3 things social media automation will help you achieve;

1. Maintain consistent content

Consistency is key to building a strong following on social media.

Businesses often create accounts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, but have trouble achieving consistency. A  survey conducted with 900 social media users identified consistency as one of the most important factors that determines whether people continue to follow a brand.

Businesses that are strapped for time or do not have sufficient manpower to assign a dedicated team for social media management tend to drop off the social media radar.

As a result, they reap little or no benefits from marketing on social media.

Social media automation holds the solution to this problem.

Tools like DrumUp and Feedly help you discover fresh, trending content that you can share to your audience. DrumUp also lets you schedule posts, ensuring that your social accounts stay active even while you’re offline.

Feedly

DrumUp

2. Get control over your strategy

Automation tools give you more control over your social accounts and helps you post more content.

Depending on the tool you choose to use, you can control the kind of content that is shared, the time at which it is posted,  and also the frequency of posting.

Plus you can monitor the level of engagement you’re receiving and modify your strategy to get more Likes, Shares or Retweets.

Since social media automation tools help you develop insight into the nature and extent of readership (or viewership) you’ll also be able to share content in a more targeted manner. More importantly, automation helps you deal with volume – it allows you to post more content on multiple accounts, more frequently, with more ease.

3. Give back your time

The biggest incentive of using social media automation is the amount of time it helps you free up.

Rather than spending hours on end trying to find content that might just get shared and bring your website a few visitors, use tools to identify trending topics and discover relevant content. Using a centralized dashboard to schedule content in advance also saves you the trouble of having to log into each account individually and post the content manually.

But note that saving time does not mean spending no time at all on your social media accounts. That would only be counter-productive. While you can automate some of the tasks associated with social media management, you’ll still have to keep a tab on all your accounts and respond to comments and mentions.

Remember that one of the objectives of using social media marketing is to make your brand more relatable. This can only be achieved by communicating with your audience.

3 tips on how to use social media automation;

1. Keep the schedule flexible

Make sure that you always leave room for timely updates when scheduling posts in advance.

There may be an announcement regarding your business that you’d like to make, or perhaps a piece of important news or viral content that you want to share with your audience. Whatever be the case, know that it’s okay to do ad-hoc posts on top of your automated schedule. Just be careful not to do it too often, since that would defeat the purpose of scheduling posts in the first place.

2. Time it right

If you’re looking to increase engagement on your social accounts, it’s important to first understand when you’re audience is most active. Posting content in this time window will increase the likelihood of it being seen and shared.

One of the things to consider in this regard is the demographic information of your audience. This is particularly relevant if your audience are in different time zones.

Although timing your posts requires a trial and error approach to see which schedule works best with your audience, here are few insights into audience behavior on Facebook and Twitter.

• Engagement on Facebook is at its peak on Thursday and Fridays.
• To see an increase in the number of times a post is shared, schedule it at 1pm.
• While Tweets by B2B businesses get more engagement between Monday and Friday, B2C businesses see higher rates of engagement on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
• Twitter users are 181 percent more likely to be logged in while they are commuting.

3. Use analytics

Once you’ve successfully established a steady presence on your chosen social media platforms, it’s time to measure how your accounts are performing.

Are they taking you closer to the goal you set for your business?

There are several social media analytics tools that allow you to measure the performance of your posts. While the number of views a post gets is a good indicator of your reach, there’s little meaning in paying attention to it if what you’re really looking for is more sales. So get clear on what metrics are important to you in relation to your business goals.

The metrics you choose to track may vary based on the objective of your efforts, but can be broadly classified into four categories – Consumption Metrics, Sharing Metrics, Lead Generation Metrics and Sales Metrics.

Using analytics helps you understand what works, and what doesn’t for your business. It gives you valuable knowledge that can be used to improve your social media marketing strategy.

Conclusion

These are the key points from this article;

• Social media automation is a good idea, particularly for businesses with multiple accounts
• Automation helps you achieve consistency in your social media marketing efforts
• It gives you greater control over the content you share, and how you share it
• It helps you save time, which you can then use to grow your business
• Post schedules must be flexible and ad-hoc posts are important, especially if they’re time-sensitive
• Posting content at a time when your audience is online increases the likelihood of it being viewed and shared
• Analytics help you understand what works and what doesn’t for your business

What automation tools do you use?