Social media is a great way to promote your brand and products. It is also a way to connect with customers directly. Thanks to today’s best social networks, it is possible for brands and companies to interact with users in real-time and on a personal level. The whole experience that social networks present allows brands to market itself more effectively.
However, social media can be a handful. There are multiple social media pages that need to be maintained in order to have a strong online presence. It is also important to keep users (and followers) engaged for the social media campaign to be effective. Social media automation can really help simplify these tasks in a number of ways.
The Best Time to Post.
For a social media post to be effective and highly targeted, there are a few things to consider. One of them is the time the content is posted. Timing your social media posts correctly can really help increase user engagement and get you the exposure you want for your products and brand.
It is easy to figure out the best time to post on different social networks too. A handy marketing automation tool should be able to analyze your followers and the engagement rates of your previous posts to determine the best time to post content.
Some automation tools go even further and help you determine the right content to post at the right time. Use the tools correctly and you’ll be able to boost not only your engagement but also click-through and conversion rates.
Post Scheduling and Content Mapping.
One of the worst things you can do on social media is not posting anything. Staying silent for a day could prove to be devastating to your business or brand, simply because it’s a very active medium that requires a lot of attention. The nature of social networks – and their users – means you have to be on point with your posts at all times.
Of course, it’s almost impossible to keep up with these kinds of demands, even when you have multiple people handling your social media accounts. You need to create the right content, post the content on social media, engage with followers and answer questions as the same time. This is where, once again, automation comes in handy.
Instead of doing everything manually, you can actually map your contents over a certain period of time. Schedule posts based on the data you have and keep your social media pages active at the right moments. Don’t forget to set aside some time to answer questions and reply to your followers as well.
Curate and Share.
Even with the many benefits social media can offer, it is still important to have a strong website to anchor your brand. Social media posts are gone in a matter of minutes – or even seconds – and the only way to keep them evergreen is to have the same contents (or more complete versions of them) on your website.
You can, for example, share a blog post about how to optimize the use of your products on social media. You can continue to share the same article whenever you want. To make it even better, you don’t have to do it manually. You can use a script or a tool to automatically post articles from your brand’s blog to social media pages periodically.
Randomize the way contents are shared to make your social media pages appear natural. Be sure to share articles that are timeless only; news and updates should be treated differently. You can save a lot of time and still have an affective online presence this way.
Offload More Tasks.
A social media campaign is not just about posting stuff on social pages. It’s about producing content that works well with social media users. It also involves constant analysis and evaluation to keep the campaign effective the whole time. Some of these tasks can be offloaded to third-party service providers.
Content creation, for instance, isn’t something you have to do yourself. You can hire writers or video producers to make content for your brand. The time you save on content creation can then be allocated to doing other, more important things.
The same can be said for evaluation. Master all you need to know about marketing automation and you’ll be able to automate everything from data collection to analysis rather easily.
So, should you automate your business’ social media feeds? Based on the discussion we just had in this article, the answer is quite simply: YES.
