Ultimate Guide to Plan The Best Social Media Automation Strategy

In times when each of your tweets or each post on social media counts and numerous people eye on them, you need something that can shift the burden of updating every day, consistently. Here social media automation is the best solution that can up your social media game. It can help you boost your social media marketing activities and engage/influence your target audience strategically.

According to a report, 75% of all companies have already started using social media automation. 83% of marketers prefer social media automation for scheduling, and they are now reaping great benefits in the form of higher engagement & conversions.

If you too are planning to join the suite, we have got you covered.

In this article, we are going to discuss the ways you can use social media automation to get the best out of your social media campaigns. But, before we move ahead with its usage, we must know the basics and its impact. Only then can you relate to the relevance and importance of using social media automation in the current scenario. So, let’s begin:

Social Media Automation – Overview

Social media automation is the practice of using advanced tools to plan & schedule social media content. It is usually done so that you never miss any post update. In other words, it is automatic content sharing on social media handles.

If we go into the details, social media automation is another marketing activity that serves a purpose for marketers that involves numerous tasks. From content update and scheduling to analyzing critical social insights out of every single post, social media automation involves almost all activities that can save you from the brunt of work.

What purpose does it solve?

It reduces the time you spend updating multiple social media accounts; so, you can keep your energy for other important tasks to grow your business. Social media automation holds great significance in today’s scenario where businesses need to match the fast-paced competition if they want to survive the competition.

Importance of Social Media Automation

Automation seems to be the best solution for marketers and businesses, right? Let’s understand the story behind this claim that will explain the relevance and importance of social media automation for businesses. But, before that, let’s have a look at some critical stats:

• Around 32% of businesses have seen an increase in revenue after 12 months of using different automation tools.
• Also, 77% of businesses saw an increase in their conversions.
• Moreover, businesses that use automation for marketing are observed to outperform those businesses that are not automating their marketing.

You may find people criticizing the use of social media automation saying it lacks the human element. They feel that it is a bit “anti-social,” because it doesn’t evoke emotions due to all the automation. Well, we are not advocating the use of social media automation for live interaction because then it is entirely mechanical rather than humane. But, we need to be intellectual and critical about the usage of social media automation, considering when to use it. Also, we can’t ignore the various benefits it has to offer over a few disadvantages that are significant in today’s context.

With social media automation, you can save a lot of time and energy, which can be used to execute great business ideas. This convenience has fallen really heavy on other benefits that include gains and scalability.

Pros of Getting Started with Social Media Automation

There are several good reasons to automate your social media activities. Whether you use chatbots or schedule your social media posts, social media automation comes with innumerable advantages. Some of them are listed below, have a look:

• Social media automation helps you to publish content consistently across multiple social media channels. As you use social automation tools, they integrate well with different social media channels, which makes it easy for you to publish content.
• You have a complete overview of the scheduled activities where you have a fair idea of posting your content at the right time. This way, it optimizes the post and helps a social media manager to formulate a better strategy and implement the best practices.
• Another best feature of automation is that it lets you schedule and publish content that automatically gets published on social media. Moreover, it also enables automated responses, which encourage your audience to engage with your brand directly. This way, you can maintain an active social media presence even when you are busy with other tasks.
• Being a marketer, if you are reading this post, you can imagine the pain of collecting the data manually and putting in the time, energy, and all your efforts to form a simple analysis. Here social media automation shifts this burden off your shoulders and lets you monitor and analyze the social media activity on its own.

That being said, it’s time to know how you can automate your own posts.

How to Automate Social Media Posts?

If you are running short of time and still want an impressive and active presence on social media, automation tools don’t let you compromise on it and post your content in less time. Also, you don’t even have to compromise on the content quality. It is of great use; especially, when you are running out of content ideas, you can use it to repost past content. You can also curate better content taking inspiration from the content shared by other channels through consistent monitoring with the help of social media automation tools.

Social media automation helps you optimize your social media interaction, it involves different elements. Let’s try to have a basic understanding of the critical elements of social media automation beginning with different tools:

#1 Learn How to Schedule Your Social Media Content

When it comes to social media, consistency is a must. If you lack consistency, you are out of the mind. With social media automation tools, you can plan your posts in advance while spending more time making creative posts. Social media automation tools can be used to schedule your posts. This way, you can save your time and work on other important tasks for your business.

ContentCal is one such popular social media management tool. It allows businesses to plan, collaborate on, approve, schedule, and publish their social media content. It also makes it easier for marketers to create detailed reports to further boost their social media performance.

ContentCal integrates with all popular social platforms. From Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and Instagram. The latest ContentCal ‘Engage’ product simplifies community management by allowing users to prioritize and respond to all customer questions and streamline communication, through a central inbox.

ContentCal Top Features

• Asset management – Store all of your content in one central Content Hub.
• Ideation – The best content is created together, ContentCal’s tools aid the creative process, helping you to capture the best ideas.
• Planning – Create the perfect plan with our shared team content calendar.
• Collaboration – Powerful team collaboration features help you ensure your content meets brand standards and hits the right mark with your audience.
• Approvals – Ensure that all stakeholders get visibility and sign off through custom approval workflows.
• Publishing – Fully automate publishing to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Analytics – Demonstrate your success with customizable and sharable reports.
• Community Management – Centralize all mentions, DMs, and comments in one shared inbox.
• Integrations – Connect content with 1000’s of other tools (like Trello, Slack, Asana or Monday.com) to create the perfect workflow and 1000’s of other publishing platforms (like Pinterest, Medium, or Mailchimp) to improve content distribution.

The ContentCal Difference

• ContentCal has been recognized as the fastest-growing content marketing platform thanks to its ease-of-use, support, and flexibility.
• Not only can you use ContentCal to manage all of your social content, but you can also manage all of your long-form content too, like Blogs, Emails, and Press Releases.

Find out more here!

#2 Use the Best Social Listening Tools

In addition to mastering the use of scheduling tools, it’s also important to get started with the best social listening tools. These are powerful solutions that allow marketers to keep tabs on the current market trends, assess market competitions, and derive actionable marketing insights to boost the performance of their SMM campaigns. When used strategically, online social listening activities will let you track your brand mentions, engage with your customers/prospects, and collect high-value data that will help you create laser-targeted campaigns in the future.

You can use social media listening tools to monitor your audience and competitors. Brand mentions, replies, likes, comments, and messages are some of the important parameters that you should consider to track audience engagement.

For example, you have missed a query and you weren’t able to respond on time. With all the data gathered through automation, you can identify the places where you couldn’t respond and resolve their query in a timely manner.

Mentionlytics – A go-to social listening tool

Mentionlytics is one of the best social media listening tools that can up your social media game manifolds. Here you get a complete social media management platform with scheduling and publishing features. You can easily publish your content on various social media channels at the very moment and monitor your posts. It will help you draw meaningful comparisons between your content and what your competitors are posting online. Moreover, with the help of our AI-Social Intelligence Advisor, you can well optimize your posts.

The tool offers incredible benefits to help you create a dominant online presence and improve your revenue via social media activities. Here’s how –

• It lets you discover marketing insights and current trends to strategize your campaigns.
• You can get easy access to mention insights.
• If you are struggling to find the right influencers for your brand, you can get through Mentionlytics.
• It will help you grow your brand’s reputation and sales.
• You can easily understand competition and gain insights about your competitors, products, and industry by keeping a close eye on their strategies.
• You will get to discover different public perceptions at a time. Also, you will know the current feelings of the public and what it has to say about your brand.
• It gives you complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.
• You can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand.

To put it simply, Mentionlytics lets you access the latest trends, consumer sentiments, and get more sales leads. You only need to enter your brand name or product or competitors to access all the details.

Get started with a free version here!

#3 Start Using Chatbots for Customer Interactions

After we are sorted with different social media automation tools, chatbots are another option. You can automate your marketing by streamlining your customer support with the intent to enhance the customer experience. Using chatbots, you can create automatic replies so that your customer doesn’t have to wait for answers to common queries. This way, you can also inform them that you will get back to them after some time and provide them with the necessary information. So, for small issues, chatbots are a better option. However, in case the issue escalates, you or your customer support team will have to intervene in the matter at a personal level.

Apart from this, you can surely work on creating one of the best chatbot content strategies that will offer you a new way to personalize your content on social media. Now, you will ask how? When you communicate over chatbots people try to be as personal as possible while presenting the real issues they are facing. You can use this insight to create content that encompasses real-time issues that your customers and audience face. It gives an impression to your audience that you care for them and have something valuable to offer them. This way, you can very well automate your social media posts by tracking what’s going on in your customers’ minds and what they really want. You won’t run out of content anyways!

Fact: As per reports, 80 percent of modern-day entrepreneurs will be using chatbot by the end of the year 2020.

#4 Use Analytics to Track Success

Analytics is the most important feature that almost all social media automation tools offer. You can use the insights to identify the loopholes in your social strategy and work upon improving them. For example, you discover that your audience is not interacting with your content. What can you do? You can work on improving your content quality by analyzing the posts on which you got the most likes and comments. It will help you know the current trends and audience preferences that will ultimately help you grow your fan base on various social media channels.

Sprout Social is an advanced social media business tool that can help you with analytics and build meaningful connections with your target audience. It’s the first choice of over 25,000 global businesses that are keen to leverage the true power of social media. The reports can be used to measure your brand engagement and fine-tune the plan to achieve better results.

#5 Master Content Curation to Amp Up Brand Value

Content curation means you can choose industries and topics based on audience preference. It depends on the tools you use that will curate content for you so that you don’t have to get into the hassle of finding topics to share and post on social media. Even some automation tools can be of great help due to the content drafts that you can post on social media. Well, such content can be used initially to know the interest of consumers.

We would recommend you draft your own content to include that personal and unique element that reflects your brand values.

Final Word

Social media automation is the best way to save time and schedule day-to-day tasks that give you the margin to work on the growth of your business. On the other hand, some businesses resort to automation tools, but they don’t know how to implement them. Taking note of this issue, we had discussed the ways you can use social media automation tools. We have mentioned important factors and the tools that shouldn’t be ignored.

We hope that this was an informative post for you.

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