Social media can be a powerful marketing tool – or a huge time suck.
The difference makers? Solid planning and smart automation.
What is social media strategy automation?
It’s a fancy name for using software tools to manage some of the time-intensive aspects of executing your social strategy like:
- Prescheduling posts
- Curating content for republishing
- Getting your whole team to share your company’s content
- Triaging and escalating customer issues and queries
While you don’t want to be that company sending weird, prefabricated bot replies on social (some things should always be handled by humans), systematizing parts of your strategy can increase your efficiency and results by orders of magnitude. So if you’re spending too much time fussing with hashtags or chasing down your employees to share your content, it might be time to investigate a few shortcuts.
Tips for Automating Your Social Media Strategy
Start with a great social media strategy.
Where does your audience spend time online? What are you trying to achieve with social media marketing? Before you automate anything, you need a clear understanding of your goals – and a sound plan to get there (yep, we can help with that!)
Build a detailed content and social sharing calendar.
However you choose to automate your social strategy, you should start by developing a comprehensive calendar. Build a plan for what to share on each platform and when to share it, so every post has a purpose – and supports your overall marketing strategy. The time you invest in creating your calendar will make automating the execution much simpler.
Choose the right tool to automate social sharing.
Tools like HootSuite, Buffer and NetSocial allow you to schedule content to be automatically posted to your social accounts. NetSocial streamlines the process even further, allowing you to automate sharing through the social accounts of all the people in your organization.
Related post:
How to Get Your Team Involved in Social Sharing
Tips for Successful Social Marketing Automation
- Vary messages from platform to platform. Adjust copy slightly to match your audience’s expectations and usage norms on each network.
- Post on your audience’s schedule. Use analytics to determine when your target audience is active on each platform, and schedule posts accordingly.
- Batch-schedule posts. Create your written and visual content, and then use your preferred tool’s scheduling features to upload a week’s content all at once. Be sure to keep a close eye on what’s going on in your industry, market and the world, however – things change quickly, and you may need to adjust your prescheduled content accordingly.
- Listen to your audience’s conversations. Protect your company’s reputation by using social listening tools to flag conversations and mentions. Engage your audience when appropriate and direct any negative conversations to a private communication channel.
- Remember that some things should never be automated. Social automation tools are sophisticated, but they don’t have a human’s judgment or sensitivity.
Need help developing or automating your social strategy?
If you have questions about what your business should be doing, or need help with any part of the process, contact BARQAR’s social media experts today!
