The Beginners Guide To Social Media Automation
Over the last decade, social media channels grew at an enormous rate. Marketers have to be adaptive to keep up with the ever-changing trend and stiff competition. Learning the latest strategies to manage social media channels is an essential duty if you want to stay afloat in a sea of social media marketers.
Most of the time, marketers can only handle so much. There is no way one can stay on social media all day, curate and post content, engage with followers and customers, while at the same time analyze metrics. Many of them have other responsibilities aside from managing social media accounts and campaigns.
If you are one of these “social media octopuses” who tries to juggle all sorts of tasks all at the same time – searching for content ideas, responding to customer queries, managing social media ads, you could probably use a new strategy and look for things you can automate.
Today, whatever industry you are in, speed is important and one of the best ways to have speed without compromising the quality of work is through automation.
Social media automation is a strategy that allows marketers to establish systems and automate day-to-day tasks thus reducing the time and effort needed to accomplish these. These strategies are meant to free up your time so you can focus on more important functions.
Read on to learn what social media automation practices you can use on your business.
1.Content Scheduling
Aside from speed, one key factor to stand out is having consistency. It is one of the best ways to earn follower’s trust and establish a good online presence. Using social media automation tools, you can schedule, queue, and batch your content.
Publishing content directly on multiple social media platforms is one of the most basic features you can use. This kind of tool enables the integration of multiple channels you wish to publish content on. Once you create a draft of the content you plan to post, you can save and schedule it across multiple channels at one time. It helps marketers plan content and post high-quality content consistently with less time.
2. Social Media Insights
Your social media strategy should not end on creating and publishing content on your social platforms. To optimize the performance of your content and campaigns, it is equally important to have insights into how they are performing based on your marketing metrics. What type of content does the audience interact with more? What is the best time to post? What is the engagement rate?
Most social media automation tools provide analytics such as engagement, reach, and impressions on all your social media platforms. These detailed reports that measure the performance of your content make it easier to evaluate the success of a campaign. Being able to track, measure, and analyze helps marketers prioritize efforts that bring a positive impact to the business.
3. Chat bots
Customer service is a huge factor to measure the success of a business. Good customer service increases customer satisfaction which could lead to customer retention and brand recommendation which then extends your brand’s reach.
These days, consumers expect straightforward communication with businesses. It is generally accepted practice to have chatbots or auto-response on emails and messages received on your social media platforms to handle simple inquiries and service requests.
With automation tools, you can now enable an automated response to keep your customers engaged around the clock. Irrespective of time zones, this automation helps you set automated responses and directly interact with your audience without the need of having a customer service representative.
Additionally, you can use these automated messaging tools to let your customers know that you’ll get back to them after receiving a message. Some inquiries may need escalation which can only be resolved through natural human conversation.
4. Email Automation
For any business, regardless of size or industry, email marketing is one of the most powerful tools they can bank on. With the power of emails, they can double their reach, nurture leads, and enhance engagement with existing customers. This is why email automation has become an integral part of any social media growth strategy.
If done correctly, businesses can create the right email marketing campaigns to drive business growth without having to spend so much money on paid advertising. This strategy allows marketers to send personalized promotional emails on their mailing lists that improve engagement and potentially convert to sales.
To go beyond the extra mile, you can also use this email automation feature to thank your customers whenever they avail of a product or a service. When someone registers for your event, buys a product, downloads your free content, sending a thank you email is a great way to build extra engagement and a lasting relationship with your audience.
5. Ad automation
Advertising on social media channels provides opportunities for businesses to communicate their brand, values, products, and services to a highly targeted audience. Marketers can now direct their marketing efforts to people based not only on demographics but more importantly psychographics – interest, consumption habits, personalities, and lifestyle. Therefore, it is of substance to invest in an automation tool that can create, publish, and analyze social media ads.
While ads usually cost money it relies heavily on data which makes automation the best strategy. With social media automation, it can allow marketers to automatically boost top-performing content or ads to show to a wider audience.
Now that you have an idea of how automation can help you strategize your social media efforts, it is important to know first what suits your business. Make sure it is relevant and appropriate to make a lasting effect not only on your business but also on your audience.
