As you are reading this, I am currently swanning around the pool of a beautiful villa in Marrakech, celebrating my thirtieth birthday and giving myself a well earned bit of down time whilst switching off from technology.
Of course, you wouldn’t have ever guessed this since my social media accounts would suggest I’m very much still hard at work posting content. That is the beauty of social media automation, my new BFF and the tool I now can’t live without.
Keeping in contact with your audience when you run a business is very much a time consuming and recurring task as you have to be consistent and be posting regularly. At the same time, we don’t want to let this get in the way of running our actual businesses. We need to find a balance and social media automation tools are an amazing way to ease the load as the schedule your posts for you and post on your behalf.
So firstly, you may be wondering ‘what are these magical tools you speak of?’ and secondly, ‘how do I go about using them?’
Well, my friends, there are in fact LOTS of different social media automation tools out there
I could spend forever trying to explain each one and its differences. But I wont as https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/social-media-management has done a pretty good job of doing this already.
I personally use Buffer and have this to be pretty easy to use and so far, I’ve not paid a penny to use it. It gets the job done and allows me to schedule up to ten posts at a time. I’d heard a lot of mention of Hoostsuit and was originally going to go with this option until I realized that on the free plan, Hootsuite, only lets you schedule one post at a time.
I may upgrade my Buffer account soon to a paid version ($10/month) which will then allow me to schedule up to 100 posts. Perfect if I decide to schlep off on a uber long vay-cay. In the meantime, here are some tips if you are looking to jump on board with social media automation.
- Schedule posts before you go on holiday.
My favourite tip as going on holiday is a time when I don’t really want to have to think about too much. But just because you are taking some time off, doesn’t mean your social media presence has to. Prepare posts and content in advance so that you don’t have to be constantly hooked up to your laptop whilst you’re away. Less tweeting = more tanning.
- Fill in your social media calendar with posts you’ve already published
Your social media calendar doesn’t have to be solely fresh material. Can you imagine if you were going away for two weeks and had to have a back up of two weeks worth of fresh content?
Re-use old posts that are still relevant, particularly the ones that got a good reaction. Don’t fret about people thinking you are just repeating yourself as chances are, they didn’t see it the first time, have forgotten about it or because it was that good, they don’t mind seeing it again.
- Cater messages for each network.
Each social media platform has a different format (eg word length, image size) so don’t just throw a ‘one size fits all’ approach at it. Tailor posts as you would if not using automation, sticking to Twitter word limits and using the correct image sizes.
- Use analytics to see how well posts perform
Most automation platforms have analytics built in so you can track how well your posts do in comparison to eachother. If a post does particularly well, schedule it to be reposted at a later date.
- Post articles of interest within your niche.
Your social calendar needn’t contain solely your own posts, and in fact when it does, it can tend to look like a bit to much ‘oh hey look at me!’
Whilst the aim of your social media platforms are to get eyes on you and your brand and to generate awareness of your business, you want to be helpful and knowledgeable and that means scheduling curated content that would benefit your audience. I like to share interesting articles I found across the web about women in business, online marketing and life hacks such as productivity. Just because these articles weren’t written by me doesn’t mean that they can’t be of benefit to my site and brand. It’s my way of showing my audience ‘he look, I found this really interesting and think you may do too!’
I love feedly for finding new content (a lot of my good finds come from The Huffington Post, Forbes and Lifehacker), but I also drag articles I’ve stumbled across via Twitter and Facebook too.
- Remain engaged – know what to automate and when to engage.
You don’t want to just throw a load of content into your scheduling tool and then leave it to work its magic. You want your brand to come across as human rather than robotic so you need to keep engaged with your audience. Although scheduling means that posted content is automated throughout the day, you should still make the time to pop onto your platforms when you can. Perhaps schedule just one time slot a day to respond to comments, post spontaneously, engage in discussion and comment on your audience’s content.
- Don’t schedule too far in advance.
Whilst premium versions of many automation tools allow you to schedule enough content to keep you covered for weeks at a time, you don’t want to schedule too far in advance as what is relevant now may not be later down the line. Decide what content is time specific and make sure it goes out at the right moment and also be ready to change your schedule if something that is due to go out is no longer relevant.
- Keep on top of current affairs.
When automating, it’s crucial to keep aware of what is going on in the world and position yourself to adjust and add to your content when needed. Remember, you want to appear human and not a robot so adding to discussion that is currently trending makes you and your brand relatable and real.
- Use quotes in your scheduler.
I love me a good quote and I find they are a great way to pad out your scheduled social media calendar. People seem to respond ridiculously well to quote and it was in fact posting quotes on my Instagram that directed a huge amount of traffic to my site and got people reading my articles.
Think about what type of quotes resonate with your brand and what your audience will repond to. Post the quotes with an image (I love the app Word Swag for this) for a bigger impact.
- Keep on top of conversations about you/your brand
If discussion is happening about you and your brand, you’re going to want to know about it to find out what people are saying and adjust to feedback and criticism. A tool called Mention searches where you and your brand are mentioned and allows you to reply and engage directly from the Mention dashboard. It also gives you the option to receive alerts when you are mentioned.
