Before delving deeper into the pros and cons of automating your social media posts, let me warn you that while the benefits relating to it may prove significant; overdoing it may result in disasters. For instance, pre-planning a post about the scenic beauty of a destination (such as Nepal) may create negative results when that country had suffered from devastating earthquake or a catastrophe. The answer, therefore, lies in using discretion, especially for hotels and smaller businesses that work with minor marketing team and for whom time is a precious commodity.
What is Social Media automation?
Social media automation entails the use of tools (mostly third-party) to have some of your chosen social posts pre-loaded into a pattern and pre-arranged to be posted by that application at a specified time. Automation tools can also simplify some in-house tasks that include sending direct messages to new followers as also reminding them about those.
Tools such as Buffer, Social Oomph, Zapier and Post Planner are all popular options for various levels of automation.
Some of the benefits of SM automation
It is mostly the time and energy that you can save by SM automation. Instead of logging into a number of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and others several times a day, depending on how frequently you need you business posts, you can just spend a couple of hours to upload your post content to be scheduled through the week or month.
Since these tools will help you post the same message across all the social platforms automatically, you need not harass yourself to log into each social account individually, thereby saving yourself time switching between the accounts.
Also, as you can schedule multiple posts at one , automation will ensure sending out a consistent brand image across a number of social platforms without your bothering about that important issue.
Finally, since automation tools can post your messages at scheduled periods, you can be free to work on other things throughout the day and still have your posts going out to your fans and followers at optimal times to ensure the greatest impact.
Automate your SM but keep it social, too
In other words, while automating your SM, you also need to monitor your social media for comments from users and responding to these, thereby creating engagement. These may done in the form of re-tweeting, ‘liking’, replying as also commenting on other users’ posts, if appropriate, to get conversation in easy flow in order to demonstrate your cordiality.
Timing is an important issue
Farsightedness may take you far into the road to success, but do not try to schedule your social content much too far in advance. True, you can not pre-anticipate natural calamities like Tsunami or temblor, but keeping an eye open to world affairs may often warn you about impending danger to certain areas, thereby help you withdraw related posts.
Social media automation tool “Social Oomph”
Do you struggle to get all your social media tasks done every day? Here is a tool to help you out.
>> Social Oomph
Social Oomph is a social media management tool with quite a few useful automation features. One of the best features is the queue reservoir.
Evergreen content is one that doesn’t go out of date.
Nevertheless, when you post blog content that is considered evergreen it’s important to continue promoting it well after it has been initially posted.
As your social media presence continues to grow, you get more fans/followers that have never seen your content before and also it is very likely that most of your existing fans/followers didn’t see your content when you first shared it!
When you post evergreen content you add it to your Queue and in this queue you specify how often you want content shared.
Social Oomph will pick items from the queue every 3 hours.
When you put an item in the queue Socialoomph allows you to create multiple variations of the tweet and as a result you are not sending out the same tweet all the time.
So, for every item you add to the queue you have 3 different variations of the tweets:
However, this is how SocialOomph will send out the tweets:
Tweet 1: 5 Tools to Market Your Business Using Mobile Social Media Apps http://bit.ly/1akwk7V
Tweet 2: 5 great mobile social media apps that you should download to-day http://bit.ly/1akwk7V
Tweet 3: Does your company have a mobile app? Here are some examples to inspire you: http://bit.ly/1akwk7V
The queue reservoir is such a useful feature that it will save a lot of time and it will also drive you more traffic to your site.