Being an active presence on the social media is a must for every company and entrepreneur in the world. It is the best, most efficient and cost effective way to approach qualified leads, engage them and turn them into customers. We will not dwell any more on the “why” part of doing social media for business in this article, instead we will focus on “how”.
Social media engagement takes time, and that is one thing that entrepreneurs don’t really have. Growing a business takes a lot of time, and you still need to be able to have a personal life and enjoy time with your family and friends. So, how can you run your social media marketing without investing too much time in it? The answer is through automation.
Automating social media marketing does not mean that you have a magic tool which does all the work. Instead it means that you use various tools to minimise your actual input in social media posting and only step in at important moments. Let’s get more in depth for a better understanding of social media automation.
1. Keep Track of Mentions of Your Business
One thing you need to look after is your online reputation. Social media is great both for building reputation and for thrashing it. This is why you need to be aware of anyone saying anything about your business and take adequate measures, by responding to criticism and removing defamatory and insulting comments.
In order to have every kind of mention at your fingertips you need to use Google Alerts – which sends you notifications either as it happens or as a daily digest – letting you know of every instance when your business name is mentioned on the social media or in a website story.
2. Share Your Posts at the Best Time
The best time to post is when most of your followers are online and browsing their social media pages. To do that manually would probably be inconvenient, because the patterns of your followers’ social media usage may not be compatible with your daily schedule. This is why you need a tool such as SocialBro.
SocialBro analyses the activity on your social media accounts and shares your programmed posts at the moment when your pages have the highest level of activity and engagement from your followers.
3. Share Suggested Content
Content curation is one of the most efficient social media marketing strategies, but it is also the most time consuming. You have to search for up-to-date, engaging content which is most likely to be interesting for your followers. You can do so by browsing the news feed, looking at the social media accounts of industry leaders… but that could take quite a lot of time.
The simpler way to solve this problem is to use a social media automation tool such as Hootsuite, which delivers curated content specifically tailored for your niche, your interests and your targeted keywords. All you have to do is give it a quick look and schedule the posts.
4. Never Forget a Good Blog Idea
In terms of content, blog posts are the best way to share insights, interesting ideas and helpful solutions to your followers’ problems. However, planned time for writing and sharing blog posts does not always coincide with great ideas. There are days when you have 2 or 3 great ideas and writing those posts takes just a few minutes, because you are booming with creativity and inspiration.
But there is the small issue of planning those blog posts to match your marketing plan. In this case WordPress is the clear winner in terms of blogging platforms, giving you the flexibility to schedule posts and never have to worry about losing a great blog idea just because it conflicted with your posting schedule.
5. Link Social Media Accounts
This is the simplest idea for social media automation. By linking your social media accounts, your content is shared across all your platforms, helping you reach more people and gain more followers. So whenever you post a photo on Instagram, it could also show up on Facebook as well, and every Facebook post could also be shared on Twitter.
In this way, using simple automation tips and tools, your social media marketing activity will be highly effective with minimum time input from you.