8 ways brands botch content aggregation

Content aggregation is a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, organizing, presenting, sharing, and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter to appeal to a target audience. It’s become integral not only to marketing and branding, but also to journalism, reporting, and social media.

Content curation and aggregation can take many forms, including feeds or channels such as YouTube. It can appear on blogs or even be something as simple as the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list.

Whatever form it does take, it keys on a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message, or persona of the person, brand, or company that has created the particular content channel.

There is, unsurprisingly, a dark side of content aggregation. In this article, we’ll look at the eight worst practices that are upsettingly common among brands.

When content aggregation goes wrong