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Do you want to promote your business on social media? Do you want to save time automating some tasks?
40% of social media users use the internet to learn more about different products and services, and 30% base their buying decisions on the feedback and reviews on social media, says Global Web Index.
Quite a potential for businesses, isn’t it?
Well, with the increasing potential of social media, it can also feel too much to handle for a lot of businesses. Social media comes with several tasks to perform and all of them are equally important. The key to business growth lies in performing all of them and eliminating unnecessary tasks to save time and energy for other business areas.
Hovering over the need to reduce social media efforts, let’s talk about the only solution: Social Media Automation.
What is social media automation?
If you’re a business in today’s age and still relying on the ‘brick and mortar’ method, you are way behind the game. With the traditional methods rapidly fading, businesses now have another place to compete, i.e. social media. Nowadays, brands can make a lot of difference when they go online and use social media.
Social media automation, on the other hand, can be a catalyst to your business growth. It is a process of automating tasks that can make your social media marketing wheels roll faster. This tells you to divert your attention exactly where it’s needed, i.e., engagement with users.
Time has always been a big-time challenge for brands and social media automation saves a lot of that. If you are a marketer or a Facebook shop/eCommerce store owner and still wondering how social media automation can polish your tasks, let’s look at the reasons.
Why marketers use Social Media Automation?
1. To boost engagement
Social media automation gives the most important thing required for your business – time. It saves the time you spend performing repetitive tasks on social networks and allows you to use that time to engage with the users.
For example, if you have to make a post on a social media page, you don’t have to open all platforms and post on them separately. Social media automation tools now support multiple platforms and let you make a single post within a click.
Moreover, tools like SocialPilot allow you to schedule your posts, gain curated content, generate analytics reports, and much more. So you don’t have to take the long route to maintain your social presence.
2. To work smarter
The Pareto Principle says that only 20% of all the tasks you do in and around your business require your attention. Maintaining a social presence with traditional methods seems to be among the 80% tasks. With social media automation tools, you can eliminate the tasks that can be taken care of through automation and divert yourself to work towards other things to scale up your business online.
We tend to lose ourselves in quantity and forget about the quality while social media marketing always works on both. Some specific social media management tools can also help you explore relevant topics for your target market and that is when you start working smarter.
3. To keep up the pace
With the ever-increasing competition on social media, brands are striving to nail their social media marketing techniques. With original ideas, it also requires an up-to-date social media presence. And with a social media presence comes analytics which is of major importance when competing on social media.
With a bunch of features like bulk scheduling, content curation, analytics reports, etc., there is no more a question if social media automation tools are necessary. A business on social media has to sign up for it and utilize it to develop a profitable marketing funnel.
Let’s dig deeper into social media automation and go through a few steps that can help automate your social media marketing the right way.
5 Steps to Automate your Social Media Marketing
1. Choose the right social media automation tools
Before diving deep into the list of social media automation tools available in the market, take a minute and hover over your business idea and what all you’re expecting from your automation tool.
After you have decided on your expectations from your to-be automation tool, it’s time to shortlist relevant tools available in the market. Start to compare what each tool offers and which social networks they cover. This might take some time but it’s going to be worth it for all the time you will save in the future.
There are tools available to manage even one or two social platforms which depend on the need of the business. For example, you are looking to automate your tasks on just LinkedIn or Twitter; there are a bunch of LinkedIn tools and Twitter tools available in the market for the same.
So what are you waiting for?
Dive in and make the right choice.
2. Understand the needs of each social network
With 3.8 billion active users, social media is a whole different world in itself. While each social media platform caters to a unique segment of audiences, you need to understand the needs of all of them before kick-starting your automation tool. For example, Instagram serves users who prefer visual content. On the other hand, LinkedIn is known for B2B businesses and is prominently used by people of all age groups.
Before you begin, going knee-deep into understanding the features, style, pros & cons of all social networks is inevitable. This also includes knowing the right time to post on each social media to reach maximum users at once.
Reflecting on these details can help you develop and automate content that will work on respective platforms. Social media automation can work wonders for you only when you are targeting the right content at the right place at the right time.
Source: Oberlo
3. Automate the right tasks
Social media platforms aren’t a place where you can only post and build a successful brand image. The primary task is to maintain a presence but when it comes to nailing social media marketing, it requires more.
As a business, you need to perform tasks other than posting, like messaging targets on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc., to collaborate with relevant brands & influencers, engaging with customers, etc.
All you need to do is list down your social media tasks and divide them in terms of automation. Tasks such as posting regularly or an auto message saying ‘We will get back to you shortly’ can be automated using your social media automation tool while other tasks require your attention. Knowing what to automate and when is the key to undefeated usage of social media automation tools.
If you quickly move on to automating all of your tasks as soon as you start with an automation tool, you are just a second away from a blunder. Something similar happened to the twitter channel of American Airlines and after looking at it, I am sure you will check your automated tasks at least twice.
Source: Business Insider
There are also some tasks like live video that you cannot automate with social media tools. There are tools like MLC PowerPoint Add-in that can help you create PowerPoint presentations faster and some webinar tools for broadcasting live video, but that’s about it.
4. Set a time for engagement
From all the tasks that you automate, the responsibility of engaging with users cannot be imposed on your social media tool. Users on social media are real persons and they are more than used to watching and scrolling through one-sided advertisements that barely talk to them. What can make them pay attention to a brand on social media is how authentically they are engaging with customers.
As a user, it’s always better to talk to a real person when communicating with a business, right?
Set a time to respond to comments and messages from your users. This way the users will appreciate a quick response from your business and on the other hand, you will also be able to personally engage with each one of them.
Here’s an example of how personalized your engagement with users should be like. @netflixcanada responded to all the comments with a human touch which makes users feel important. This might even make users share their experience on their social media community which is a win-win situation for the business.
Similarly, @otter_ai personally replied to their user query which develops a huge amount of trust for the brand in the user’s mind and everybody viewing it.
5. Keep a check on your progress
When using social media management tools, you cannot just keep posting and expecting it to work on one magical day. Let’s be honest, that never happens with social media. There are two sides to social media marketing, one of them is posting, engaging, collaborating which is the front face of your business on social media while the second side is your growth weapon – analytics.
Constant analysis of the progress of each post/campaign will give you valuable insights into what has to be done further. Keep asking yourself questions like:
‘What made the audience engage with this post and not with that one?’
‘What made the users share this post more the others?’
‘Why was there no engagement on this post?’
To grow on social media, a tight eye on your social media analysis is essential and when you get used to asking these questions to yourself every once in a while, that is when you will come up with unique ideas to increase your engagement.
Ready to work smart with social media automation tools?
After reading this, I am sure you won’t deny the ever-growing importance of social media automation tools for businesses. It can give maximum benefit to your business by saving you time to focus on work which requires your attention.
As you must have derived from this guide, social media automation tools check off a lot of repetitive tasks from your to-do list of the marketing plan. But don’t forget that certain tasks like engaging with users still require you to be there.
Let us know in the comment section below about which social media automation tools worked out for you.
We would love to hear from you.
Till then, Happy Social Media Automating!
Dig into our resources
Global Web Index
The Biggest Social Media Trends Shaping 2018
the balance careers (Pareto Principle)
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/pareto-s-principle-the-80-20-rule-2275148
Business Insider
About Shobit Gupta
Being a Marketing Expert at SocialPilot, Shobit loves to help entrepreneurs with everything they need to know to build their own business. A belief that is driving his life towards success - "Business is in my blood, and I will toil for anyone who carries the same belief." You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
