Social media automation is evolving and how. Marketers are working round-the-clock to be omnipresent across all social media platforms, but that is easier said than done.
Users expect brands to reply instantly on social networks, and brands want to do that.
However, it is simply impossible to be present “where your audience is” every time. Your audience is spread across multiple networks and if you want to leverage them all at once, you have to automate your social engagement.
This goes hand-in-hand with the need to understand which social media platform will work best for your brand. Some of the best social media apps like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are home to a majority of your audience. Then there were emerging platforms like TikTok that became a rage but soon went out of the picture.
This quick change in how a platform rises and falls can be stressful as you try to strategize your social media engagement. If you try to put the same kind of effort on all social platforms, chances are high that you will be exhausted trying to meet user demands everywhere.
Your best solution is to automate social media tasks like post sharing, engagement, and traffic analysis. Update your followers, interact using chatbots, and easily save hours of manual work.
This article will look into the best (tried and tested) social media automation workflows that you can (and must) start using in 2021 and beyond.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
1. Automate Social Media Posting
Each social media platform has a unique messaging requirement. While Twitter has restrictions of 140 characters, platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook let you post fairly long posts clubbed with images, GIFs, and links.
When you are trying to engage your audience across multiple social channels, you need to get the same message posted on various channels with modifications as per the channel. Instead of doing it all manually, you can set up automated workflows to get your message posted across multiple channels simultaneously while you focus on driving engagement.
One way is ofcourse using social posting tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to pre-schedule and update multiple social channels. Another alternative is setting up a bot that will automatically publish your post on a social channel.
For instance, let’s say you run a blog on WordPress. You want to make a tweet about every new post that goes live on your blog, as soon as it’s live. Instead of manually scheduling a tweet, you can set up a bot using Automate.io and connect your WordPress and Twitter account. By doing this, a tweet is automatically published whenever a new blog is live.
Your bot runs in the background without any interruption. So, all you need to do is set up your bot and then just let the bot do all the work. Try this (and other such) automation workflow(s) right away.
2. Capture Social Leads with Chatbots & Lead Ads
Social chatbots have gained immense popularity. It automatically responds to a user query and captures basic user information in a snap.
This does two things –
- For a brand: It helps in keeping the engagement going without requiring human intervention. Plus, it captures basic user information that comes in handy for a brand in the long run.
- For users: It gives an instant response which is exactly what users want. Despite knowing it’s a chatbot, users interact anyway because it solves their queries on the primary level.
So, it’s a win-win situation for both, users and brands.
A chatbot is very human in the way it interacts with each user. Most social chatbots are designed to handle simple queries like helping with signing up or subscribing to a blog or initiating password resets, and so on.
For instance, look at how Hubspot gives options to choose to keep the interaction going. Needless to say, the moment a user clicks on ‘Get Started’ on Facebook Messenger, the user profile is captured as an active lead.
These chatbots capture user information easily. Brands segregate these leads based on social profile details and query intent. What follows next is an automated sequence of nurturing leads and converting them into loyal users.
Dayna, Social Media Expert at ServiceNow, says-
Juggling an active community for a consumer product/service means that it can be hard to prioritize requests/questions from the social community. Chatbot filters through the messages and answer the easier queries. As a result, I spend time only on messages that requires my attention.
Here, you can simply set up an automated workflow between your Live chat tool and your CRM to capture leads directly into your CRM.
If you are using Hubspot CRM (or any other CRM), then you can use this workflow right away –
Several other social media automation workflows you can try-
3. Track Your Business on Social Media
Social media is not just about posting new updates or sharing blogs. It is also about listening to your users and engaging with them.
Users prefer social media platforms to voice their feedback, complaints, and suggestions for a brand. And they expect the brand to listen and respond.
With automation, you can easily turn your social media platform into a user engagement hub. Respond to your user queries, promote brand advocacy, and learn what your customers want from you.
How?
One of the easiest ways is to track whenever a user mentions your brand. For instance, on Twitter, you can set up an automated workflow to get notifications whenever any user tags your brand. You can automatically respond to these tweets without wasting time.
Engaging your users on social media platforms may be a challenge, what with social posts losing their life shelf after a few hours. Infact, research shows that a Facebook post has a validity of a maximum of 6 hours before it gets lost in heaps of other “news feed”. And on Twitter, a tweet is valid for just 15 minutes.
You need to be quick in following your new users, connecting with your existing followers, and interact with them at the right time.
Ofcourse, doing it all manually is insane. With social media automation workflows in place, you can quickly catch up with all the user engagements. Not just that, automated workflows also help in filtering out all the noise on social media platforms and focus on what matters.
Integrate your social tools with your collaboration and tracking tools so that your entire team can focus on driving user engagement.
Pro-Tips to Drive Social Engagement
Social media evolves faster than you can comprehend. So, it is essential you catch up with the pace sooner. To do so, we have a few essential tips to remember, while and after automating your social media engagement.
(1) Be mindful of your users’ time zones
If you are catering to a global audience, it is obvious your target users are based out in different countries. This means they are in different time zones.
You cannot sit all day to post updates for each time zone, but you can always fix a particular time for your posts. This way you can grab maximum eyeballs with your social posts.
For instance, Facebook automatically takes in the time zone in which your computer is set in. You can make edits to it to fix a global time to reach a maximum of your audience.
(2) Avoid scheduling posts way ahead of time
There’s a lot going on around and you want to be relevant every time you make a social post. Relevancy can become challenging if you are scheduling social posts way ahead of time. This is because what’s relevant at this hour may become old news in two days’ time.
Scheduling social posts is a great idea to save time but make sure you set up a calendar on weekly basis. This way your content continues to be new and relevant.
(3) Customize messages for each platform
One of the simplest tricks to be active on multiple social channels is to recycle your messages. However, the trick is to customize your message according to the social platform. If you are confused about how to do it, follow CoSchedule’s guide on how to write messages for each channel.
If you are planning to use visuals with your social posts, awesome. But make sure you align to the size guidelines for each platform. Most design tools come with pre-set templates according to the design dimensions for each channel. All you need to do is pick one, edit, and get going.
For instance, I am a Canva-fan. All I do is pick a template, make edits, and voila! my design is ready in the right size.
(4) Know how frequently to post
You want to drive maximum engagement with your social posts. But that doesn’t mean you have to post countless updates. To leverage social media, you need to determine the optimum frequency of posting.
Here are a few observations to help you plan:
- On Twitter, engagement drops after 3 tweets.
- On Facebook, engagement is maximum with 1 post but drops with 2 posts in a day.
Experts believe that engagement solely depends on what kind of content you post, what days you pick to post, and how active your users are. While there is no set rule to follow, it is essential you do proper sentimental analysis for your social posts.
Know when your engagement was maximum and accordingly determine how often you can post on respective social channels.
Final Thoughts
Automate your social media engagement to interact and engage with your users better. Understand what part of your social media strategy you want to automate and why. Having clarity on this will help you automate better and drive more engagement.
Have you started automating your social engagements yet? Let me know what part you think needs automation and how you are doing it.
Till then, happy automating.
