Why should you Automate Your Company’s Social Media?
Social media automation is becoming essential for business in order to save time and scale their activities. In the past decade, one of the most important channels to getting your brand’s name out is social media. Since the vast majority of your audience are on a variety of platforms, you need to be where they are if you’re going to have an impact. However, while social media marketing is universally seen as a positive aspect of any growing business, many companies are still struggling to promote themselves on these platforms. Thankfully, there are social media automation tools.
Benefits of Automating Your Company’s Social Media
Social media automation has major benefits, but before we dive into the various methods you can use, it’s imperative that we cover the reason why you should invest in them in the first place. If you’re not familiar with this kind of automation or what it can do for your business, let’s outline some of the top advantages you get as a result.
Consistency
Social media automation keeps things consistent. Consistently posting to multiple social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are critical for any business. Lack of a regular posting schedule may end up in losing followers. Using automation tools enables your company to remain active all the time. Which also means reaching a new audience and educating them continuously.
Save Time
Social media automation can help reduce the time spent on the repetitive multi-channel posting. Many social networks demand to post multiple times to their channels because of short life span on posts. This task of posting multiple times to multiple social networks can quickly monopolize your schedule. The choice will be to add more resources or automate.
Social media automation tools can do the bulk of your marketing work at once and spread it out across hours, days, and even weeks. You still get the benefits of consistency without the drawback of having to post frequently in real-time.
Faster Growth
Social media automation can help ensure that you’re always driving more traffic to your site to fill the top of the sales funnel. Even if a single social post brings five or ten new visitors to your website, make sure that you’re posting relevant content as many times as possible.
What should you consider for Social media automation?
Social media automation has its own limitations. Yes, you can build your company faster and more efficiently with these tools, but they are not capable of handling each aspect of social media marketing (yet). So, when looking at the best options for your business, consider the following.
Automation doesn’t Engagement with your customers
Social media automation keeps posting consistent, which is often is an excellent way to get your business noticed across social media, but that doesn’t mean that these tools can respond to comments or messages from customers and followers. As your posts garner attention, someone still has to do the detail work of engaging with your followers so that they will feel heard. If audience do not get responses from the brand as they interact, they slowly fade away. Try to build a community to help with engagement!
Tools can’t Create Content
Social media automation tools are plentiful, but no matter which method you use for social media automation, no program is good enough to create compelling content from scratch. Whether it’s an image, a video, or a simple text blurb, you and your marketing team still have to come up with it. Overall, these tools are meant as an easy way to share these pieces, not generate them.
Don’t “Set it and Forget It”
Social media automation does not mean that you set can set it and forget it. Though many tools allow you to schedule posts ahead of time. Do not schedule for more too far in the future because social media trends keep changing. Trending keywords and hashtags should be included in your posts on a timely manner to reach relevant and vast audience.
For example, if you logged a week’s worth of posts and didn’t adjust them or add to them at all, you could miss out on some significant trending topics that could boost your company’s following. If a post starts to go viral, you need to capitalize on it as quickly as possible before it fizzles out. Overall, you need to let the tools do their work, but supervise it consistently to make sure that your content is still having its intended effect.
Choose the best social media channel, create great content, post consistently and engage with your audience.
How to Implement Social media automation?
Social media automation can accomplish many things, and now that we know what social media automation can (and can’t) do, we should start looking at how to implement these tools and strategies. There are three primary aspects to consider when starting a new automated campaign: the schedule of posts, the content you post, and the
software you use. Let’s break each section down so that we can understand them better.
1. Finding the Right Schedule
Social media automation should not mean flooding your followers with content. As we mentioned, if a post can bring in a certain number of people, then you want to create and share content as much as possible. However, there is going to be a point of diminishing returns, meaning that there is such a thing as posting too much.
Rather than flooding your follower’s timelines with a ton of content, you need to be strategic about it. Too many posts, and you’ll turn people off to your brand. Too few, and it’s hard to gain any meaningful traction. Here are a few things to consider when trying to come up with an optimized social media schedule.
2. Find the right Days of the Week for social posting
It may seem counterintuitive, but the fact is that the days you post can have an impact on how well the content is received. According to some recent data, the best days to post on Instagram are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with a lot of engagement on Saturday
evenings. The worst day? Sunday.
For Facebook, the weekends are better, as more people engage on Thursday through Sunday. Earlier in the week, your posts might as well be invisible. Although this kind of data is useful as a baseline, it shouldn’t be taken as gospel. The customers you’re trying to attract may have different schedules, so you should experiment to see which days have the most engagement.
Overall, the goal is to boost your content on higher volume days and keep it light on the others. Efficiency is always the name of the game when marketing, so focus on what works, drop what doesn’t.
3. Post at the Right Time of Day
Audiences of B2B products and services do their research during business hours. So, choose to post during business hours. If you have a B2C business, it is best to post off business hours. For example, a social media marketer will research for a tool during her business hours. Whereas, looking for apparel is done during business hours.
It’s known that content has the most engagement between 11 a.m and 1 p.m, as well as between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. The first step is to measure engagement time for your business, content, and audience.
4. Finding the Right Content
Social media automation can help you push out content more effectively and as we all know, content is king. However, 90% of the content created is in the last two years. It only continues to grow. This creates a competition among content to reach the audience. The competition for attention can come from any content that appears next to yours on social media. For example, on LinkedIn I see a post from a world leader I follow, next will be a friend’s post from their company, an ad, a job opening and next to that will your company’s content. So, relevancy and quality of the content is very critical to get attention. Relevant content leads us to find a relevant audience and prospects.
5. Find Curated Content
We always recommend our customers to include curated content in their social calendar strategy. Curated content should include trending topics in the industry and seasonal topics like holidays. Once a week should be dedicated to show thought leadership by addressing industry topics.
This further boosts your brand’s authority in the industry. It is important to scan for competitor’s content and mentions in the articles chosen and also the reputation of the author.
6. Create New Content
When crafting content for your business, here are some general guidelines:
Be Specific – if the post is too vague, your audience won’t connect to it. Find something that your followers care about and address it directly.
Be Personal – don’t sound like a robot or a salesperson. If the content sounds personal, it will seem more authentic, and it’s much more likely to get shared.
Be Accessible – use hashtags and other tagging elements to make sure that people looking for that kind of content will come across your posts. Use trending tags as well as those related to your company.
Be Scannable – no one wants to read a giant block of text. Break it up with images, headers, and bullet points whenever possible.
7. Finding the Right Tools
Social media automation tools can be found anywhere on the internet if you look for them, but you want to make sure that you’re using the right tools to get your content out on social media.
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