact of Pinterest design has influenced how many brands employ social hubs. Here are some examples worth studying:

Team Titleist More than aggregated brand social content, this is a community-powered by the Telligent platform. However, it does include social hub features by aggregating the brand’s social content from Titleist blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. The default sort is by what’s trending. Users can make comments on blog posts and perform normal Twitter functions, and Facebook and Instagram offer offsite links. If you want to see all of Titleist social content aggregated in one place, this is it.

O-I Glass is Life The Owens Illinois social hub is very robust and powered by the Postano Hub platform, which is incredibly fast. Aggregated social networks include Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo. Curation is focused on brand-published social content on each of these platforms and users can interact and share on any of the aggregated social content, which is a social media optimization best practice.

Intel IQ Curated by Intel employees, IQ is powered by Intel’s own IQ social content curation platform to showcase the impact of technology on media, life, and the planet. The site is broken down into 3 sections: Featured stories created or curated by Intel IQ staff, Top trending stories, each with an “IQ score” and Tweets that use the #IQ hashtag. All stories are “share enabled”.

White House Social Hubs are not limited to the private sector and in fact, many government organizations use social hubs either as a static aggregation of all the various social media accounts for the institution or as more of a dynamic hub like you’d find in the other examples on this page. The White House social hub offers column-formatted streams of social content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Scribd, Flickr, Slideshare, Google+, and LinkedIn. Users can share Tweets and all other curated White House social content links to their respective platforms.

IBM Voices The social hub at IBM collects blog posts, Tweets, videos, and images from a Tumblr site owned by the company. This platform is called Voices. Trending topics and the standard sharing options for the items in the Twitter feed are represented by a word cloud. All others either launch a pop-up window or contain an external link. A function called "embed" is also available, which sets it apart from most other social hubs.

USA Rugby Social Hub Another Pinterest-style layout with endless scrolling down and a featured story up top can be found on this sports team's social media page. The #usarugby hashtag is used by supporters as well as by USA Rugby's Twitter and Facebook accounts to gather social media information. Each story has a Twitter share button. If not, they connect to their specific social media channels.

Dell IT Social Hub I found the following description of Dell's social hub's purpose to help understand its goals: "A central spot to find, share, and comment on all our most recent social nuggets and current events from Dell's public sector and large enterprise segments." Dell social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, StumbleUpon, Delicious (old school! ), Digg, Dell Blogs, and Community are used to aggregate social media information. Users have the option of viewing content from all social channels or just a few. Each piece of content can be shared to other social networks using the ShareThis widget and is further divided into categories (such as enterprise, healthcare, and education).

Nine West Social 9 This social hub, which has an endless scroll and is powered by Positano Hub, collects brand-related social media material from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+. Each item is sharable to other social media marketing & networks.

Social@Cisco A lot of the early adopters in the social hub arena were IT corporations, and this hub from Cisco demonstrates the column structure they frequently utilized. These and more brands use a variety of social media hub solutions, including: 

Positano 

Tint 

Rebel Mouse

Feed Magnet 

Telligent

Some plugins may be used by businesses utilizing blog or CMS platforms like WordPress to produce results similar to those shown by the brand social hubs above. is the center of our new TopRank Online Marketing websites' social networks.