Automating social media is your key to saving time, regularly posting engaging content, and boosting your communication, marketing, and sales channels.
Companies are now dealing with consumers who have particular expectations:
- 79% of customers expect a response from a brand within a day
- Almost 80% of users believe that content on social media can greatly influence their purchasing decisions
- 90% of users on Instagram follow a business
To satisfy the rising demand of customers to deal with a company via social media platforms, businesses are focusing on improving their multichannel marketing with automated tools.
By leveraging social media automation, you can pave the way to enhanced customer experience, improved lead generation, and unprecedented business growth. Want to learn how?
This blog post will answer all your burning questions and offer you easy tips to follow.
What is Social Media Automation?
By definition, social media automation is leveraging tools for automation to empower the efficiency of social media marketing and sales channels.
Reducing manual work and automating repetitive actions leads to saving resources and time as well as a more in-depth understanding of the audience.
Why Do You Need Social Media Automation?
The core benefit of automating social media lies in optimizing your social media strategy to achieve the desired results faster with the help of automated tools.
By doing so, you can manage your social media easier while scheduling posts and setting up automated, fast responses in chatbots.
You can significantly boost customer experience by employing social media listening tools.
Automation helps keep your actions consistent, thus leading to an improved online presence as well as boosted customer engagement.
Besides, using automated tools helps to foster better-personalized marketing communication. It happens thanks to saving time on monotonous tasks and allowing marketers to focus on individual approaches.
Finally, you can also use social media analytics tools to measure the performance of your efforts.
Benefits of Social Media Automation
After understanding why social media automation is essential, it’s time to discuss how to start with this. Let’s view the main essentials for automating social media marketing.
It saves time and gives consistency
Despite having a great content plan, one may fail to follow it, unable to keep up with consistent posting.
Posts scheduling is crucial for a business to improve its online presence and keep it steady. Regular posts help to build trust as your customers will create a sense of systematic interaction with your brand.
In addition, post scheduling enables more precise timing. By examining when your audience interacts with your social media the most, you can share the content at the best time to reach your customers. You can refine CTR, expand visibility, and improve overall customer engagement by scheduling your content at the right time.
Using marketing automation tools to schedule a social media post is also a great time-saving technique. This way, you organize all the content beforehand and then have more time to focus on creativity. Moreover, posting in advance helps to detach and examine your content with fresh eyes.
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It helps obtain in-depth data insights
It’s essential to gain insights from tons of customer data. Otherwise, a business will have tons of information without practical and effective use.
To understand your audience’s interests and drivers, you need to humanize your data analytics. You must set a clear goal and carefully select the metrics to examine.
As your focus is your customers’ behavior, social media automation is the key to gathering data from your various social media channels. You can then export it into one platform and leverage marketing data visualization.
For example, you want to analyze your Facebook performance. You can use inner analytics functionality or third-party integrations to export data and then use it in data visualization or data analytics platform.
This way, you’ll be consistently having live dashboards and reports displaying:
- your audience (age, gender, region, etc.)
- customer interactions (conversion device, post reaction type, instant experience component, etc.)
- essential ads metrics (reach, impressions, etc.)
Another example of getting in-depth insights with social media automation is social listening. You can automate tracking customer feedback, brand mentions, and industry trends.
Collecting this data automatically can help you understand your industry and react quickly to any market changes and trends.
It empowers management and monitoring
If you use a multichannel strategy, keeping up with your customer’s journey and interaction on various platforms may be challenging. For this reason, a business needs to have cohesive customer experience automation.
From implementing chatbots to integrating notifications from several social media platforms into one place – automating communication with your customers can pave the way to new engagement and selling opportunities.
By merging all your feeds, notifications, and messages into one place, you’ll avoid jumping from one platform to another (thus losing time and clients waiting too long for a response). Some requests can be answered automatically, and some will require your personal human touch. Still, by delegating common and repetitive replies to a chatbot, you’ll significantly improve response time and focus on providing better customer service.
Automated notifications and messages help you see the whole picture of your multichannel marketing and keep informed about what’s happening. This way, you won’t lose a customer by just missing their message or comment.
Connecting all communication channels into one system improves customer experience and sales.
It enhances customer service and engagement
You don’t have to use social media just for publishing new content. Indeed, social media can also be used as a customer service tool. We’ve already shed some light on the importance of effective social media integrations with other tools.
Another powerful integration would be with CRM software. Integrating your social media channels into CRM significantly improves customer service and empowers better marketing campaigns.
Such integration will enable you to monitor customer experience on various platforms. It fosters the connection among different teams: customer service, marketing, and sales. Consequently, you can rapidly react to customers’ needs and expectations. Through tracking the sales funnel, you can personalize offers for individual customers.
In addition, social media integration with CRM can help monitor engagement and spot brand advocates and influencers. As a result, all this will help to gain more leads and turn them into satisfied customers.
Take your social media marketing to the next level. Automate your social media efforts now!
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3 Mistakes of Social Media Automation to Avoid
When automating social media, it’s crucial to evade common mistakes that may occur. Three of them are the most common.
Inappropriate schedule
You don’t need to check all your scheduled posts constantly. However, you need to stay on the pulse of what’s happening around your company. Otherwise, it may become a disaster if your content contradicts some real-time events.
If there’s any tragic event for your audience, you will want to avoid posting entertaining content, and with automation, you might just forget about the inappropriate post.
For this reason, don’t forget to keep informed about the world and correct your scheduled posts if needed.
Inappropriate scheduling relates to non-effective time slot choices, too. Know your audience’s time zones and preferences because, for instance, important late-night updates can be lost in a social media feed.
Lack of human touch
Another possible pitfall of automation is turning your social media into a robotic flow of content. Your customers will instantly grasp it.
That is why it’s essential not to forget to engage with your audience. Automated responses are great, but they cannot replace the human touch of your team communicating with customers.
To add a human approach to your social media automation activities, work with a professional social media connector and don’t ignore the following:
- monitoring of social media accounts
- answering posts’ comments
- reposting
- replying when tagged
- liking your followers’ relevant posts
Lost posting opportunities
Treating social media automation as a process you set up for one time is not the utterly correct approach.
Your audience expects you to share information about some event, e.g., a bug in the app, a server crash, or even some world event. You cannot keep silent when something important for your audience and users is happening.
So despite having your social media publishing automated, don’t hesitate to break the plan and share information on relevant issues or events. Besides, social media automation will help you effortlessly get back to the planned schedule.
Also, don’t schedule social media posts far in advance. Long-scheduled posts might lose their relevancy. Try to schedule posts 2-4 days, not 2-4 weeks ahead. It’ll help you not to miss posting opportunities and stay on top of things.
It will also be a good idea to check if a browser used for your automation tool is safe and isn’t affected by any malware. Otherwise, there’s a risk of a data breach or unexpected software bugs that will break your posting schedule and negatively impact your reputation.
Final Thoughts on Automating Social Media Efforts
It’s indisputable that social media automation is the new impetus for social media marketing.
Innovative tools are designed to ease your burden of repetitive and tedious tasks that, in turn, will create opportunities for your brand growth.
With automation, your posting will become more consistent and perfectly timed. Your team will enjoy time released to focus on more creative tasks, and customer engagement will likely grow.
We hope this article helped you understand the essentials of automating your social media efforts. So it’s time to try automation in practice!
Growth Hackers is a leading SMM agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners automate their social media efforts, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
