Does Your Company Need Social Media Automation?

Owning a business can be overwhelming. In order for your business to survive today, social media has to play a role in your everyday routine. What can you do if there just aren’t enough hours in a day? The answer is social media automation!

Before beginning the process of automation, remember that automating cannot be an impulsive decision. The process takes time, patience, and research. Automating should be established after you’ve already established a presence on social media. Never start your social media platforms with automated social media activity. Before setting up a system of automation for your social media, you need to organize a plan.

This blog post is part of "Your Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation" blog series.

Automate at the right time

Automation saves you tons of time on repetitive work on your social media but it can easily be overused. There is a certain limit to the effectiveness of automation with its ability to encourage interaction on social media and you don’t want to go past the limit.

Consistency on social media is a must and automation takes care of this for you. The part you have to worry about is content itself and the schedule. All the content you plan on automating should aim to educate your audience and also appeal to viewers in general. Your goal is to put out your own content, but remember the importance of interaction. You may want to bring in content from other companies or influencers that is helpful to your own viewers. Have a variety of posts that are not all on the same topic. Humanize your automation with personable and customized posts that are easy for people to connect with. Go back and customize the messaging on your different social media sites to better bring in viewers.

Find your choice of automating system

Different systems that allow you to connect most social medial platforms include Buffer, Edgar, or Spokal. These tools allow you to build a large file of content and it automatically selects from the content for social media sharing.

Establish a beneficial schedule time

The hardest and most important part of social media automation is setting up a schedule to abide by. Some things to keep in mind are:

Who are you appealing to?

What platform your target audience is dominant on?

What platform are you post on? How do people use that certain platform?

When and where do your posts perform the best? (Clicks, shares, likes)

A hack to understanding social media is understanding each individual platform. Facebook does well towards the end of the week between Wednesday and Friday as productivity begins to decrease. Twitter is more likely to have interactions around 12PM, 5PM, and 6PM. Perform your own research to understand how your audience use social media to better connect with them on a more personal level.

There are three things that you still have to do yourself. The first is scheduling as you go. Scheduling too far in advance prevents you from keep your content fresh. The second is to keep up with timely events. As new information is discovered, go back and change anything that needs to be changed as time passes. Lastly, stop the automation whenever you need to. If there is something that is important, pause your automation anytime.

Social media automation can be extremely useful for maintaining an active online presence, but you also need to assure that you're interacting with your followers.

A strong marketing campaign starts with a killer lead generation strategy, and social is just one element of it. To get started, check out our Introduction to Lead Generation, a free guide that will help you with all of the basics of lead gen.

What are your thoughts on social media automation? Let us know with a comment below!