How to Make Automation Benefit Your Social Media Marketing

A normal week in the life of any social media manager would reveal that no 2 days – not even 2 hours – look the same. This is simply because not only should he or she deliver information and content to a large audience, but this position is also the look of the firm’s social presence. Therefore, it requires more than just a little attention and organization to details. Even devoting a small amount of effort and time each day to keep an engaged and active account is a huge investment for many businesses. And as new features and platforms pop up every day, it is essential to stay focused on your main goals.

Fortunately, we are living in the golden era of social media automation tools that are exclusively designed to make your marketing life much easier. The most important benefit of this is definitely to save time. By smartly automating all manual tasks, it looks like you are naturally updating, when you are actually elsewhere. Check out our comprehensive guide on how to make marketing automation benefit your social media marketing strategy the most.

What is social media marketing automation?

As its name suggests, social media automation is basically a process of automating a part or all tasks and activities in your social media marketing with the help of specialized tools or apps. This might involve anything from recycling your evergreen content and automatically updating your Facebook posts to planning your posts with LinkedIn scheduling tools.

By using social media automation, you can ensure that your accounts can stay active without the need for manual posting and constant monitoring. What’s more, those helpful tools can reduce the time and effort spent on marketing campaigns by taking over energy-consuming and repetitive tasks. Benefits of using marketing automation

Here are 3 important things that social media automation will help your business achieve:

- Keep consistent content

The key to developing a strong profile on social media is consistency. Many companies usually create up their account on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, but find it challenging to achieve consistency, one of the most important factors that decide whether audiences keep following a brand. As a result, they get little or no benefit from marketing plans on social media platforms. And using an automation tool is the most effective solution to this issue.

- Control your marketing strategy better

Using automation tools can help you create more content and give better control over your social accounts. Depending on the tools you use, it is easy to decide the form of content that is published, shared, the exact schedule, and the frequency. Also, you may monitor the engagement level that your brand is receiving and adjust the initial plan to get more retweets, shares, or likes. Since marketing automation tools can help develop useful insight into the extent and nature of viewership or readership, you may also share content with more targeted groups of customers. More importantly, an automatic process is helpful in dealing with volume to allow you to upload more content on different accounts with ease.

- Save time and effort

As said earlier, the biggest benefit of automating your marketing tasks is the amount of effort and time you can free up. Instead of spending hours in front of the computer screen and trying to look for content that is just shared and attract a few audiences for your sites, use automation tools to figure out the latest trends and identify relevant content. 

3 important rules when using social media automation

1. Keep the plan flexible

Always make sure that you leave enough room for some timely updates when planning posts or content in advance. Perhaps there might be an announcement concerning the new product launch that you want to make, or a piece of viral content or urgent news that you would like to share with the audiences.

2. Choose the right time

If you are planning to boost engagement on social media sites, it is essential to first know when the audiences are most active. Having your content posted in these periods will increase the chance of it being viewed and shared. An important thing to consider about this is the location of your customers, especially when they are located in different time zones. 

3. Use analytics tools

There are a few analytics tools that enable businesses to determine the performance of their content. Although the number of views is a great indicator of reach, there is little meaning in focusing on this metric if what you are aiming to gain more sales. Therefore, make sure to clarify which metrics are essential to your project regarding the business objectives.

Using analytics tools will help you understand which tasks work, and which do not work for your company. As a result, you can learn some valuable knowledge that could be used to boost your social media marketing strategy.

Simple ways to automate your social media marketing

Now we understand the benefits and important rules, let’s move on to some cool tasks you can perform with automation.

- Use apps: Nearly all social networking tools come with apps for browsers and smartphones, so you could control automation while traveling or commuting.

- Queue the tweets: Twitter could be a massive productivity drain. Therefore, avoid getting distractions by queuing the messages and tweets in advance. Also, you would reach more audiences on this platform by spreading the content over the course of several hours.

- Share posts and tweets: Sharing is caring! Use apps like Buffer to create and share a list of interesting topics across your network. With this tool, you could even pre-set a custom schedule for posting each day on each social network.

- Recycle the RSS feeds: When used moderately, you might pick up and repost the content by using auto-blogging. Consider an auto blog as the carrier of content: it will not post anything new, but it may automatically create relevant content and posts.

Conclusion

Making use of automation tools is a great way to keep your content marketing strategy consistent as well as save a lot of time for other important tasks. For example, Content Suite from getNEXT supports efficient marketing automation that can make itself the centre of all marketing efforts. You can save time and budget with this level of marketing enablement. However, it is advisable to leave room for some real-time interactions and posts. This might keep your content from seeming robotic, and help break up the feeling of pre-scheduled posts.

If used carefully and smartly, social media automation would be the missing puzzle piece in your business marketing strategy.