Successful social media marketing is crucial for businesses looking to increase brand awareness and scale awareness. Unfortunately, navigating it is not as we’d like it to be. There are multiple channels to navigate, all of which follow a different set of rules and algorithms. Additionally, your followers expect you to interact with them on a personal level.
This is where social media marketing automation comes in. It involves the use of online tools to accomplish specific tasks such as posting and sharing content on social platforms. It helps marketers streamline important tasks and frees you to handle other essential duties, while still delivering results.
As with most things, too much automation can be harmful to your brand. Here are 7 tips to make social media marketing automation work for your business.
Balance Automation with Personalization
There are multiple benefits of Social Media Marketing Automation, but your efforts mean nothing if you cannot find the golden balance between automation and personalization.
Schedule Social Media Posts
This is the most common type of social media automation and for good reason. It eliminates the pressure of crafting social media messages and posting in real-time.
Social media automation tools allow you to keep a steady queue of posts, making it easy to focus on the creative side of things. It helps you establish consistency, which is one of the best ways to build customer trust and increase your online presence.
You will want to schedule posts for when your audience will be online. This will allow for most interactions. Some automation tools schedule the best posting times based on the data they analyze.
Make Use of Automated Replies
Speed matters, especially on social media where customers expect a response within the hour. From pricing concerns to bugs and errors, there are many types of issues you’ll have to address on social media.
Social media automation can help you prioritize the right messages, which is crucial when you have a large audience. Saved replies make it easy to address the most common questions while freeing you to handle more pressing issues one-on-one.
It is the perfect solution to balancing between giving your audience the attention they deserve and getting things done.
Better Customer Service with Bots
Chatbots are more popular than ever, and you can leverage them to provide round-the-clock customer service. Creating chatbots with platforms such as Facebook can improve customer experience and provide instant support. A good example is Sephora’s Facebook chatbot, which answers basic questions and directs clients to a rep for further inquiries.
Brands can use chatbots to provide resources and inform customers of the expected response time. They are an easy way to handle the small issues and escalating more pressing matters to an agent.
Curate Content for Every Platform
One of the most common mistakes marketers make is using the same content for every social media platform. Every platform runs on a unique set of rules and content formats, which you can leverage to increase your online presence.
For instance, Instagram is the best place to engage with images and videos. Pinterest works best for sharing infographics, DIY tips, fashion, and recipes. Twitter is a great place to share business tips, quotes, and actionable content in 70-100 characters. Content like quizzes, emotional posts, and stories perform exceptionally on Facebook.
Avoid spamming your social media feeds with the same content. Diversify content across each platform to pique your customers’ interests.
Take Advantage of Analytics
Information is power and with social media automation, it comes in the form of analytics. Many social automation tools provide analytics that could be vital to your marketing strategy.
How much reach does your brand have? When does your audience interact most? Have your sales on social media improved? What is your customer response time? The analytics dashboard can help you answer these questions and more.
This information comes in handy when comparing the success of your campaigns on different platforms. It makes it easier to monitor the progress of ongoing campaigns and identifies areas that need improvement.
Set up Social Listening
Social media is a treasure trove for people who are yet to interact with your brand but are likely interested in what you have to offer. The best way to identify these leads is through social listening. This is the process of monitoring brand mentions on social platforms, and certain keywords, hashtags, or topics to see what’s trending in your industry.
In addition to identifying new leads, social listening tools can inspire new products and content ideas. They can help with competitor research and ensure you always know what people are talking about.
Most tasks such as posts and responding to social media messages can be automated. However, you cannot build authentic relationships with your customers through automation. A personal touch is required. Take time to personally reply to comments, address questions and interact with your clients. Social media automation should be treated as support for your marketing strategy, and not its replacement.
