The benefits of creating a social automation strategy are far-reaching. Consistency of content and greater time efficiencies are two huge advantages of marketing automation that will help to drive your social media plan further with minimal effort.
The greatest benefit of an automated social media strategy is that it removes the tedious nature of posting, allowing for more time to spend engaging with your customers.
How can your business create a social automation strategy optimized for success? By finding the right tools to automate and then creating a strategy that aligns with keeping your brand authentic and customers captivated across all of your social channels.
Find the right tools for you
There are hundreds of wonderful tools to automate your social media content. Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social are three popular examples of tried and true social automation tools. It is up to you to define what you need in a tool beyond the basics of scheduling posts in advance across a variety of channels and monitoring those social channels for mentions and questions from your customers.
Create an editorial calendar with diverse content
While it’s tempting to schedule the same post across multiple channels each day—don’t. Repetition on social equals boredom and it’s guaranteed that more than a few of your customers might follow you on multiple social platforms and will benefit from seeing different creative and copy on each.
Instead use the extra time you’ll save by scheduling your posts in advance to create thoughtful and fresh content across all of your social networks. Make sure your content aligns with your brand voice but doesn’t feel repetitive to your audience.
Schedule time to engage with your customers
Don’t forget the human behind social. Although social automation can raise the bar on productivity levels, it’s important to add a personal touch and set aside time each day to interact with customers, answer questions and truly manage your social community.
Alway monitor your posts
A key “don’t” is to set it and forget it. When scheduling posts for weeks at a time be sure to be aware of the day and time of each post to ensure that you are monitoring it for customer responses. This is beneficial for a variety of reasons. First, if your post garners a number of questions and comments from your audience you are quick to response. Second, mistakes happen. If a post receives a negative reaction you are able to quickly remedy the situation and make a correction.
Automation is a great tool to add to your social media strategy. The key is to utilize its benefits in moderation while still staying actively engaged and available to your customers. Need help creating a cohesive automated social media plan? Contact us today to get started.
