Whether you’re running a small business or running to keep up with your social media presence, you can’t afford to spend hours every day maintaining your various profiles on the various platforms of social media. Thankfully, there are tools that can help you automate your social media activities so you don’t have to spend hours every day clicking buttons and scheduling posts—your accounts will do it all for you! Here are some tips on how to automate your social media efforts in order to save time, work more efficiently, and get more engagement from your followers.
Why you need an automation tool
The benefits of social media automation are undeniable—but why do you need an automation tool? Tools like Hootsuite allow you to scale up your social media efforts while maintaining a high level of engagement. If you’re constantly posting content and answering questions, it’s easy to feel bogged down. By shifting your social media interaction responsibilities onto a tool, you can free up more time in your day for other tasks—and ensure that your followers get regular updates. With Hootsuite’s scheduling features, plus access to robust analytics and insights, there’s no reason not to automate. Your followers will thank you!
What types of content should you automate?
There are different types of content you can automate. You’ll want to make sure you have an active strategy before automating any content types—if you haven’t been actively producing content, social media automation isn’t likely going to help your business. Here are some content types that work well for automation: GIFs/Videos—Posting videos or GIFs with a link will allow you to reach a new audience and increase brand exposure, but it also gives you more chances at driving conversions since these posts often lead viewers back to your site.
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Automating Instagram
If you’re new to Instagram, or don’t have much time to spend on it, consider using automation tools that do all of your social media management for you. You might be wondering: Won’t that mean I’m no longer posting photos? Actually, not at all—automation doesn’t replace posting photos; it just means you’ll get more exposure on your accounts without having to handle everything manually. There are a variety of services out there that allow users with little time and/or small business budgets to boost their exposure by spending only a few minutes a day (or even less) on social media.
Automating Facebook
Facebook automation tools let you automate your Facebook posts and manage multiple accounts at once, helping you keep up with all of your pages without spending hours every day on social media. They allow you to upload new content directly from your computer—or even schedule it ahead of time—so that everything looks more natural. For example, if you have a monthly newsletter that publishes on its own, but you want to post an update about it on Facebook in real time as well, automation tools can do that for you automatically. These types of tools save hours per week so that social media doesn’t eat up too much of your day. As a result, your engagement is higher (and) so is traffic to your website or blog.
Automating Twitter
If you follow a large number of people on Twitter, or if you’re frequently engaged in conversations, one way to make sure your updates are seen is to automate your Twitter account so that it tweets at scheduled times. By doing so, you give your followers something new and interesting each time they check out your Twitter feed. This ensures that people who may not otherwise follow you can see what’s new in your life and what you have to say about certain topics. It also allows them a window into how authentic and human-like Twitter accounts can be—something that some potential users worry about when deciding whether or not they want to invest their time on a particular platform. If automated posts help build trust with potential users, then automatically tweeting at set times is definitely worth considering.
Why it works
Social media automation works because it frees up your time to create valuable content for your audience. Without it, you’re spending too much time on repetitive tasks like sharing images and commenting. That’s why automation is a must for any social media strategy—and why small businesses should take advantage of all automation tools available to them. There are many benefits of social media automation, from gaining additional followers to increasing brand awareness. Some of these benefits include
Frequently Asked Questions To Social Media Automation
Why is social media automation important?
Social media automation is important for social media managers because it helps them save time, boosting productivity. In fact, about 20 percent of small businesses allocate at least half of their social media budget to social media automation tools.
Though you can set up an automation tool in just a few minutes, understanding how each tool works helps you pick one that fits your needs. This way, you’ll only have to focus on creating content while ensuring consistency across all your platforms.
How do you automate on social media?
There are a variety of tools available that can help you automate on social media, though not all are created equal. Social media automation is an evolving industry, so what works now may not work as well a year from now. With that in mind, here are some tried-and-true social media automation strategies to get you started. If these work for you, great! If they don’t – keep testing until you find a strategy that works best for your business.
How do you automate posts on Facebook?
Whether you’re managing a brand page, your personal account, or both, you can automate posts on Facebook (here’s how to do it). There are also apps that let you schedule updates for Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. The benefits of social media automation? Time savings for sure. Efficiency is another big one.
It allows you to schedule content well in advance so it doesn’t matter if you need to be away from social media for an hour here or there because your posts will still go out as scheduled. There’s also significant potential cost savings depending on your platform strategy. Facebook advertising tends to be far more expensive than other platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest – which makes automation all that much more attractive since posts can run without costing anything extra.
