Businesses nowadays utilize social media, especially in marketing, to find and communicate with their market. But before the ascendancy of social media, businesses had to actively attend live events in search of their targeted group of prospects. Sadly, attending even a small business conference requires spending an average of $1,000 which makes it very difficult for startup businesses to meet their target audience.
Thanks to social media, that reality is no longer the dominant order.
It has transformed the field by enabling startups to virtually get in front of their intended market and prospects, reshaping the way business entities communicate with their clients, superseding business cards by pop-ups in your audience’s feed, and making it more convenient for businesses to present value forthrightly before asking anything from a target client.
In this article, we will discuss 10 best practices to automate your social media marketing like an expert.
But first, what is social media automation?
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn are some of the social media platforms that have gained global acceptance and to great extent influenced the online scope of companies.
Based on statistics, about 3.2 billion or 42% of the world’s population uses social media. This number is continuously increasing every day due to the influx of new users. This is an indicator of the potential of these social media platforms for marketers.
But taking advantage of this formidable tool is a taxing task for marketers. There is a need for your brand to be available, consistent, and relevant on social media. One should also keep tracking trends, measuring the fulfillment of social efforts, and engaging persistently with prospects on those social platforms. Doing all these actions along with running several marketing campaigns is complicated. Thus, the need for social media automation plays a fundamental part in marketing strategies.
By definition, social media automation is a method of automating social media activities for the optimization of the results gained from social media channels. It is the process of using software tools in handling some of the time-consuming undertakings associated with the maintenance of a professional social media presence.
Examples of social media automation are scheduling posts earlier on, curating content to republish, triaging common customer inquiries, and creating analytics reports. Some of the social media automation advanced tasks include sentiment analysis and social listening. These enable businesses to engage with their prospective clients in a much profound manner.
When done right, this automation can help marketers save effort and time spent on the management of social platforms, engagement with prospects, and enhancement of brand awareness. Also, it helps in getting the maximum returns of investment from all social media endeavors.
The use of these social media tools is intended in freeing up your time so that you can have more time in engaging and personally interacting with your followers, have a genuine exchange, and strategize about what and when you post.
Important statistics you need to know
Let us look at important statistics that show that a combination of social media marketing and marketing automation is a foregone conclusion. In a nutshell, automated marketing campaigns in social media save time, customize the client’s experience, and improve targeted messaging. To deepen our understanding of marketing automation and how it helps in the growth of your business, let us check out the compelling facts below.
Marketing automation is one of the best four practices of building up the customer experience.
The automation of advertisements and social media posts helps institutions save not less than six hours every week on the management of social media and continue to be updated with substantial content.
On average, 51% of companies have carried out strategies on marketing automation.
The response rates of companies are increased by 250% by utilizing automated social media campaigns.
More than 80% of companies recognize the reality that social media campaigns are one of the most satisfactory ways of implementing marketing automation to a business.
About 70% of companies point out that improved targeting of messages is the most crucial part of the business’ marketing automation.
64% of organizations attested that when a marketing automation strategy is done effectively, sales improve. Marketing automation brought about a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a reduction of marketing overhead by 12.2%.
Roughly 75% of marketers reveal that the business’ marketing automation helps save time in their day-to-day operations.
80% of users improved their leads by utilizing marketing automation tools or software and an increase in conversion by 77%.
10 Best Practices to Automate Your Social Media Marketing Like an Expert
Social media automation is a continuing, active, and real-time marketing undertaking. It makes it possible that your brand will always be up and running on the social media platform with constant examination, review, and iterations.
Below are 10 of the best practices that you can incorporate as you are implementing social media automation.
1. Be mindful of the time zones
When it comes to global marketing teams, scheduling and publishing social posts on automation software or tools can be complicated. Make sure that you configure the right time zones for such automation tools. You must also ensure that you are using the correct time zone while setting up posts in advance.
It is likewise necessary to get through to your audience with the correct message at the appropriate time. You can track the analytics of your automation tool to become aware of the best time to post every format type. And before you stick to a standard pattern regarding the setting of time for content publication, you should experiment first with varying timings for dissimilar content types.
2. Monitor your automation tool at all times
Automation indeed minimizes human effort. However, social media campaigns should not eliminate human involvement since this is not a good practice to follow. You should continuously monitor the process of your automation software so that you can make certain that there is smooth engagement with your audience and review of content. This can help in the optimization of your present process with the most fitting outcomes from previous campaigns.
3. Avoid scheduling too far in advance
While social scheduling makes life less difficult for marketers with subsequent planning of social content, planning too far in advance is not an advisable practice considering the short-lived nature of buzzwords and trends.
Being available in real-time is what social media is all about. It is also about making the best out of trendy cultural references, contemporary social issues, and the progression of technology. Thus, make sure that you are not scheduling your content too much in advance to stay away from appearing irrelevant.
4. Keep up with automation tool updates
Social automation platforms are in a constant upgrade instead of the changing social behaviors and requirements. There is a stream of additional or new features on these platforms, with alterations in the present user interfaces and functionalities. That is why you should keep an eye on the upgrades made available by your social automation tool and take advantage of these new features.
5. Optimize campaigns with the use of analysis and reports
Scheduling and publishing social media content is the main feature made available by social automation tools. But what is also important is the utilization of your tool to optimize the implementation of your social campaigns.
You should see to it that you are creating detailed reports so that you can measure the performance of shared social media content based on outreach and engagements. You can make use of this data in altering your future content or social campaigns to achieve more desirable results.
6. Use social listening tools
You can make use of social media automation tools for social listening. In essence, social listening is the act of monitoring what your audiences are saying about your industry or brand online.
Using these automation tools, you can look at brand mentions across different social media platforms in one place. Also, you can keep an eye on specific topics, keywords, or hashtags to be aware of what is happening in your industry. Moreover, you can use these social media automation tools to watch over your competitors, be updated of what is the latest news, and what people are talking about.
Finally, social listening tools can be of help in coming up with ideas for social media content, even product ideas.
7. Use chatbots
Creating chatbots is another way of using social media automation. You can use chatbots with sites such as Facebook Messenger in streamlining your marketing, delivering customer support, and improving customer experience.
For instance, you can create suggested or automated replies to the comments or questions of customers. When someone asks for your business hours, for example, there will be an automatic response from your chatbot.
Also, a chatbot can be used to inform the customers that you will get back to them at a specific duration and supply resources.
Finally, a social media chatbot can be of help to customers concerning minor issues, but escalate bigger issues to a person.
8. Gain useful insights across different networks
Almost all of the social media automation tools make available useful analytics that can be of help to your social media strategy.
For instance, after connecting and using these tools to your social channels, you can use the analytics in determining the perfect time to post. There are questions that you can answer such as “At what time do my prospects interact more?” and “What is my rate of engagement?”
A major advantage of using automation tools is that you can obtain analytics like reach, impressions, and engagement of all social media channels in one place. These analytics make it easier for you to compare the achievement of a campaign across various platforms.
9. Create content curation ideas
Not all of the automation software can provide content curation, but some of them can do. This means that you can select topics or industries that you believe your prospects are interested in.
Then, the automation tool will curate content that you can post or share on whatever social media channel that you have.
There are some automation tools that can draft a social media post on your behalf, but this should only be used as a point, to begin with. It should be you who will personally write all your social media posts. Besides drafting your own posts, you can create visuals through free graphic design tools. This is a great thing to use especially if you don’t have any graphic designing experience. A free graphic design tool can let you create visuals from pre-made, customizable Powerpoint templates or through its easy-to-use interface.
Also, using the method discussed above should help in knowing your prospects better, smoothing the way for more content ideas.
10. Engage with your audience
Engaging with your audience across different channels in one place is one of the most essential benefits of implementing social media automation.
With these social media automation tools, you can oversee brand or product mentions, messages, and replies. Having able to gather all these makes it easier for you to connect with your prospects and helps your marketing team in responding on time.
Takeaway
There you have it – the evolution of social media and how it affects business marketing; the concept of social media automation; the social media trends, statistics, and facts you need to know; and the 10 best practices to automate your social media marketing like an expert.
Hopefully, you obtained some relevant knowledge from this article, and may it help you with your social media campaigns and overall business growth.
Just remember that the most crucial part here is your boldness, perseverance, and consistency in implementing this strategy. If done correctly, you will see its fruits in no time.
