Social media campaign has raised in the past few years and the businesses realized the need for upping their social media game. Since an increasing number of social media platforms made them squirm in figuring out a way to always be quick, steady and responsive to the audience.
“This statistic provides information on the most popular networks worldwide as of April 2019, ranked by number of active accounts. Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts and currently sits at 2.32 billion monthly active users. Sixth-ranked photo-sharing app Instagram had 1 billion monthly active accounts.” –Source: statista
Meanwhile, there was an entire industry forming to figure this whole social media mechanism out – the SaaS Industry. An acronym for Software as a Service which is comprised of various tools and software that aim to help businesses do better online.
One major cause of developing these tools was to automate social media while you focus on making your campaigns viral.
But the question is how automation helps your campaigns directly?
Why Automation Is Important for Social Media?
The fundamental concept of social media automation is to reduce the amount of time and effort you spend on repetitive tasks that slow you down in achieving your digital marketing goals. Not just automatic social media posting, you can use different tools for many more daunting tasks that slow your campaigns down.
Reason #1: Time Efficient
Of course, when you use automation tools for your social media campaigns, you spend less time and effort on content that only gets a few shares and website visitors.
While using a centralized dashboard for content scheduling or to schedule Facebook posts or on other social media platforms, you not only schedule your posts in advance but also save yourself the hassle of going back and forth with multiple accounts by logging into each one individually and then post the same content over and over again.
This gives you more time to keep an eye on the comments, mentions, inboxes and trending topics”(Twitter trending topics, Instagram, or else)” for future content sake – since these domains cannot be fully automated and require more attention than simply posting content.
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Since your objective of social media marketing should always be providing value to the audience. Prioritize delivering quality content and while doing so, save time and hassle with automation.
“This statistic shows the number of social media users worldwide from 2010 to 2016 with projections until 2021. In 2019, it is estimated that there will be around 2.77 billion social media users around the globe, up from 2.46 billion in 2017.” –Source: statista
These are some of the best automation tools you can find.
Reason #2: Content Consistency
When your brand is consistent on social media it builds a strong following. We have seen many companies who have created social media profiles on popular social networks but failed to create consistency with their content.
According to i-Scoop , 78% of businesses have dedicated resources for their social media which rose from 67% in a matter of 5 years. This clearly shows that more and more businesses have acknowledged the power and usefulness of social media marketing.
But some of these businesses do not have sufficient resources to dedicate them for social media management solely or do not have enough time to look at how their content performs and what needs to be done. These businesses tend to struggle to reap even the fewest or no benefits from social media marketing.
Content automation tools can be the solution for it – Hootsuite, MeetEdgar,Buffer, DrumUp and many other content automation tools help you find relevant and fresh content to share on your social media and stay active on each one without having to stay online all the time.
SocialBee is one such tool that offers an AI article generator, which is designed to make the content creation process significantly easier and more efficient. By utilizing this tool, you can create high-quality content for social media in a fraction of the time it would take to do so manually.
SocialBee’s AI post generator also provides an opportunity to tailor content in your own tone, meant to fit your specific needs and preferences, allowing you to make the most out of your social media marketing efforts.
Reason #3: Better Strategy
There are probably a million ways automation helps you improve your social media strategy but one tried and true way is to figure out when your content performs the best.
Of course, you cannot always expect it to get maximum engagement but automated posting on social media definitely helps you analyze when your content performs the best. Then you can schedule your content within that particular time bracket. This strategy does not only work with filler content but also with your marketing campaigns.
For example, if you are holding a Mega Sale that ends in a week, you can schedule a 12 hour or 24-hour reminder post that sort of shows the time running out.
In order to check how the content is performing, you can always check on your content automation tool’s dashboard.
Automation allows you to modify your social media campaign and the strategy, in general, to ensure a higher number of reach. Since these tools get insights into how well the content is being received at the other end. From likes, shares, retweets and link clicks to conversion, you will be able to deliver your audience exactly what they like and post in volume too.
How Automation Affects Your Social Media Campaigns
While making a fool-proof strategy for your social media you will require some tools to assist you to speed things up, ensure accuracy and provide insights into whether or not it is working out for your brand.
As the number of social media platforms continues to grow, it is nearly impossible for you to manually engage with each one’s audience equally and provide timely content to them every time. But all thanks to content automation tools, you can do it efficiently and make the most of your time strategizing.
TechCrunch’s Facebook Chatbot Marketing
Ever since Facebook announced chatbot integrations to messenger the news spread like wildfire and many hopped on this crazy exciting journey. Now chatbots come in many different shapes and sizes to suit your marketing strategies and campaigns like TechCrunch.
This online tech publication has a facebook chatbot that acts like a digital digest. When you visit their page on Facebook and hit the “Send Message” button underneath the cover photo, it will redirect you to their Messenger chatbot.
This is an excellent opportunity for them to send direct messages to any user that opts into their messenger bot since they’re giving explicit permission to the business.
As for a specific social media campaign, this example can be taken into consideration. Techcrunch uses its Messenger bot for growing its daily website visitors. How? By encouraging them to read the content available over their website.
They’re giving value to the users and simultaneously increasing their readership by sending out this daily digest as links to thousands of Facebook users. Making it an everyday ritual is what makes this campaign successful as the odds of clicking through their website increases to a great extent.
This does not only increase TechCrunch’s messenger audience but also incrementally grow their monthly traffic. What could be a more important success metric than that for any digital publication after all?
There are so many other uses for Facebook Messenger bots. Your business can use it as a lead generation device, answer FAQs for customers, allow customers to set appointments, and so much more.
A takeaway for you:
Chatbot marketing is a powerful and fun way of brands to engage with their users and can potentially increase their social media campaign’s engagement rate.
Apart from the specific use case mentioned above, your automated chatbot can generate leads, respond to customer FAQs, take appointments on your behalf and even create a questionnaire for your giveaway campaigns. Here’s a complete guide on how you can create a facebook contest using a chatbot.
4 Ways and Their Tools To Automate Your Social Media Campaigns
There are tons of social media automation platforms you can choose from and they all pretty much offer the same features with one or two differences. However, it is important for you to know exactly which type of automation your business requires.
This is why I have gathered these 4 different ways you can automate your campaigns, your communication and overall management of your social media marketing.
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1. Content Optimization
Hootsuite alternatives does not only enables you to schedule your posts, but it also helps you automate your tasks and content too. You can actually streamline your entire social media campaign and manage your networks as a team by keeping a close eye on the progress of assigned tasks, sharing information with other team members and repurpose your old posts by duplicating them with the drag and drop feature.
Send your posts as a draft internally or to your clients to get approval and then schedule them accordingly once you get a go. On the plus side, the platform offers a built-in UTM tag creator, helps you evaluate how your content has been performing with social media analytics and also lets you restrict your posts to a specific audience to reach if need be.
An overall social media automated posting and scheduling tool that helps you bring multiple tasks on a single dashboard.
How cool is that!
2. Automated Chatbots
Now that your content is scheduled, posts are being analyzed what about the dozens of queries pending to be responded in your inboxes?
Even if you are using just a single social media platform it’s simply too expensive to dedicate a resource for 24/7 customer support for merely a small number of queries you get. But if your inbox is flooded with messages you are probably missing out on some – which means a higher chance of losing a customer too.
Botsify is a chatbot building platform that helps you automate your messenger and website chat. You can create custom chatbots by creating multiple conversation scenarios, add multimedia, google search and lead collection forms to it. Most chatbot platforms offer real-time support to your customers however, botsify does more than that.
- You can respond to your comments through a chatbot. All you have to do is set up one or more keywords and their responses. For example here, I have setup these 5 keywords that I mostly got queries for on my page and automated it using botsify’s acquire users from comment feature.
So as soon as anyone drops a comment containing any of the designated keywords (on a selected post that I have automated comments for), they will instantly receive a message response from my chatbot.
- You can optimize your facebook sponsored ads by redirecting your users to specific conversation flow. This works best for promotional offers on your website or seasonal discounts etc.
3. Social Media Management
There are some readily available 360-degree automation tools that help you not only schedule your posts but also replicate them whenever you want. These tools help you save time in doing repetitive tasks.
However, timing your content is very important – which is mostly because of the demographics of your audience. If your audience has a different time zone than yours or belongs to multiple time zones then you have to customize your schedules a little more.
4. Content Finder
If you want to find out the most trending topics that you want your content to revolve around (which is highly recommended) then Buzzsumo is your best bet! You can find the relevant trending topics and how they are performing. All you need to do is automate your research by providing the relevant keywords you want.
Although this tool is a little on the pricier side (as compared to other social media optimization tools) but the information it provides is worth every penny. Buzzsumo tracks result from numerous platforms including facebook, twitter, Pinterest and many more. You can find filtered search results by location or platform.
Other than the content you can also look for influencers and build your relationship with them.
Final Thoughts
The best way to increase your engagement, stay relevant and deliver the right content is through automation. Although you cannot fully automate your social media management, you can use tools that fasten up your pace, lower repetitive tasks and help you build your brand better.
But always remember one thing while you use automation tools, one shoe never fits all, find out tools that are relevant to your needs so that your time money and resources dont go wasted for nothing.
