The Benefits of Social Media Automation
The most obvious benefit of social media automation is the convenience and the time-saving effect. There are plenty of social media automation tools that allow you to create and schedule content to be shared at a specific time on multiple social platforms. These tools save time and resources for tedious manual tasks like filling your social channels with fresh content.
Social media automation will also make it much easier to provide a consistent stream of content on multiple social channels. Scheduling your social media posts will allow you to share content even when you are out of office or on holidays. Scheduling will also help you to repeat your posts automatically and re-share your evergreen content in order to extend the lifetime of your posts.
Convenience
With social media automation tools, you can schedule and share your content at a specific time on multiple social platforms. This is a great help if you want to share your content on multiple social network sites or if you need a quick way to post messages to each of your channels at once.
Content Consistency
The social media tools also allow you to ensure a consistent stream of content on your channels without manually having to update your feeds constantly with new content. Consistency in content delivery helps you to keep your followers updated and loyal to your channels. Automation also allows you to deliver more content more often. It also allows you to easily repeat your posts and re-share your evergreen content regularly.
Easy Scheduling
Social media tools enable you to schedule your messages to be posted at a specific time, even during off office hours, holidays and vacations. This allows you to schedule your posts for the best times throughout the day when your content is most likely to make an impact. This is the time when your followers are most active and your content is most likely to be seen and engaged with.
Reaching More People In Less Time
With the convenience of automation, you can save a lot of time for tedious manual work. With sharing your content automatically across multiple social platforms and communities you can reach out to more followers and potential reader in less time. Time, you can better spend on creating and researching valuable content for your audience.
- Network purpose (private/business)
- How to address the communities (formal/informal)
- Number of characters for posts or comments.
- Size and number of images that can be posted.
- Text post, link post or image post formats and what works best.
- Activation of emojis to show your emotions, hashtags for keywords or handles to reach out to specific users
- Favorite times when social communities are most active.
- Posting frequency: the number and frequency of postings that lead to more engagement or annoy the community.
The Pitfalls of Social Media Automation
However, the benefit of convenience is also the biggest pitfall with social media automation. Social media automation can turn your social media channels into lifeless, robotic streams of repetitive posts.
Poorly Formatted Posts
Most social media automation tools share the same content in the same format on all social media channels, regardless of their differences. However, poorly formatted posts without personal comments get less visibility and receive less engagement.
Losing Track
Automation ensures consistency in content delivery, but this can also backfire on your reputation.
- If you don’t monitor your automated posts for their impact and response, your social streams can quickly become irrelevant to your audience.
- Too many repetitions of the same content can easily annoy and drive away your followers.
- If you don’t keep track of your automated posts current events can make your scheduled posts look outdated or misplaced.
Don’t Become a Robot
Successful social media marketing is all about communication and interaction with your community. Social media automation can save you from tedious manual work. But don’t let yourself be carried away by the convenience and lose contact with your audience. Automated posts without personal comments usually don’t get much response. So consider very carefully what your followers in each community expect, and don’t be tempted by the convenience to push all your content to every social channel in the same way.
3 Tips to Avoid Being Robotic
1. Don’t repeat your posts over and over again
Social media automation makes it easy to re-share your posts, but don’t be tempted by the convenience. Combine automated promotional posts with personal content and curated content to give your social feeds an authentic and balanced appearance and to offer your audience a variety of inspiring contents.
2. Don’t post your content in the same format for all social media platforms
Don’t share everything everywhere. Select your social media channels carefully before you post. Always think of your audience. Only share content that is relevant to the specific community on each social platform. Even if you share the same content, always customize your comments, images and posting times to each respective social media channel. Sharing your content at different times and on different days will increase the visibility of your posts across various networks and helps to extend the lifetime of each post. Personal comments make the posts more engaging. Questions or call-for-actions in the comments encourage response and interaction with the community.
3. Don’t automate personal messages, likes or replies
Automated Replies and Direct Messages are not personalized, and your audience is unlikely to engage with them. Use the time you don’t have to spend on manual sharing on social networks anymore, to engage with your social community on a personal level.
How Blog2Social can Help you to Unleash the Power of Social Media Automation
Tailor your Social Media Posts
- Add personal comments, hashtags, handles or emojis to personally reach out to your community and encourage engagement.
- Choose between the link post and image post format for each post or community.
- Select the image you want to post for each social network or community individually, select any image from your gallery or device.
- Edit meta-tag parameters for Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards to define your link post preview.
- Edit your post with an HTML rich text editor to syndicate your posts on blogging networks such as Medium, Tumblr or Bloglovin’.
Automating Your Blog or Website Content
Automating Content from Other Sources
Melanie Tamblé is co-founder and co-CEO of Adenion GmbH. She is an experienced expert in content marketing and social media.
Adenion GmbH specializes in online services and tools for bloggers, businesses and agencies of any size to support their online marketing and content seeding tasks on the web.
Blog2Social as WordPress Plugin and WebApp enable fast and easy auto-posting, scheduling and cross-promotion of blog posts, articles, links, images, videos and documents across multiple social media sites.
Social media posts will be automatically turned into a customized format for each social platform and auto-scheduled for the best time. Social media post can be previewed and tailored with individual post formats, images or personal comments – all in one easy step.
About the author
I stopped by your blog and am truly amazed by your experience and knowledge of the social media industry. Social media automation is easy, remember? Well, it’s also easy to sound too robotic. While the posts may come from you, they can easily lack human engagement. Tweeting in real-time can show emotion, genuine thoughts and a personality. You lose all that through a machine.
Thanks for your feedback, Hosa. Yes, social media automation can backfire on you, if done wrong. However, we all need the help of social media automation to manage our social media channels. Especially, if you have to manage multiple social sites and communities. If you do it wisely and pick the right tools, smart social media automation can save a lot of time-consuming manual work for you and leave more time for real human communication and engagement.
Best,
Melanie