How to Leverage Social Media Automation to Save Hours Per Week.
Maintaining a strong social media presence requires a lot of work. Not only do you have to create or curate content regularly, but you also need to make sure you’re posting it at the right times across multiple platforms.
Let’s be honest, some of these tasks are tedious, but you can’t skip them. However, there is a way out. You can automate them.
Social media marketing automation is the process of leveraging tools that can help you schedule posts for publishing and aid in content curation. Some specialised tools can also help you monitor all your social media feeds from a single platform.
In a nutshell, automation can help you save a tonne of time. If you think about it, it’s like putting parts of your social media marketing strategy on autopilot. Here is how to get started with social media automation.
5 tips to get started with social media automation
Before we get started, a word of caution: always use automation tools ethically. As an honest marketer, you want to stay away from tools that write posts for you. Instead, aim to leverage these tools for reporting, scheduling, and social media management.
1. Schedule your posts to go up at the appropriate times.
Different networks cater to different audience demographics. For instance, LinkedIn attracts professionals, while Twitch attracts gamers. Based on who your audience is, their lifestyle is likely to differ. That, in turn, will also impact the time of day they are most active.
First, find the best time to post on each of the networks that you’re active on. It’s also important to assess the frequency of posting content on each channel. Once you’re done with that research, schedule your posts using an automation tool. Scheduling posts in bulk can help you stay consistent with your social media calendar. In fact, 83% of marketing professionals believe that scheduling is the best use of automation for marketing purposes.
However, you can’t rely on automation tools for everything. Your social media manager can lay out a plan to ensure that you stay consistent with your posting schedule. If you do it right, consistent posting can help you get more engagement and more followers.
Not sure which tool to use? Hootsuite is a great option. It can get your posts scheduled for a week or more, and it comes with a nice feature that tells you the best time to post your content. Sprout Social and Buffer are two more popular options.
2. Make use of social media chatbots
Did you know that the chatbot industry is predicted to be worth $1.25 billion by the year 2025? Social media chatbots are a game-changer for the customer service industry. You can design them to provide automated replies to basic customer queries; intelligent chatbots can provide personalised suggestions to users and even provide assistance with shopping.
The best part is that chatbots are available 24/7, so your customer service reps don’t need to be available to customers around the clock. Add chatbots to your website as well as Facebook Messenger and other social media platforms.
So how can you leverage chatbot automation? You can build your own chatbot using platforms like Flow XO and MobileMonkey. They are designed to make the entire process simple so that you don’t need to have any coding knowledge.
Use WordPress plugins to automate social media sharing.
It’s a no-brainer that you should be sharing all the posts that you publish on your website. Doing so can help you gain more readership and engagement, as well as social signals, which may play a role in SEO.
But publishing each post manually on multiple social platforms is time-consuming. Thankfully, there’s a way to streamline and automate this process if you have a WordPress website. All you need to do is find the right WordPress plugins. When you publish a post on your website, they can automatically share it on all of the social media platforms you specify.
No extra effort or time is required—it’s all done in one go.
Here’s a list of plug-ins that can automate post sharing on social media:
I also really like Quuu Promote, which isn’t a WordPress plugin, but it does automate the process of posting your content to social media channels via an RSS feed.
4. Begin monitoring social media.
Keeping track of each brand mention or comment related to your products can be chaotic. If you are hosting a giveaway or a contest and it’s successful, you could be bombarded with hundreds or thousands of posts about your brand online.
How do you efficiently monitor what everyone is saying about your brand? How can you tune in to conversations about your brand? You need to leverage social media listening.
On Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, customers don’t shy away from giving their honest opinions. If you are proactive, you can also use this as an opportunity to answer their queries, or even make major changes based on their feedback. Tesla CEO Elon Musk keenly listens in on social media conversations and even reacts to some comments.
For social media listening, there are multiple specialised tools. They are designed to help you keep track of specific hashtags, keywords, topics, and more. You can also leverage these tools to keep track of the latest trends and what your competitors are up to.
I like the following:
Some of these tools even offer sentiment analysis, which can give you an at-a-glance idea of the general sentiment around your brand.
Use automation tools to get content ideas.
Coming up with new content ideas is a challenging task that all content marketers face. While automating content creation isn’t a good idea, you can use automation tools for research to get great content ideas.
BuzzSumo and Ubersuggest are tools that can help you discover high-performing content in your niche, as well as relevant questions that your target audience is asking.All in all, they can indirectly lead you to some great content ideas.
Plus, you can also track analytics with these tools to find out which content ideas are resonating well with your audience.
The benefits of social media automation tools
Social media automation tools can help you reduce the total number of hours that your team spends maintaining your social media accounts. They enable you to schedule your posts for simultaneous publishing on multiple platforms, making it easy for you to have a consistent posting schedule and helping you post at optimal times for maximum engagement.
WordPress, chatbots, social media listening tools, and other specialised platforms will allow you to make the most of your social media marketing strategy. If you aren’t using them already, get started and see how much time they can save.
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