Anyone who wants to succeed in the dynamic world of social media can no longer avoid automation. Over the past few years, social media automation tools have become indispensable.These automation features help manage social media tasks efficiently and save time.
In this blog post, we explain what social media automation is, what it’s useful for, and demonstrate how to effectively use social media automation for your accounts with the WordPress plugin Blog2Social.
Table of contents
- What is Social Media Automation?
- Use of automation tools for social media marketing
- How to automatically publish posts from WordPress to social media
What is Social Media Automation?
The term “automation” is a buzzword in social media marketing. But what does it actually mean, and why is it considered so crucial for success on social media? While there are now numerous tools for scheduling posts, social media automation goes beyond that. It encompasses a range of functionalities that streamline time-consuming tasks, optimize workflow, and make the entire content distribution process more efficient. This leaves you with much more time for the creative and strategic development of content.
Before we dive deeper into the topic, let’s first clarify what social media automation actually means:
What is Social Media Automation?
Social Media Automation refers to the use of software tools to streamline recurring tasks in Social Media Management.
These tasks primarily include scheduling, publishing, and distributing content on social media. Automating these routine tasks is one of the core functions of social media management tools. With these tools, social media posts can be created and scheduled in advance, and the tool will then automatically publish the posts according to the pre-set conditions.
Use of automation tools for social media marketing
Being responsible for the social media presence of a company or brand, whether for yourself or for clients, requires a great deal of creativity, strategy, and constant attention. From content creation to scheduling and publishing – the challenges are numerous and can be overwhelming.
This is where social media automation tools like Blog2Social come into play. They offer an efficient solution to simplify these recurring tasks. By using automation software like this, workflows can be sped up, and the complexity of social media management can be reduced.
Here’s a look at the biggest challenges social media management consistently poses and how social media automation can help overcome them:
Challenge: Many networks, much effort
At a time when social media marketing plays a central role in addressing customers, companies and freelancers face the challenge of being present across multiple social networks while effectively targeting different audiences. This requires careful consideration of the unique characteristics and focuses of each platform. Every platform has its own specific requirements for the content that can be shared, such as image and video formats, character limits, the use of hashtags, or other typographic nuances. Preparing your content to meet the demands of various social media networks can be very time-consuming. Additionally, successful social media marketing requires that the content meets the expectations of the target audiences on each platform. A proven method to address these complex aspects is known as cross-posting or cross-promotion. Cross-posting or cross-promoting involves the parallel distribution of your own content across different social channels.
How automation can help:
Social media automation tools simplify the process of cross-posting or cross-promoting content significantly. They allow you to automatically publish posts across various platforms with just a few clicks. These tools offer several settings that ensure your content is customized and optimally displayed on each platform.
Solution: Cross-Promoting social media content across different networks
With Blog2Social, you can specifically choose which social media platforms your post should be published on. You can group networks together to select multiple platforms at once or choose them individually for each post. This gives you full control over where each piece of content appears. In the post preview editor, you can then make content and format adjustments to your posts. If you want to tailor your posts for each network individually, Blog2Social allows you to cross-promote your content — such as a new blog post — in just one step.
You can find more information in the FAQs: How to create social media posts and share link, text, image or video posts
Challenge: The never-ending demand for new content
Another challenge in social media management is the constant need for fresh content. Every day, creative ideas must be generated, designed, and transformed into engaging posts. This requires a significant amount of time and dedication.
How automation can help:
Automation tools can significantly speed up the content creation process. Instead of editing each post individually in the upload interfaces of various platforms, you can use post templates provided by the automation tool.
Solution: Quickly create social media posts with templates
Blog2Social provides post templates for text posts, image posts, link posts, and video posts. The software can adapt your post to the specifications of over 20 networks and, depending on the settings, even pre-fill it with text and hashtags. Templates can be defined and saved for each network, allowing you to generate titles, content, summaries, hashtags, and even pricing variables for WooCommerce-managed online shops directly from your website content. A post preview lets you see how the final post will look before it’s published, ensuring everything is perfect with just a few clicks. Additionally, the tool allows you to reuse previously created content in different formats across other platforms (content recycling), which reduces the pressure to constantly produce new content.
This is what a post template for Instagram looks like:
You can find more information in the FAQs: How to use post templates for social media posts?
Challenge: Maintaining a continuous posting schedule
Consistency is crucial for success on social media. Continuous visibility is necessary to reach and retain the audience. With the multitude of social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok (and so on), it quickly becomes challenging to maintain a presence and post regularly across different platforms. This constant presence demands a lot from a person.
How automation can help:
Automation software allows you to post your content consistently and at the optimal times. Since people are more active on social media at certain times, you can generate more visibility and reach by strategically scheduling your posts. By automating the publishing of your content, you ensure that your audience receives new updates regularly without needing to be active on your social channels around the clock. Instead of constantly thinking about uploading the next post, you can focus your energy on analyzing campaigns, interacting with the community, and developing new content.
Solution: Publish social media posts at best times
Blog2Social’s Best Time Manager helps you schedule your social media posts for peak times. You can either use Blog2Social’s pre-set best times, which are based on extensive analyses, or create an individual timing setup for each social network to target your posts more precisely to your specific audience. Additionally, staggered posting is possible to extend the lifespan of your content across different platforms. These default settings can be applied to all your posts or adjusted individually as needed.
You can find more information in the FAQs: How do I schedule posts to be shared on social media in advance, using the best-time-scheduler?
Challenge: Managing multiple social media accounts simultaneously
With the multitude of topics, individual social media posts, and interactions across various platforms, it’s easy to lose track. Everyone wants to manage their social media accounts individually and purposefully while keeping their overall strategy in mind. Doing this with consistent diligence requires forward-looking content planning and ongoing coordination.
How automation can help:
With a social media management tool, you can keep track of content planning across all your accounts or your clients’ accounts at all times. You can manage and control everything in one place, which significantly simplifies your workflow. An integrated editorial calendar shows you what is planned, when it is planned and who scheduled it, as well as any potential gaps in the schedule. This also allows you to better oversee the work of your team members.
Solution: Plan social media posts in advance
Blog2Social’s social media calendar provides a comprehensive overview of all scheduled and already published posts. Each user has a unique color assigned to their posts in the calendar, which makes team organization easier. For even greater insight, you can sort postings by network. Additionally, you can edit or delete posts directly in the calendar or move them to another date using drag-and-drop to flexibly adapt your plans at any time.
You can find more information in the FAQs: How do I access the calendar feature of Blog2Social?
How to automatically publish posts from WordPress on social media
Good automation tools like Blog2Social offer a quick solution if you want to manage your social media accounts more time-efficiently and effectively. What sets Blog2Social apart? It is a social media automation tool that integrates seamlessly with your website as a WordPress plugin. It allows you to automatically create social media posts from your website content and publish them across 20+ social media networks. With Blog2Social, you save the time and effort of manual sharing, as you can manage all social media activities conveniently through your WordPress dashboard. Additionally, the plugin provides the ability to generate and share social media posts from other types of content, such as images, videos or links as well.
Automatically publish social media posts
Blog2Social’s autoposting feature allows you to automatically publish new or updated posts from your WordPress website to your social media channels. This feature saves time and ensures that your content is always shared right away. The autoposting function works not only for self-created posts but also for imported content, such as from RSS feeds. This enables you to continuously and automatically provide your community with fresh, relevant content from various sources.
You can learn how to set up the autoposting feature in this short video tutorial:
Conclusion
Automation in social media management is no longer a luxury but a necessity. It saves time, makes repetitive tasks more efficient, and ensures a consistent presence across social platforms. This allows you to focus more on what matters most: the creative and strategic development of your brand.
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