5 Social Media Tasks You Can Automate Right Now

Did you know that the number of active social media users exceeds half of the world’s population? According to Statista, 4.2 billion people worldwide are using social media platforms! Given that, more and more brands are leveraging multiple social networks to reach their target audience.

What’s great about such a multichannel approach? Every customer touchpoint opens opportunities to strengthen your relationship with your audience. But the challenging part is social media marketing across multiple platforms takes huge amounts of a marketer’s time.

Here is the good news: with the right automation tools at hand, you can minimize your workload when marketing on social media. Wanna know how? Keep reading this article to discover the social media tasks that you can automate right now!

Why automate routine social media tasks

Whether you are pulling content from other resources or publishing posts you’ve written yourself across multiple platforms, chances are you are dealing with repetitive tasks eating up lots of time. Social media automation means implementing software solutions that can do these tasks automatically. The goal of the automation strategy is to minimize the manual effort and time you spend on your tasks daily.

Leveraging automation can help you optimize your social media marketing efforts. Here is what you can achieve through social media automation:

• Minimize the time spent on activities that don’t need a human touch;
• Free up time for core business tasks;
• Increase your online presence;
• Ensure consistency in your social media marketing;
• Stay active on social media at your best times for posting.

Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

The top 5 social media tasks to automate

Now that you are aware of social media automation benefits, let’s look through the top priority tasks to automate.

#1 Posts scheduling and publishing

Publishing content on multiple social media channels daily is time-consuming. Not only logging in to different social media accounts but also adapting content to each platform’s requirements can take tons of time.

With automated posting software, you don’t have to publish posts every day. Instead, you can dedicate a block of time (say, once a week) to craft content and set up the desired timeline for posts on each platform. This scheduling feature allows you to plan content for weeks ahead in a short amount of time.

In addition to scheduling things ahead, you can also continually share your best work. For instance, let’s say that you host a successful podcast and have 3 episodes that are especially popular and evergreen.

You can use automated publishing to share those episodes on social media every 2-3 months to make sure new followers hear your best work.

#2 Curating content for publishing

Content curation is another time-consuming task. It may take a while to search through different sources and find information relevant to your audience.

Automated content curation tools will take this pain away from you. With them, you can share useful third-party content across your social media channels in a matter of clicks.

Besides, you can customize your content to make sure you’re getting only the finest hand-picked articles, videos, blog posts, etc.

No more spending hours manually combing through websites!

Here’s how it all works:

Automated content curation identifies relevant content from a variety of sources and then incorporates that content into social media posts. This can be done in a number of ways, but one common approach is to use keyword-based search algorithms to find relevant content. Next is leveraging some form of natural language processing to extract the most important information from that content.

Additionally, some automated content curation tools offer features such as templating and layout customization, which can also make a blog post more unique.

That’s hitting two birds with one stone because you can use the same software for your social media and other types of content.

Pro tip: Curating your blog content means you have more (quality) ammo for your social media. So, make sure you purchase the right software for your needs.

Basically, automated content curation:

• Saves you time;
• Identifies insightful and relevant content that’s bound to bring in more conversions;
• Assists with SEO and design for your other websites, thus saving you even more time and resources.

And because these tools use algorithms that get smarter over time, they just keep getting better and better at finding the choicest bits for you. So go ahead and take a load off with automated content curation tools!

#3 Analytical data collection and report generation

Let’s say you’re managing social media for a fast food restaurant.

You could manually scroll through Twitter, looking for every mention of your restaurant. Or, you could set up an automated search that would send you an alert every time someone mentions your restaurant in a tweet. You could then analyze this data to see what people are saying about your restaurant and use it to generate reports.

This is just one example. The point is: To make sure that your social media efforts are paying off, you need to collect and analyze data. Is your social media following growing? Are your posts getting the desired engagement?

Going from one account to another to gather these insights is time-consuming. With social media automation tools, you can save tons of time on collecting and analyzing meaningful metrics. This information is then sorted and organized according to your specific needs.

It’s way more convenient to see all the performance insights from a single dashboard, rather than logging in to multiple accounts to get this data.

In addition to saving you time, these tools can also ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date. Even better: They can help you save money by eliminating the need to hire additional staff to collect and analyze data.

Consider this: Anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes on social media knows that it can be a digital minefield. From trolls to memes, there is no shortage of distractions.

However, social media can also be an incredibly powerful tool, especially when it comes to data collection and analysis. And automated social media tools can help businesses track important metrics, such as engagement rates and reach.

For instance, are you planning partnerships with other social media accounts, like influencer marketing campaigns? You can estimate the potential engagement with such tools as the TikTok engagement rate calculator.

This software can also generate reports that provide insights into your customers’ behavior:

• When and what and why they’re buying;
• Their characteristics;
• Their likes and dislikes;
• Their feedback;
• How they engage with your brand and product on social media;
• And more!

#4 Answering routine customer queries

For today’s customers, time is critical, and prompt response is more important than ever. According to HubSpot, 90% of users say that an immediate response from a business is an important customer service feature.

Handling each customer’s questions on social media can eat tons of your sales team’s time. Given that users often send similar inquiries, answering the same questions over and over again can be truly frustrating.

Automated tools provide basic customer service and cover common queries without the effort of a human team member. You can also integrate certain tools with your CRM to handle more sophisticated queries, like order tracking or refund status.

By automating customer care tasks, you can keep your prospects engaged, even when your sales team members aren’t online, for example with automated answers telling the customer when your business hours are.

#5 Social monitoring and listening

Are you monitoring the online conversation happening around your products or services? If not, then it might be time to start!

To keep track of your brand’s online reputation, you don’t have to search for all the posts mentioning your company manually. Social monitoring and listening tools will help you see the conversation going around your brand. These tools carry out the analysis of the specific keywords and generate meaningful insights. With sentiment analysis, you can get timely signals about your audience’s mood and adjust your strategy accordingly.

How to succeed in social media automation

We’ve covered the top priority social media-related tasks to automate. Now, we’d like to share the best practices to get the most out of your automation efforts. Let’s get right into them!

Don’t plan too far in advance

While it may be tempting to schedule the content for several months ahead, don’t plan too far in advance. Things around us are changing rapidly, so the content may become outdated within a couple month.

Identify the best time to post for each platform

Each social network has its days and times when users are particularly active. For example, time slots between 11 am and 1 pm and between 7 pm and 9 pm work well for posting on Instagram. As to LinkedIn, its users are especially active between 7 am and 10 am and between 5 pm and 6 pm.

To get higher engagement, identify those “best times” to post and schedule your publications accordingly. With tools like Blog2Social, you can get the advantage of pre-configured best-time settings when scheduling posts for multiple platforms.

Keep the human touch

When striving to put routine activities on autopilot, don’t forget to keep the human touch. How do you achieve this?

First, keep your content conversational and engaging. Leverage humor whenever appropriate.

Next, make sure your automation efforts don’t look copy-pasted or spammy. Your audience will easily recognize bots leaving automated comments or identical cross-posted messages on different channels.

Tailor your message to each platform’s specifics

While posts scheduling can save you tons of time, failure to adjust your message to each social media channel may frustrate your audience. Therefore, be sure to consider the specifics of each resource:

• Platform-specific language;
• User handles;
• Image size requirements;
• Word count requirements;
• Best times to post;
• And more.

Tools like Blog2Social offer opportunities not only for automation but also for customization. So, you can tailor your content to fit the specifics of each social network.

Keep track of your automation progress

Before you start automating your social media tasks, you need to understand what you want to achieve. A good practice is to set KPIs so that you can evaluate the achievement of your goals.

Here are the possible KPIs:

• Reducing the customer service response time by X%;
• Growing social media engagement rate by Y%;
• Increasing ROAS by Z%.

So, be aware of your social media automation goals, and keep track of your progress.

Summary

Performing all social media-related tasks manually can eat up loads of your time. Luckily, you can automate many of them! To optimize your workflow and free up time for tasks requiring human touch, take advantage of automation tools.

To achieve the best results, approach your automation strategy wisely:

• Don’t rush to schedule all posts for several months ahead, so that your content doesn’t get outdated;
• Consider the best times to post on each social media channel;
• Maintain a human touch throughout your social media activities:
• Adjust your message to fit the specifics of each social media platform;
• Identify the desired KPIs for your automation efforts and monitor the progress.

Start automating repetitive social media tasks today and free up time for core business activities!

David Morneau

David Morneau is the co-founder and CEO of inBeat, a hybrid micro-influencer marketing SAAS/agency that helps brands scale their marketing efforts. He has helped over 200 DTC brands to date.

About the author

David Morneau

David Morneau is the co-founder and CEO of inBeat, a hybrid micro-influencer marketing SAAS/agency that helps brands scale their marketing efforts. He has helped over 200 DTC brands to date. View all posts by David Morneau