Time is valuable. There’s no doubt about it. In this day and age, marketers and business owners have limited time to get a huge list of tasks done and done well. Did you know that 64% of marketers spend at least 6 hours a week on social media? That is 15% of your work week, at the very minimum. You’ve heard the expression “time is money” and if that is the case, manual social media marketing is costing your business quite a bit of money!
You may have heard of social media marketing automation before. While having a social media strategy in place is a necessity, the hours you spend managing it are not. If you think that automating your social media strategy is a waste of money, think it can. In fact, it can save you money and make your team more efficient. If you or your team are scrambling around finding something to post on a day-to-day basis or spending large amounts of time manually posting each social media promotion, you’re in trouble.
Automating your social media marketing gives you ample time to plan in advance. Now that your team is no longer spending 6 hours a week creating and posting content, they can spend a few hours planning strategically for the future. It is smart to have your team plan 6 months or even one full year in advance in terms of promotions and content topics in order to achieve your organizational and marketing goals.
Aside from saving you and your team time, automating social media content helps you better connect with your target audience. Your customers and prospective customers are almost always active on social media. American adults spend more than 11 hours each day interacting with media. Wow! Unfortunately, your team cannot be available on social media at every hour of the day. That’s why marketing automation is so important! The work is getting done even when you’re not actively working. What could be better than that?
Social media automation will help your brand be there when your target audience is active on social media, which ultimately leads to higher engagement levels. A successful social media strategy will achieve much higher levels of engagement, conversions, and impressions when automated strategically.
At this point, you may be wondering how you can get started automating your social media strategy. Whether you’re a social media pro or if you’ve just started, here are some tips to help you automate your processes:
Make Decisions
Analyze your social media process for opportunities for automation. Start at the very beginning. Write your process out step-by-step and identify who is responsible for each task. This process will help you to identify redundancies and which steps in the process are the most time-consuming. You may decide to automate your social content using SocialPilot’s RSS Feed Automation tool.
Add the RSS Feed URL of a particular site and leave the rest on SocialPilot. This RSS automation tool will automatically share the blogs of your favorite sites on your social media accounts. Better yet, you don’t need to spend time going over each platform each day. You can rest easy knowing SocialPilot has taken care of it.
Another popular opportunity for automation is post scheduling. You can curate third-party content and bulk schedule your original content to have an amazing mix of content uploaded and ready to go, all at once.
Understand and Follow Best Practices
Marketing automation is a time-saver, but that doesn’t mean you can simply “set it and forget it”. You’ll need to ensure your content is relevant to your target audience so that you’re not filling their feeds with unwanted content that may be considered spam. Take some time to review your social media content and strategy on a monthly basis to stay proactive and in tune with what type of content your audience is engaging with.
You’ll want to measure the content of your posts, but also the frequency and timing of when your posts are going out. SocialPilot’s Social Media Analytics tool will give you all of the insights you need to make data-informed decisions.
Choose the Right Networks
Each social media platform is unique and has its own unique set of users. The data below should help you make an informed decision on which networks to leverage for your business:
- Ideal for reaching 18-64-year-olds
- Over 2 billion monthly active users
- Most of the users are using a mobile device to read content
- Users utilize Facebook to connect with family and friends, learn about new things, and get opinions and recommendations from their network
- Over 500 million daily active users
- Majority of users are 18-29
- Users are more apt to interact with brands via stories and in-feed content than other networks
- Over 300 million monthly active users
- 18-29-year-olds love to use Twitter
- Users engage with brands to get to know them on a more personal level
Choose the Right Tool
Choosing the right tool to automate your social media marketing can be a make-it-or-break-it decision. 85,000+ professionals trust SocialPilot to manage social media, schedule social media posts, improve engagement and analyze results – at a pocket-friendly cost.
“This is the best auto-post tool I’ve used in the last 10 years. Over a six-week timeframe, traffic to my website has increased from almost nothing to almost 10,000 per month. Ease of use. I stepped right into it and found it to be user-friendly. This is one of the best experiences I’ve had in my online career.” – Susan Daniels, Founder – Beautiful Lives by Susan
Why is SocialPilot the right fit? We have solutions for small businesses, freelancers, agencies, marketing departments, and enterprise organizations. No matter the size of your team, there are ways to optimize, automate, and save time and money. We even offer priority email support so that you are always fully supported by our marketing experts. What could be better than that?
If you have questions about getting started with social media marketing automation or how SocialPilot can help you be successful in your social media marketing efforts, please do not hesitate to reach out. We’re here to support you and ensure your social media strategy is effective and efficient.
