Today, you need to be on social media to have credibility. Not only that, it’s very common that with the growing number of social networks, you need to be on more than 4 or 5 at a time.
Probably at first people think that they can easily manage all of their social profiles, the same way they manage their personal Facebook profile. But as the time goes by, the competition is bigger, the followers are growing in number, and the expectations for you or your brand grow tremendously.
Time becomes limited and you notice that you simply can’t manage it all!
Every social network is different
The reason that we have so many social networks, it’s because they all function very differently. Each network has its rules and standards to abide by, and you can’t just post the same content and the same way on every one of them.
The number of social networks you need to be on depends on your brand and your target audience. The main ones to consider are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
To automate or not automate?
This is the dilemma for a lot of companies, much like “to be or not be”. Do you keep things the same and struggle to manually manage your social media? Or do you automate key processes to get the best results? Most people don’t know enough about social media automation, how to do it, why, and what results this could bring to their business.
So, let’s look at the advantages of automation.
one of the biggest advantages of automating your social media is that your posts will show up more frequently in your follower’s timelines. Automating your scheduling will allow you to be there all day, every day, without the need of you to go online and push the post button each time.
As we mentioned before, the need of being in more than 4 or 5 social networks at the same time can be overwhelming. Using an automation tool will allow you to manage as many networks as you want, pay attention and be present in each one of them, and will save you hours of your time.
There is no point of being in a social network if you’re not actually reaching people. Automating your social media will allow you to reach more people.
They will see you during the day in their timelines, and you will generate more engagement and gain more followers as your valuable content goes viral.
So what do you actually automate?
We got you waiting but it’s finally here – the 5 steps you need in order to automate your social media. You don’t need to be a marketing expert with years of experience, just know your brand, know your target audience, and follow these steps:
Step 1 – Automate posting & scheduling.
Start planning the schedule of your posts by days, or weeks. In the beginning, schedule at least 2 or 3 days ahead.
You can schedule your posts with queues that will be published according to the time you set, and you can even recycle the content of your queues (have it publish all your posts and then go back to the first one and start over again).
Set the timing of every post for each day, and of course, plan your content carefully. For this, you will need an automation tool that we’ll discuss further in this article.
Step 2 – Repurpose content.
Like we mentioned earlier, every social network it’s different, hence you need to treat them accordingly. In order to engage with the audience of every network, you need to adapt or repurpose your content. You can use different posts for each one, but also you can change a little the message or the images according to the standards of that social network. Here is a great article about adapting your content to different platforms. for each platform.
Step 3 – Automate engagement
It’s very important for you to interact with your followers, receive and give feedback, and engage with them in order to build long lasting relationships. When you have a certain amount of profiles to manage, and hundreds or even thousands of followers in each one of them, it’s practically impossible to engage with everyone. That’s when you can use tactics like sending an automatic message to every new person who follows or sending automatic messages to all of your followers from time to time.
There are tools like Social Inbox that will allow you to check all your mentions, likes, shares, comments and direct messages in one place. So you save time logging in to each network separately. This way you can not only automate message but check all the interactions and feedback you receive on all of your profiles and reply accordingly.
Step 4- Automate social listening & monitoring
If you want to stay in business, you need to know what are your competitors doing, what are their followers doing and what they want. You also need to know the latest trends and what everyone is talking about.
For this, you have to keep constantly monitoring several social networks, competitors, etc. If you do it, and you do it well, you will find an amazing amount of valuable information that you can use to shape your strategy and become more competitive.
You can find tools like Monitoring keywords and hashtags, and Suggested Content feed that allow you to do this in the easiest way. Seriously, our lives cannot be any easier with a number of tools and features we have nowadays to automate our job, and not only that but be more productive and efficient.
Step 5 – Use a social media management platform.
There a lot of social media platforms out there, you just have to find the one that suits you and your business the most. There are ones that are specialized in just certain features, and there are other that offer a complete list of features and tools to handle all of your social media automation.
I recommend eClincher, a platform that offers the complete set of features for automation: publishing, auto post, auto post with queues, social monitoring and listening and the social inbox. The best thing about them is that they are super responsive, they answer each customer right away, and help you get everything set up.
Final thoughts
Automating social media profiles can make your life and business way easier. You can easily manage several profiles in several social networks, you can boost your engagement, and search for the latest trends to make sure that your content is always relevant.
It’s really important to understand the difference between every social network and see how you can position your brand in each one of them.
There is no guide for telling you exactly how to do it, but by following the steps in this article, you’ll begin to understand your community of followers and how to best manage your brand in social media.
I hope this has been really useful to you. Let me know your thoughts on this, and see you next time!
Ben Kazinik (@eclincherrocks) is an inbound marketer for eClincher, the world’s most powerful social media management platform. He enjoys hiking, cooking, soccer, and visiting his family around the world. Email me at – ben@eclincher.com