If you are anything like me and thousands of other online marketers, you’d find yourself always strapped for time, and wish that you were as lucky as that darned octopus with its 8 arms (or 6 arms? See Dailymail article here if you doubt) and do tons of work at a single time.

You are lucky if you can multi-task like a maniac; like putting a wash on as you send out your morning emails, or setting a timer on your roast as you work on your projects, or even walking your dog while you listen to your favourite podcast.

Thank all those genius tech innovators for the rapid rise of technology, because now you can automate work-and-personal-related tasks quite easily. You can automate weather updates directly to your phone, or get flight alerts directly sent to your email. Automating has actually taken a big role in our lives, even without us knowing it.

After all, who does not want to save time on mundane and repetitive tasks? Who doesn’t want to make their lives much more efficient? Who doesn’t want to have more time to spend on things that they love?

Social Media Automation – Why Do You Need It?           

Social media automation works pretty much the same as automating the tasks that we have in our daily lives. If you are a business owner, you can’t afford to have your time being sucked out by social media.

Have you ever noticed how just checking your Twitter or Facebook feeds take more than the original 10 minutes you allocated for it, especially if you see interesting posts from friends or business associates?

Social media automation can save you a lot of precious time, consolidating hours of work into just a few minutes. And this is the best reason why any business owner needs it.

But the BIG question that many of my marketer friends always ask me is: “Just how do you automate your social media marketing without sacrificing your audience engagement?”

You Don’t Just “Set a Timer and Forget It” When You Automate Social Media Marketing

Think of it like baking. You don’t set the oven timer, put the cake in, and forget about it. You leave it just enough to bake it, test it and make sure it is done, then put it back if it needs a little more time, or take it out when it’s perfect.

But do you stop there? No. You have to make the icing, and then decorate the cake. If you like the results, you would want to bake another cake; different filling, different icing.

What’s the point to this rambling? Just like baking, social media automation requires your constant engagement, from the start to finish. You can’t be complacent, at the risk of burning your product and personal brand.

You have to automate what you can automate, while staying engaged. But the great thing about automation is you can condense hours of social media work into just 30 minutes. So you can have more time to use on more important things.

The 3 Things Where Social Media Automation Can Help

1. Content Consistency

The key to establishing a strong social media following is consistent content. Many businesses create Facebook or Twitter accounts only to forget about them or put them in low priority, hence, their content becomes inconsistent.

A survey involving 900 social media users pinpointed content consistency as one of the deciding factors for them to continue following the brand.

A business that does not have enough capital to hire a dedicated social management team tends to be strapped for time, ending up dropping off the social media radar. The result? They miss out on the huge advantages offered by marketing on social media.

The solution to this problem is social media automation.

For instance, there are tools like Feedly and Drumup that can help you discover spanking new and trending content that can be shared to your audience. Drumup even lets you schedule the posts so that your social accounts are always active even when you are offline.

2. Total Control Over Your Social Media Marketing Strategies

Using social media automation tools allow you more control over your social media accounts. You can choose the kind of content you want to share, the times when they are posted, and the frequency of posting.

You can also monitor the engagement level you are receiving. With the data you collate, you can properly modify your strategy so that you can get more Retweets, Shares and Likes.

Because social media automation tools help you have a clearer view into the nature and extent of your viewership or readership, you can target your audience with the right content.

Automation also helps you in dealing with volume as it allows you to easily and quickly post multiple updates on different accounts, on different platforms.

3. Free Up Your Time

I’m sure you’ll agree that the best advantage in using social media automation is the amount of time you can free up.

Instead of spending countless hours on finding potentially shareable content that can bring you a few site visitors; you can use automation tools that can identify the topics that are currently trending.

Most tools provide a centralized dashboard where you can schedule content in advance (like Oktopost excellent calendar which helps you schedule content very easily: above). This means that you can save a lot of hours and effort as you won’t have to individually log in onto each account and manually post content.

Again, I reiterate that just because you are using these tools and saving time, you won’t have to spend time on your social media accounts. WRONG. That’s a counter-productive proposition. You still have to monitor your accounts and personally respond to mentions and comments.

Your main objective in using social media marketing is to establish a firm footing for your brand on the Internet by making it relatable, and the only way to do this is to communicate and actively interact with your audience.

Steps that Make Social Media Automation A Lot Less Complicated

There are 4 basic steps to effective social media automation:

1. Understand when to appropriately automate your social media presence
2. Choose the correct tools
3. Find the most ideal schedule
4. Monitor the conversations

What to Automate

Be warned: automation can be addictive. As you start becoming more efficient in one aspect of social media automation, you can easily get carried away and start to automate everything.

But it is important to remember that social media is a human experience. Most of your social media marketing will require human presence so you can assess the situation or target your audience. People appreciate personalized and unique responses on social media, and this cannot be automated.

So it pays to be prudent; not everything that can be automated should be automated.

Here are the things you can and SHOULD automate:

• Content Curation and Distribution
• Personal/Funny Tweets
• Published Posts

Choose the Right Automation Tools

 As previously mentioned, Feedly and Drumup are great tools but there are others that you can use, too.

For the automation obsessed, tools like Zapier and IFTTT are excellent options. These services are designed to smartly connect apps under specified circumstances. For instance, both these services can send the photos you were tagged in on Facebook to an Android or iOS device, then post your Instagram photos to your Twitter account.

Heres an example and one of our favourite IFTTT scripts that automatically keeps you Facebook and Twitter profile images in sync.

Find the Most Ideal Schedule for your Automation

A smartly spaced schedule is one way to hit your audience at times that are sensible. To achieve this, look at your social analytics and find out the best time to engage your audience.

Here are some research-backed statistics that would help:

• Twitter engagement spikes up by 17% on weekends for brands
• An Argyle Social research found that B2Bs get 14% more Twitter engagement on weekdays than on weekends
• Kissmetrics state that Retweets have been shown to be at its peak around 5PM.

Take note that statistics are only effective as a baseline depending on the context of a particular business. If you want more specifics on your business, you can use tools such as Followerwonk, SocialBro and Tweroid. These tools can analyze your followers to give you data on when they are around and engaging.

Staying Engaged with Your Audience

• Notifications – you can use your phone’s notification to alert you if anything comes up on Facebook and Twitter and you don’t miss a beat.
• Mention – this is a powerful tool that works like Google Alerts so you can monitor your blog and social media channels. You can be updated via email when you receive a mention or a comment so you won’t even have to be online in the platform all the time.
• Set Time Aside and Engage – again, just because you automated some of your social media tasks, doesn’t mean you won’t have to login onto your social media accounts at all. You have to make time, at least 30 minutes per day to quickly check and really engage with your audience.

Targeting Mobile Users

Most Twitter users are on mobile and a majority of them “tweet” during commute, work hours or school hours.

A 2012 Compete Study shows the following statistics on mobile users:

• They are twice likely to use Twitter upon waking up
• 181% are more likely to use it when commuting
• 119% use Twitter on mobile when at work or at school
• Mobile users are 3x more likely to use the app when shopping
• They are also 2x more likely to use it before going to bed

These people are who you need for your business, because the chances of them clicking on links are 44% more than usual, and 66% of them are more likely to re-tweet compared to desktop users.

Mobile users also tend to follow more brands; with 53% of them likely recalling seeing an ad placed on Twitter, compared to desktop Twitter users.

While timing can be complicated, the key is to put yourself in your audiences’ shoes and consider the patterns. What are their days like? When are they most likely to be busy, or bored? When are their breaks between meetings? When do they want to hear from you? Use the tools we mentioned earlier to analyze the specifics of your audience and give you an idea on the key times to shoot for.

Final Thoughts and Takeaways

• Social media automation is an excellent way for marketers and businesses with multiple accounts in different platforms to save hours of daily engagement work.
• Automation can help you maintain content consistency.
• It also gives you total control over the kind of content you share and how they are shared.
• You can use the time you save on more important things, especially growing your business.
• Your post schedules should be flexible. Focus on ad-hoc posts, even more so if they are time-sensitive.
• Posting your content when your audience is online significantly increases the chances of them being viewed and shared.
• Analytics will help you better understand what works best and what doesn’t.

Social media automation is not as tough as it seems, and it works well for any business. Remember, conversations, human interactions and engagement are always an important factor of your social media marketing strategies.

And because you do not have to tediously share or post throughout the day, you will have more time to focus on more meaningful conversations with your audience. You don’t always have to be online in your social media accounts waiting for the next like/share/comment, not with social media automation.

What you can do instead is work on other productive tasks and just check on your social media accounts occasionally. Once you get the hang of it, do not forget to #alwaysbetesting just like what they always say in Unbounce.

p.s. If you still feel like this is all too much work you then why not get in touch with us and enquire about our done for you social media management packages.