Social Media Automation: Do You Really Need It?

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social-media-automation

Automation has gained infamous reputation among social media marketers. It is often considered as a ‘sin’ for many ‘purists’. However, while it may never replace the need for human touch in a job, it can always go hand-in-hand to make things better and faster.

If you understand the ‘timing’ part of automating any job and can maintain a synergy between human intelligence and tool’s capabilities, you can always outnumber your score. Social media campaign management is of no difference. Automating certain tasks in your list of daily social media jobs can improve productivity as well as marketing ROI.

Today, with the growing volume and complexity of social media marketing jobs in hand, a marketer cannot help but find out the scope of effort optimisation techniques and remove manual hand-offs in the process. Simply put, you need a machine that understands your instructions, apply human intelligence, and are programmed as per the standard needs of a job. It reduces the amount of stereotype and repetitive computing tasks so that you can breathe a life beyond work.

The bottom line is that your social marketing effort should promote adoption and use of innovations and not be restricted to mundane tasks like post scheduling, data capturing, crunching, and ROI measurement. The life deserves to be better and we should do it.

Measuring ROI is the biggest challenge for social media marketers. The problems are manifold, though. Most of the marketers run short of time and ideas while trying to:

  • Schedule and share posts/threads on multiple social media accounts
  • Create original contents from various web resources relevant to subject matter
  • Share the posts among blogs, social media pages and websites at a faster rate
  • Address business, legal or regulatory risks of social media account
  • Identify and prioritise social media efforts for better yield
  • Monitor campaign performance or, identify prospects on a daily basis
  • Remove spam and unauthorised content or curate them
  • Generate consolidated reports based social media analytics

Neither spending long hours in social media campaigns fits in your time bucket, nor does it ensure a solid online presence of your business. You should focus more on your social media content and its production strategies than on its distribution. Is your existing marketing setup really up to it?

Do you know that using best-of-the-breed social media management tools can actually keep your entire social media activities hassle-free? In this article, we will learn what type of social media tasks can be automated with a tool and how that helps you optimise the overall marketing effort and cost.

1. Automate campaign setup, planning and content curation

Tools like Hootsuite, Oktopost, Sprout Social, and Social Oomph have some great built-in automation features. They help you pre-schedule your social media posts, create contents well in advance, publish posts to multiple social media accounts from a single platform and do more.

2. Automate conversion monitoring and reporting

Conversions or leads – the bottom line of any social media campaign, much depend on how efficient you are in identifying prospective communications among millions of social media threads in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You set up a list of preferred keywords in Hootsuite and the tool will automatically fetch you all the threads relevant to those keywords. It is a simple, quick and effective way to know who might be your next customer. Tools like Oktopost goes one step ahead in lead acquisition in attribution. With its social acquisition dashboard, you can not only track conversions from various channels but also measure which channel brings you more business – all with a graphical view.

3. Automate notifications on social media security

Being social also means that you are exposed to potential damage. A marketer needs to stay abreast of any social media activity that poses social risks to a business, its brand value, or employee recognition. And employees create by far the biggest risk in that regard. A business needs to ensure compliance with government rules and regulations, as well as to protect its data and reputation.

4. Automate content sharing and update

Your social media pipeline should always be full of engaging and fresh content. That means you cannot afford to spend hours in queuing, publishing and sharing content across the web. There has to be a better way of doing things. A tool like Babbly is excellent in this job.

5. Automate content creation and discovery

DrumUp and Spundge are some other content discovery and scheduling tools that keep your FB, Twitter and LinkedIn pages always noisy. IFTTT automates tweets creation for every new blog post added to your website. The same goes with Zapier – a tool that generates tweets for any new video getting uploaded to YouTube.

6. Automate social media engagement data extraction for analysis

Social media engagement analysis is the first step to monitoring your social media strategies. The more powerful tool you apply to monitor how your social content resonates with your audience, the better decisions you are likely to take. Social analytics tool like Simply Measured, Brandwatch, Quintly are very much apt in this job. You may even try these free social media analytics tools to start with. Moreover, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, and YouTube – all these tools come with powerful analytics feature by default.