When you are managing your business online, you would understand the importance of marketing the same on social media. You have done your bit of research to understand that social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. have a huge following and that you can reach out to a wider group of target audience across all geographies within a short time. You have also done the groundwork of creating your profile on these platforms to garner more visibility for your business. You are then presented with the main challenge!
Each of these social media platforms requires you to post relevant content about your business on a regular basis. You cannot just copy and paste the content from one site to another. Each of these sites demands a different format of the content to be posted. You are also bound to get replies from hundreds of users on these sites for the information that you post. How do you ensure that you post on these sites regularly? How can you engage with the users actively and reply to the comments posted on your handles? These are questions that are topmost in your mind, aren’t they?
I am sharing some simple social media automation tips here that you can follow so that you can schedule your social media posts and put them on autopilot. With these tips, you can not only ensure that your social media presence is frequent but you can also save a great deal of time and energy in the process.
Schedule in advance
While it is important to post content regularly on social media to make your presence felt, it may not be possible for you to spend time posting content consistently. You may want to post a lot of updates, but you may not have the time for it as you might have other business commitments to attend to. This is when you can make use of “scheduling”. You can prepare your posts when you get some time off from your work and schedule them in such a way that they get posted on your social media handles at a particular time. This way, you can attend to your target audiences across all geographies.
You can choose to schedule your posts every day or every week, as per your preference. You can also schedule posts about special offers/ promotions to be posted on particular occasions. To avail this feature, you should activate the option of automated publishing on your blog. If you have posts on your blog that are viewed by a lot of users, you can schedule them in such a way so that they can be automatically published across various social media sites. So, in effect, you can still be active on social media while you are offline.
Automated response systems
As I stated above, the two main challenges that you will face on social media are posting frequently and responding to each of the comments on your profile. We have addressed the first challenge with the first point. The second challenge is quite tough and very important for your credibility. It is not enough if you just post on social media consistently. You should also take the effort to reach out to the people who have commented on your posts to show them that you care for their opinions. It is practically impossible to reach out to hundreds of replies/queries/suggestions that you get on your social media handles on a daily basis.
This is where you can take the help of a feature known as a social inbox. A social inbox is a single place where you can access all your messages, comments, and mentions from social media platforms so that it becomes easy for you to respond to them. Thanks to this feature, you don’t have to spend time logging into different platforms to see what people have commented on your posts. Through the social inbox, you can get in touch with your target audiences from all sites directly and respond on time, thereby making your social media presence felt.
Make use of technology
Today, there are lots of tools and resources that you can make use of, for making your social media presence a success. While using tools, you should be smart enough to choose those tools that are particular to the specific social media platform. For example, a tool that works for automatic postings to Facebook may not necessarily work for Instagram and vice versa. Some tools not only help you post consistent content but they also save a great deal of your time by managing your content for you. They come up with content relevant for your niche and ask for your permission before automatically posting them on your social media handles. Tools like these leave you with a lot of time that you can use in identifying new opportunities to grow your business.
Some important points to note
In spite of knowing the tools to put their social media feeds on autopilot, not many businesses gain from them because they tend to do some mistakes. One of the first mistakes is to schedule the posts for a later date and completely forget about them. Though you have scheduled your posts for “automatic publish” for a later date or time, it is very important for you to analyze your posts carefully.
You may have to adjust them manually if needed so that they sound relevant to the people who read them when they get published. You should track the performance of these auto-posts to know if they are profitable to your business or not. This way, you will know if you are on the right track or not, while putting your social media feeds on autopilot.
You should read the posts first before you decide to automate them. All the posts that are published on your handle represent your credibility to the outside world. Therefore, check the posts thoroughly to ensure that they are not obscene, derogatory or controversial in nature. When controversial posts are automatically published in your account, it destroys your reputation among your target audience and it is very difficult to get back the trust of your audiences.
