Scheduling part of your social media content is well worth it and provides tons of benefits to busy small businesses. With proper use of social media automation, you can make your time spent on your social media online marketing as productive and profitable as possible. However, you shouldn’t automate all your posts as you should allow for spontaneous and real engagement.
Step 1: Develop a content calendar
Develop an idea of what you want to say each day on all of your active social media networks. Schedule in personal posts, promotion and relevant, original content from others. Map out all of the events you want to highlight and themes you want to touch on throughout the month.
It may also be helpful to include the time of day that these posts will occur. Hubspot provides an in depth, social media template updated weekly that can help you through this process. You could also use a calendar like Google calendar to plan you content. Dedicate one hour a week, and set a reminder to outline the following week’s social media content.
Step 2: Choose your automation tools
At Hunch, we use Buffer to create queues of content on our Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. There are plenty of premium applications online, but Buffer is free to use. Once you have your social media calendar planned out for the week, you can automate all of those posts. This saves time throughout the week and takes out the risk of forgetting to post.
Connect your apps with IFTTT and Zapier
These services connect apps with one another to create a call-and-response chain of action. Both places allow you to browse their long lists of possibilities so you can find something useful for you. Potential recipes include automated systems for favoriting tweets and sending them to Buffer, archiving to Dropbox whenever you are tagged in a Facebook photo, and saving articles to read later directly from favourite social media posts.
Avoid the pitfalls of automation
Customize your messages for different networks.
Different styles work for different networks and the audience that you draw to those platforms. Using the same message across all your social media network makes it look insincere. Followers take notice when you put unique messages across all of your social media networks.
Stay attuned to current events
Stay away to what is happening in the world around you, so you can provide commentary on current news and events. When big news does strike, it’s important to be prepared to hit pause on all your automation instances.
