Thinking of automating your Social Media postings?
Our business clients often ask us whether automating social media posts is a wise idea. The truth is—you really should be using automation in almost every case. That may seem like a surprising answer at first, so let us elaborate.
It’s a common misconception that automating social media reduces post quality, gets your accounts penalized, or results in some other setback. But it’s just a myth. Automating social media is no different than posting it yourself in most cases, except you’re saving yourself a lot of time.
So, how can you automate your social media effectively? When’s the best time to do so? What tools will work best for you, and how does this revelation change your company’s approach to social media in general?
How Can You Automate Your Social Media Postings?
There are a variety of tools that can automate posts for the majority of social media platforms. Popular ones include Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, HubSpot, and many others. Each option has its own pricing structure that revolves around several measurable factors, such as:
- Number of accounts to automate
- Number of posts that you want
- How many users you want to add to an account
Depending on the size of your business, certain tools may fit your case better. Look around for your ideal solution, as each one targets different company sizes and use cases.
What Are the Benefits of Social Media Automation?
You may be wondering whether investing in a professional automation tool is worth it. Let’s dive into the benefits you will receive after adopting social media post automation.
Spend Less Time on Social Media
You’ve got a lot going on as a business owner, and you don’t want to spend precious hours of your day posting on social media. Instead of doing it all yourself or hiring someone else for the task, you can save time and money by scheduling your posts out in advance.
The purpose of these social media automation platforms is to save you time. Each of these tools makes it easy for you to curate and schedule an entire batch of posts at once, letting you focus on other important areas of your business.
Create a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
Your business has a lot of valuable content already, even if you don’t know it yet. By creating a robust social media marketing strategy in conjunction with automation, you can ensure that you’re sharing this valuable information across all platforms in an efficient manner.
When you post manually, you can easily forget to mention certain points or skip a post by accident entirely. That skipped content is still a valuable asset your company has already spent money on. Don’t do yourself a disservice by not syndicating it across your different social media channels through automation.
Recycle Evergreen Content
Not sure what that is? Evergreen is the timeless type of content. It’s information that does not become outdated and will always be relevant to users in your specific industry. Examples include major company milestones, new product information, and holiday-themed marketing messages. Social media automation is excellent for scheduling out evergreen content.
Automate the Easy Tasks/Posts
It’s not easy to draft, edit, and schedule meaningful posts every day when you’re busy. Free yourself up to focus on individual posts that are more time-sensitive or require a degree of personalization to get the most value out of them. With all your other posts already automated, spend extra time perfecting specialized promotions or creating a dedicated marketing campaign.
Simplify Customer Engagement
As you start to post content and build momentum on social media, you also need to engage with other users, customers, and individuals within your industry. Doing so demonstrates that your brand is alive and worth listening to.
One area where many businesses struggle is user engagement. Users may reach out to businesses on social media for a variety of reasons, whether to ask questions about products and services or clarify store hours. Responding to all these individual queries is time-consuming, but social media tools make it much easier to handle this task at scale.
By communicating with your users properly, you boost user engagement. Keep clients happy by answering their questions and address any concerns they have.
Create Optimized Channel-Specific Content
That is, content geared to each platform. No two social media networks are the same; they all have distinct user bases with their own expectations of the content they want to see. For example:
- Facebook posts have compelling, attention-grabbing headlines with engaging copy text.
- Instagram prefers an artistic approach with beautiful imagery.
- Twitter is ideal for sending out updates and small news items, as well as responding to a client who mentions you there.
- Snapchat allows you to show off your personality with fun, behind-the-scenes videos.
- LinkedIn users expect a professional, business-like experience.
- Pinterest works well with infographics or DIY projects.
With a social media automation tool, you can easily create tailored content for each of these platforms. Quickly schedule posts and tweak them as needed on each site.
Save Time with Templates
After working in social media for a while, you’ll start to notice that posts often go under specific categories, as they share similar formats and setups. Pair up the right images together and copy marketing collateral so that the post appeals well to the audience of each platform.
Conclusion
Let’s go back to the question we asked at the beginning: should businesses be automating their social media or manually crafting every post?
The answer is “both.” Keeping accounts on multiple sites can get hectic, and posting is a time-consuming task. Use automation to increase efficiency, but occasionally post manually for more important or time-sensitive topics.
Remember that the goal is to automate the social media process. That statement sounds obvious, but it can’t be stressed enough how much time and money you can save. As you become more familiar with these tools, you’ll find creative new ways to save even more while still leveraging the full potential of your audience.
Social media automation is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. Investing in one doesn’t cost too much, and it will pay for itself quickly.
Are you looking for help with automating social media posting? Globalgraphics is a professional marketing and web design company that can help you get more value out of your social media accounts. Contact us today if you’re interested in learning more about our services.
