These robots may not be coming for your job yet, but marketing technology is developing so quickly that many ideas are now painfully obsolete. It is the dirty word of the industry – obsolete – but like bell-bottoms and flip phones, what worked yesterday simply won’t cut it today. What are the biggest, most outdated myths about social media aggregation? We asked our team of engineers to weigh in, and consensus came quickly.

Behind the scenes at TwineSocial, we’re accustomed to working with marketers who want to build a brand story that engages customers. Our social media aggregation platform does the heavy lifting of gathering posts from social media networks and displaying rich user-generated-content on websites, mobile apps, live event walls, and other creative contexts. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a leading brand like MasterCard, Nike, or IKEA, or an energetic young start-up, the biggest predictor of success comes down to how each organization views these four ideas.

Myth: UGC does not matter.

In reality, marketers will find no other tool more convincing than fan content. That’s because people don’t believe brands. They believe other people. According to the “When Trust Falls Down” study, run by global market research firm Ipsos last summer, 42 percent of consumers instinctively view brands with distrust and 69 percent distrust their advertisements. The rise of the Internet makes it possible for consumers to easily “fact check and cross reference anything whether it be a news story or an advert. And this ability to check has built cynicism as consumers investigate multiple sources to reach what they consider to be the ‘truth,’” the report says.

What helps in trying times like these? Social proof. Positive peer pressure. Third-party influence. Whatever you call it, user-generated-content is an endorsement every brand needs. (We previously shared five ideas on how to deploy killer brand endorsements.)

Research continually shows that engagement skyrockets when consumers are exposed to brand and user-generated content together. Simply including user photos or customer reviews on a company website increases shopper confidence by 73 percent, so imagine the impact of incorporating consumer voices in every aspect of the buying journey.

Myth: My customers are not social.

Some organizations approach social media aggregation bashfully, unsure they will even find any content to feature. Trust us. Unless your target audience is a sleepy Amish town, your followers are online, and they’re talking. Inc. Magazine Editor Danielle Sacks describes the state of marketing this way: “The Internet has turned what used to be a controlled, one-way message into a real-time dialogue with millions.”

And the crowd keeps growing larger. There are now 2.2 billion users active on Facebook each month, 1.9 billion on YouTube, 1 billion on Instagram, 336 million on Twitter, and 200 million on Pinterest. With that kind of digital immersion, there will always be someone in your target audience to market to and engage with. You may even encounter a new demographic you didn’t realize was interacting with your product or service!

Does this mean you need to run brand accounts on every social channel? Absolutely not. Social media aggregation works differently, allowing brand managers to locate existing, relevant content by using keywords and tags across the networks. Compiled together, that UGC is probably the most valuable picture of your brand you’ll ever get – and an incredible opportunity to show prospective customers how your product looks in the context of real life.

Myth: Monitoring social media takes too long.

Some marketing teams do see their time get sucked into a dark hole -- when they’re not using the right social media aggregation engine. Manually sifting through each day’s social media to find the content that matters to your brand would be an impossible task.

Fortunately, martech tools like TwineSocial make it possible to pull relevant UGC into a privately-viewed moderation hub. Teams need only to plug in a few desired criteria in the Rules Engine, designating where and how certain types of posts are handled. Want to manually curate Instagram photos with the hashtag #LondonLife or automatically approve Twitter posts referencing your brand? Consider it done.

Of course, graphic designers and webmasters can join the fun, too, using CSS customization or the Social Media API & Design Toolkit to fold real-time social content into brand pages – beautifully matching the brand’s look and feel. And with a developer support team on hand to guide you on your way, it doesn’t get any easier.

Myth: Social media aggregation has no ROI.

"People don't just go on Facebook and Twitter to connect with other people anymore; they also use it to consume news, develop tastes and even shop," e-commerce CEO Nissim Lehyani told Business News Daily. "As retailers understand that social media plays an important role in determining what and how consumers will buy, more resources are being devoted to formulating social media marketing strategies to captivate consumers and facilitate product sales."

He’s right. Engagement begets conversions. Multiple studies indicate that around 75% of shoppers make buying decisions based on something they saw on social media. Metrics like time spent, page views, and other indicators can help determine which content resonates best with social hub visitors. Whether you choose to prominently feature that content in e-commerce integrations or use our content permissions module to gain ownership for other use cases, there is no question that UGC is and will continue to deliver big results.