When it comes to social marketing, it is crucial to have constant, relevant, and personal content that you share within your social networks. There are some great tools to help you stay on top of your posting for those busy weeks or when you're taking that much-needed vacation time.
In order to ensure that your social media campaigns are running smoothly, you need to use tools as an assistant to your social strategy. Sometimes, your busy schedule just doesn’t give you the time to posts updates throughout the day. That’s why you should schedule them ahead of time.
The Tools
There are many amazing social automation tools available online. I can only speak from my personal experience about the ones I have used. If you think there are other, better ones to check out, please comment on this post and let me know!
The obvious one here is Hootsuite, I have used Hootsuite for a number of things, from school projects to social media management for large companies. It is a very easy to use tool for social automation and offers aspects of it for free.
Hootsuite is great for automating your social networks. There are 3 tiers of service and their free service allows up to 3 social networks for free. It also has a very organized interface that allows you to sort through engagement activity very easily and by specific networks. For me, the biggest issue with Hootsuite is the reporting system. Reports can be generated or bought using points, and the points are allocated based on dollars spent using the Hootsuite service. If you’re serious about keeping up with the data, the dollars spent just might not provide enough.
Another great tool that I am currently using is IFTTT (IF That Then This). This tool is great for making the organization of social automation easy. It is setup to create reactions to different social aspects. For example, IF you post a photo to Instagram, THEN it the image can be automatically saved to your Dropbox account.
IF you post a blog THEN a tweet can be generated to share your latest blog post. There are 4,000 different IFTTT options that you can choose from. This makes it easy for you to share your latest blogs and updates automatically on social media. If you can't find a specific recipe on the site, you can manually set up your own. Once you have your IFTTT combinations set up, they are taken care of automatically from then on.
There are a number of combinations that IFTTT hasn’t figured out yet, for example, IF Twitter Post Then Publish on Facebook", the link doesn't show up properly on Facebook. I'm sure there are lots of other glitches to IFTTT recipes. Although I have only used IFTTT on desktop, I hear that there are many issues with using it on mobile devices. Therefore, I would use this with caution and ensure you test out all the recipes.
Automated Strategies
In very few cases do you want to set up your social posts for weeks in advance and just let if fly on its own. For proactive brand awareness, you need to monitor your post, revisit old posts, and engage with your audience.
If someone is asking questions or making complaints on your social posts, you need to address their concern right away. A part of social media is to talk to your audience and help them out with any queries they may have. Not only do you need to monitor, there are going to be a lot of things you can not plan for.
There are constant changes in the world, so you want to stay relevant and engage with your followers. The speed of social media requires you to stay proactive to maintain a positive brand presence.
Not Everything Should be Automated
Keep in mind that there should be no such thing as fully automated social strategy!
There are a lot of tools that can assist you in monitoring, scheduling, and posting your social updates. However, these tools should only act as an assistant, rather than a replacement. You social media accounts can't simply run on their own. There are many things that you can't neglect and will need to be addressed right away. If you're considering automating your social media, think about which tasks can be delegated to a tool and what tasks you will need to carry out yourself.
on
Hootesuite is good for monitoring, Buffer is amazing for scheduling and seeing basic metrics – freemium versions are available – the awesome plan at just over $100 per year is great. Using these two platforms together works well.
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Hi Christina,
I would like to suggest you to go ahead and try Blog2social, this is my personal favorite, not only you have a single dashboard which will help you post across platforms but also it requires no cron job done. You just have to simply install and activate it.
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Thanks for sharing Matthew!
When I use an automation strategy I tend to schedule out a bunch of posts at once and then do updates throughout the week.
An example of this would be: I write a blog post, I then take that and promote it on my Social Media by scheduling a bunch of different posts at targeted times for the weeks/months following. I think have another blog post that I post at a different time, and repeat this process. What ends up happening is my social media posts build up and days become filled with promotions for all my different blog posts that I scheduled at one time or another. I then sit down once a week (usually on a weekend) and find articles around the web that I really love and schedule those posts out for the next 1-2 weeks (so that the content remains up-to-date). On top of that, I monitor my feeds throughout each day and if I see something I’m particularly loving, I’ll schedule that for sometime that day. I also make sure to try and reply to different bloggers every day, or retweet, or post little personal life updates.