Social Media Automation
Social media automation is in one way the antithesis of social media, because it is ‘anti social’ by definition. On the other hand, it can greatly contribute to efficiency and scalabillity.
It could be essentially described as process of automating a part or all of social media marketing activity. This can involve anything from automating content sharing activity to queuing tweets and recycling evergreen content. Automation is done via tools, some examples being Buffer, CoSchedule and HubSpot, and can reduce time spent on marketing by taking over repetitive, energy-consuming tasks.
For small and medium businesses (SMBs) in particular, automation is an essential part of any marketing strategy. It has been proven that on the whole, business that are automating part of or all of their marketing strategy outperform companies that aren’t. Another great benefit is saving time and money, because it means less resources and hours are spent on manual, repetitive tasks.
In many ways, the benefits of automating our social media activity are the same as automating our other marketing activities. With proper tools we can keep the content consistent across channels, maintain an active presence while being on holiday, monitor and analyse social media activity without having to run our own stats and reports and post more in less time.
Even though it is apparent that benefits are great, a little critical thinking is required when social media automation is being considered.
Some negative sides of social media automation can be wrecking havoc on brand equity. The value of our brand as seen by our customers, which has a direct impact on sales volume and profit margins, can be seriously damaged by automated social media. The reason is that automatically liking, following or posting on social channels can make us look like a spam bot and therefore seem less trustworthy. It al leads to many people actively avoiding brands who do things like automatically messaging new followers or posting endless streams of content. The point of social media is for it to be authentic and ‘social’.
Another problem is that some social networks don’t allow it. For example, Instagram doesn’t support usage of tools or bots to automatically comment, like or follow people. In Instagram’s case, it is treated as violation of their terms & conditions. Violating those terms can cause account suspension. Another problem worth meantioning is that it still takes a lot of time and effort. Even if we can manage to automate a few of social media tasks and processes, we’ll still have to monitor our channels and manually engage with followers to avoid social media problems.
Social media automation can be risky, especially if we’re not keeping on top of what’s going out on our channels, but with with the right strategy, the pitfalls of social media automation can be avoided. The trick is to strike a balance, and to know what to automate and when. Good automation is automation that helps us do something we’d do manually if we couldn’t automate it.
Some advice on handling it in a way that can be beneficial to our business is:
- Avoidance of interaction automation — in aim to seem genuine, not spammy
- Automation of our editorial calendar — for pushing our content out to all our channels at optimal times, which will result in amplifying the reach of our content and keeping our networks active and engaged.
- Experimentation with different tools and strategies — it will result in finding what works best for our strategy, resources and business goals.
- Automating tedious tasks in your social media inbox — The real value of social media is based on conversations and interactions between human beings. As social media manager must take a lot of time do do every single action on social media, any click that can be avoided, text that doesn’t have to be typed out, or actions that don’t have to be taken repetitively, can make a big difference. That’s why we use tools that have such features to simplify and save us time, contain keyboard shortcuts, enable saved replies, automated moderation, auto advancement, repeating posts automatically…
In conclusion, social media automation is a useful and beneficial thing if used properly. However, it takes skill and practice to learn how to use it with minimal negative effects.
It is very important that, in beginning, we take it one step at a time and automate processes one by one. The first step of social media automation is always to have everything in one place. It’s as just as important to be able to draw insights from all of our social data as it is to automate it for the sake of efficiency. Social media automation serves for efficiency and enhancing community’s experience. Humans cannot be replaced by it because human still has to have meaningful convos with community, keep the schedule of content fresh and exciting and create creative content to be shared and scheduled to go out via chosen automation tool. Our skills will be the key factor in determination if social media automation will be destructive for a business, or a lifesaver.
