A YouTube Aggregator allows companies and individuals alike to monitor, manage, optimize and effectively use their social media accounts in one place.
Essentially, an aggregator helps you to bring together posts and updates from numerous platforms and curate them in one convenient spot.
Aggregators are great for simplifying social media processes and ensuring your feed is consistently brimming with varied and effective content. Create a sense of community and authenticity around your brand with a tool you can rely on.
Why do I need a YouTube aggregator?
As you’re no doubt already aware, it can sometimes be tricky and time-consuming to source or create enough original and relevant content for your social feeds. In fact, a whopping three out of four marketers admit that they never find the time to produce original content for their brand. This can be highly problematic, as regular posts on social media are key to becoming a trusted and useful source of information for your audience.
Alongside simplifying your social networking experience and generating masses of content, an aggregator can help you to improve engagement with your brand by creating aggregated social streams that can be embedded into your website and increase brand’s reach.
Common Use Cases for YouTube Content Aggregation
There are many smart ways to use a YouTube video aggregator to enhance your brand’s content strategy:
- Showcase your own videos – Embed your YouTube channel or playlists on your site to boost views, extend watch time, and keep visitors engaged.
- Curate from other creators – Feature relevant videos from trusted sources to round out your content offering without needing to produce everything in-house.
- Enrich blog posts and pages – Drop in video feeds to support your written content, improve SEO, and increase time on site.
- Build resource hubs – Organize curated playlists by topic to create centralized video libraries for training, education, or support.
- Feature testimonials and UGC – Highlight customer reviews or influencer content to add social proof and strengthen credibility.
- Recap events – Aggregate webinars, live streams, or product launches into a single feed for easy access post-event.
Step-by-step guide for aggregating your YouTube videos
Now that we understand why it's a good idea to aggregate your YouTube videos on your website to earn them more exposure, here’s the step-by-step process to get it done.
Step 1. Select the right aggregator to get your YouTube feed
The first thing to do is to choose a free or affordable social media aggregator that can pull YouTube content. Pay attention to that last part as not all aggregators support YouTube.
In addition to supporting YouTube, choose an aggregator that has:
- Customization options
- Moderation tools
- Embed flexibility
- Automatic updates
Curator’s a great choice. It has all these features and more. For instance, on the free forever plan, you get up to three feeds or sources. And with other source options like social media feeds and review sites, you can support that YouTube feed with customer testimonials for free.
Step 2. Create a new feed you your YouTube content
Now that you’ve selected your aggregator, it is time to make feed that will host your YouTube content. Simply log into Curator and select “Create new feed”. You’ll be prompted by a popup to name your new feed and assign it a default post status.
Go ahead and give your new feed a name that will remind you of what the content is, like “My YouTube Channel” and then select the post status.
For the post status there are two options:
- Approved - Everything from will automatically get added to your feed and be visible. You can delete posts you want to remove.
- Needs approval - Everything will require approval to be visible, so you don't have to delete any posts, but you do need to approve them in order to get them shown.
If you are using the YouTube feeds to incorporate your own YouTube content, then using the approved option is probably the way to go. If you're using other content, we strongly recommend selecting the “Needs approval” option to avoid uploading content onto your website that might not be on brand. You can always change this setting later so don’t worry to much about it.
Step 3. Choose your content source to aggregate
With the feed created it’s time to choose the source you want to pull content from. In the new feed you created click the “Add a Source” button, and a list of source options will appear.
While we're of course choosing YouTube for this example, you can also see all the other available content options like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and several other popular channels.
After selecting YouTube as the source, you’ll have to select the source type. There are three source options for your YouTube aggregator feeds:
- Channel
- Hashtag
- Playlist
A YouTube playlist is an excellent option because YouTube content creators frequently use playlists to organize their videos into different categories.
By aggregating content from a playlist, much of the curation is already done, since the videos were hand selected to be part of that playlist.
Once you've chosen your source and source type, you need to enter the source details. For our example, this simply means that you need to copy and paste the URL of the YouTube playlist.
Step 4. Review the pulled YouTube content
After providing the playlist URL (or hashtag, or channel name) and selecting next, the YouTube content will be pulled and displayed for you to review.
Now it's time to create the feed. This is done by approving or removing each post. You also have the option to pin posts so they stay at the top of your feed. When selecting "Approved" you can see that all of the posts have the green check mark above them. You can click the minus sign to delete any you don't want.
Step 5. Stylize your newly created YouTube feed
With the content pulled and curated, it’s now time for the fun part—stylizing the feed to match your brand. Curator makes it super simple to stylize. Simply select the different tab options and start adjusting.
You can:
- Select different template styles
- Adjust the colors of just about everything
- Limit word count
- Control border sizes and spacings
- And more
And, if you really want full control, custom CSS is supported as well.
Step 6. Copy the code and paste it in your website
At this point you have successfully created your YouTube video content aggregator with customized content styled to your liking. Now it’s time to publish your feed and get it on your website.
Click the “Publish feed/get code” button and the custom HTML will appear. Simply copy the HTML code to your clipboard and then paste it where you want it to appear inside of your website.
You can paste the code in a side bar, footer, website page, or blog post. Here's what the curated feed looks like when copied and pasted into a blog post.
Step 7. Periodically moderate the YouTube content
Congratulations on setting up your YouTube content aggregator to embed YouTube videos. If your content is not changing or you have set the default status to “Approved” then you are done.
This step is for those who have used the “Needs approval” status as their default. No new content will be displayed until you approve it. So set a reminder in you calendar, or schedule a regular time to log in and review the new posts being pulled. That way your content stays fresh and up to date.
How to curate other people's YouTube content (if you don't have your own channel)
You can also curate content from multiple channels or sources. To do this, you'll simply add different sources to the same feed. Then in the Curate menu, you can delete the posts you don't want from that source (whether it's a playlist, hashtag, or channel) to only leave behind the videos that you want to showcase.
Curating content (as opposed to promoting your own content) can be an effective marketing strategy for numerous reasons:
- Serves your audience with helpful content
- Save you time on content curation
- Allows you to own expertise in your chosen area
- Can be used on blog posts and web pages
- Can be linked to from email nurture campaigns
The strategy behind successful content aggregation
Why use an aggregator for YouTube? Well, besides being the second largest search engine in the world behind Google, YouTube has more than a billion monthly active users. It’s no stretch to say that the platform is an international sensation – which explains why countless people have launched hugely successful careers through it.
What’s more, the digital landscape has changed significantly in the last ten years. This includes the landscape of content marketing, in which content only succeeds today if it delivers exactly what consumers want – when they want and in the format they prefer. In our current climate, video marketing is one of the major sources of online material that can provide the relevance, value and flexibility that your consumers need.
For this reason, video marketing has emerged as a leading way for marketers to engage and influence their target audience. Mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year on YouTube, whilst HubSpot claims that a staggering 80% of customers remember a video that they have watched in the last month.
One of the biggest strengths of video marketing is that it is both highly auditory and visual, which means that it’s generally easier for users to remember than text-based content. When someone remembers your video marketing content, they will also remember your brand – which results in increased sales and leads for your business! It is therefore imperative that you make video content a significant part of your marketing efforts.
Viewers are watching more than 6 billion hours of YouTube content each month, whilst over 300 hours of video content is uploaded to the platform every single minute. This means that there is a lot of competition on the channel, but also an incredible opportunity to get your brand seen by millions of people all around the world.
Try it for yourself
If you want to share interesting content and generate discussion amongst your target audience to increase the reach of your brand - without putting in hours of research and planning – then a YouTube aggregator is the tool for you. With the help of Curator’s aggregator, you can easily pull your social media posts across multiple channels into one feed that can be embedded anywhere and customized with your own unique branding!
Unlike other social media aggregators, Curator.io doesn’t use IFRAMEs. Instead, it allows you to embed Javascript, CSS and HTML codes directly into your site. This allows you to maintain full control over how you want your channel or site to appear.