Social Media Automation
Weve highlighted some tips and tricks in a previous blog post on how to make the use of social media in your business, but a difficulty that many businesses find is lack of time - especially those who run as a one person team. It becomes even more complicated if youre trying to juggle 3 or more profiles, trying to capture the audiences from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google and others.
Luckily, there are tools out there that can help you make the most of your social media profiles, and once you start using them youll notice just how quick and easy social media can be.
Introducing
Let us introduce you to a an automation tool. There are a couple out there, but two popular ones are Hootsuite and Buffer. These tools can become your way of managing your social networks easily.
These tools can help you manage your social networks in one place from YouTube to LinkedIn, from Google Plus to Facebook.
Remember
While you can automate social media to a high extent, avoid doing it all the time. Take notice of those who reach out to you by posting on your Facebook wall, or by tweeting to you. Send them a personal message or tweet, and show that there is actually a human behind the account rather than just some company.
Social media is very much about the social aspect - connecting with people, sharing photos, videos and other things which others may find interesting. To be truly social, it needs to be real, and thats where automation cant help.
Its also important to monitor your scheduled messages before they are sent. Depending on your message, it may be something which could be sensitive at the time of posting, but wasnt at the time of scheduling. A quick search on a search engine for badly timed tweets will reveal quite a few stories of this.
So how do you avoid it? Dont bulk up your scheduled messages - do tomorrows messages today, and read the news, know whats going on. But most importantly is think before you post.
What can I automate
There are quite a few topics you can automate, as well as different types of messages. For example:
- Questions / polls
- Videos
- Pictures
- Links to articles or blog posts
- Quotes
- And more
But remember - one size doesnt fit all. While you may find it easy to set up one message for 4 or 5 different social networks, the audience of Facebook is different to that of Twitter. Use the same message, but write it in the way to suit the audience.
When should I post?
Usage for each social network varies, but the automation tools can help schedule these for you. Hootsuite for example, has a useful Autoschedule tool which tries to schedule it for what it believes to be the best time to capture a good audience.
Last Words
Its not just about automation. Dont forget your hashtags too, and adding that personal touch.
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