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Managing social media accounts is now a crucial job, and whoever has the role is a keystone in your marketing team. Social media marketing impacts company reputation, brand visibility and sales. However, it’s also a lot of work. Manually planning and posting material on several different platforms every day can be overwhelming. If you try to do it without a system or any tools, you’re bound to make mistakes.
Automating posts will help you to reap long-term benefits. You can streamline your process so it’s more efficient, getting more results with less effort. And you can ensure that you have a consistent, engaging presence, which is crucial to boost your platform in the face of the algorithms used by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
With automatic social media posting, you’ll write and design your content, then schedule it to be shared at a later date, when you know the time and days are the most advantageous. This helps you to complete and schedule your work and eliminate the manual busywork that would decrease your productivity. You also won’t be creating on the fly and posting instantly, so you can be strategic and create more polished content.
You’ll still need to make time to respond to and engage with your audience– that should not be automated. But the regular content? That you can save time on. Continue reading to learn how to automate your social media posts.
Choose A Social Media Tool
A fisherman can’t work without his fishing rod, and a social media manager needs their own tools. There are plenty of options to choose from– you might try a couple before deciding on one that works for you. A few things to consider: find a tool that’ll support the social networks where you have a presence. If this is your first time using a media management tool, try to find one that’s straightforward to use so you can get started quickly. You also want one that will allow you to monitor and reply to posts directly via the platform, because the whole point is that you don’t want to be logging in and out of your accounts constantly. Many tools will include analytics, so that you can better understand how your content is performing and adjust your strategy accordingly.
If you’re part of a team, you’ll also want to look for features that will enable collaboration and easy communication. And of course, you want to find one at a price that works for you: many have free versions, or at least offer free trials so that you can find out whether you want to invest in them.
Create A Content Schedule
With many tools, you can create templates to post on social media. Using these templates, you can reuse ideas and concepts to continue to post new social media marketing content. Moreover, you make scheduling on social media a lot less time consuming. With the right templates for automation, you’ll be able to schedule content for multiple platforms at once.
Each of the social networks have different peak posting times. Some platforms have the highest response during business hours, while others are used most during the evenings and weekends. In fact, one of the best time to post on Instagram is at 2 AM!
Ensure that you have at least one post scheduled for each platform every day. Some platforms will benefit from multiple posts per day. And don’t be afraid to repost: people scroll down feeds so quickly that you might not catch their eye the first time. On Twitter, at least, you can repost things a few times without seeming spammy.
Work Variety Into Your Posts
You can work variety into your posts even if it’s essentially the same content or information. This is one of the best social media tips because variety attracts customers. Frame your information like a question, or pull a quote from a customer. Pose questions or challenges to increase engagement. Share photos or video relevant to the content, or share an anecdote that illustrates your message.
Some content is evergreen, and you can re-share it whenever without hassle. Some will be seasonal, if you have certain campaigns around holidays or events, so you can schedule it within a certain time frame. And some is product-specific, which is information you want to be able to re-share while keeping it interesting and relevant.
Finally, you want to keep learning! Use data analytics to measure your success and view messages with the highest engagement. You can re-queue your best-performing content to get ever bigger results.
Get organized and get an automation tool– your brain will thank you.
