Social media news aggregation sites help people find great content from their favorite sources without having to weed through all the other sub-par content to find it. This is done by a democratic system of voting and homepage promotion for these stories. Usually when people think of social news aggregation they think of sites like:
What people don't really consider too often are the systematic ways this works with Twitter also. Twitter allows you to share links to content with your audience but doesn't provide a way to for the audience to democratically vote on it, and endorse the content to entire Twitterverse. However, there are many sites that do this based on retweets.
A retweet essentially counts as a vote for that link to content and allows for pervasive exposure. Keep in mind, like social media news sites, it's not always a numbers game. There's a lot to be said for the authority of the user that's retweeting the link and the qualitative process that it's undergoing to reach it's promotion status.
With that said, let me share a few of these sites that are making this happen right now.
The sites above basically aggregate the most popular links on Twitter based on quantity of shares, frequency, authority of retweeter, tweet network, history of domain/user, etc.
So the next time you consider promoting your content on social media news sites consider a Twitter as part of your social media marketing strategy as well.
Jordan Kasteler is co-founder of of Search & Search, makers of Social Pop; the social media news aggregation iPhone App