What is automation? Social media automation is defined as the process of automating social media activities to optimize the results derived from social media channels. It helps marketers save time and effort spent on managing social platforms, engaging with prospects, and enhancing brand awareness.
Social Media Automation refers to the use of software programs that can be used to execute repetitive tasks in social media marketing. These tasks include, but are not limited to publishing content on Facebook and Twitter, subscribing to potential prospects on blogs, etc.
Most marketers agree that social media automation is a blessing for their time-pressed businesses. Social media automation is the concept of automating parts of your social media marketing task, allowing you to publish more frequently while spending less time on it.
What Are the Key Features of Social Media Automation
There are various features offered by different social media automation tools. Let’s look at the basic automation features a tool must offer. Consider these as your benchmark while investing in a social media automation platform.
1. Content Publishing
One of the most basic features of a social media automation tool is to publish content directly on multiple social platforms. These tools enable integration with your social channels and allow you to select the channels you wish to publish content on. Once you draft the message, the tool should show a preview of the content on your social channels. This feature is useful as you can easily publish content across multiple channels at one time.
2. Scheduling Posts
Another important feature provided by social media automation tools is scheduling future posts. This allows you to plan your social content strategy in advance, so you can make the best out of your social media platforms. It also informs you about when your audience is active on social platforms and lets you post at those times regardless of your schedule. Tools offer scheduling of posts up to more than a month.
3. Easy-to-use Dashboard
Social media automation is a dynamic process that integrates with multiple channels, users, and content. This is why it is important to maintain a simple and clean dashboard on your automation tool. You need to invest in an automation platform that provides an easy-to-use user interface that allows easy accessibility to all important elements.
4. Republishing Content
Constantly building new and innovative content is an exhaustive process. Hence, marketers need to repurpose, republish, and repost available content. This can mean utilizing owned historic content or curated content shared by relevant channels. Your social automation tool must facilitate easy reposting of content, as well as curating relevant content.
5. Automated Responses
Social media channels enable your prospects and customers to directly interact with your brand. It is important for your teams to respond immediately, irrespective of your time zones. Automation platforms let you set up automated responses for messages received on your social channels. This helps keep your prospects engaged despite the unavailability of agents at any time. Make sure you choose a social automation tool that provides a feature to create automated responses.
6. Analysis
Your automation tool must track all your social platforms and be equipped to measure and analyze the performance of your social campaigns. This helps you prioritize efforts that make a difference in optimizing your social engagement, brand building, and conversions. Hence, robust analysis and reporting is an important feature of social media automation.
Automated Social Media Marketing Tools
Why automate your social media marketing? To free up time to spend on higher value, more interesting tasks. Automating social media moderation makes you more efficient so you can engage with customers, post great content, and follow up with leads.
Automated and semi-automated social media tools are used to handle the most time-consuming parts of social media. They allow you to run your account effectively while saving time on content curation, scheduling, and more. While social media can be boring and time-consuming if you manually post on every social media platform one by one, here are some top free tools to automate your social media.
Kontentino
Kontentino is trusted by over 4,000 brands and agencies to organize their internal communication and client collaboration. Manage multiple clients, create custom reports, collaborate with your entire team, all within a single easy-to-use platform. Users save up to 41% of their time wasted on menial tasks by incorporating Kontentino into their everyday workflow.
Key features:
- Set restricted audiences
- Labeling and commenting built for collaboration
- Assign tasks and tag people
- Activity history to avoid confusion
- Drag and drop social calendar
- Send bulk assignments for multiple posts
- Analytics and benchmarking
- Content Plans
- Mobile app
- Client 1-click approval
Crowdfire
Crowdfire integrates with your website to collect blog posts and store updates then automatically creates branded social media content. Schedule all of your posts in advance or use Crowdfire’s recommended sharing times to take advantage of peak engagement periods. Customize each post and tailor your content for every social network.
Key features:
- Chrome extension for content curation
- RSS feeds
- Automated reporting
- Track mentions, comments and messages
- Automatic replies
- WordPress and Medium integration
- Timeline queue meter
CoSchedule
CoSchedule organizes all of your marketing into one interactive, visual calendar. Schedule and share projects with your colleagues, attach documents, spreadsheets, files, and presentations. Drag and drop assignment tags, prioritize tasks, and plan posts through the Coschedule dashboard.
Key features:
- Single content library
- Google Chrome extension
- Manage multiple users
- Catalogue files with custom taxonomies
- Define priorities
- Apply repeatable workflows
Social Status
This SMM tool helps automate social media reporting by carrying out a detailed analysis of your profiles. Social Status provides four levels of analytics; profile, ads, competitor, and influencer, and generates customized reports for all four levels. The tool supports Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.PricingStarting from $29 per month for 10 social media profiles.
eClincher
Another tool for publishing content is eClincher. It helps you with publishing, engagement, listening, and analytics. eClincher claims to be “perfect for businesses, brands, and agencies.” eClincher supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. The process of scheduling is simple. All you have to do is pick your accounts and enter your posts. It also gives the option to repeat the content over the selected intervals. But many advanced features are only available in premium or agency plans. The UI design needs a little improvement, though!PricingStarting from $59/month on the basic plan with 10 profiles and 1 user.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot manages social media, schedules social media posts, improves engagement, and analyzes results. Socialpilot also supports bulk posting on different social channels. The template for bulk scheduling might sound a little problematic if you don’t have any prior experience in bulk scheduling. SocialPilot offers comprehensive analytics concerning different platforms. The only limit is the absence of social listening and not supporting video posts in bulk uploading.PricingStarting from $30/month on a professional plan with 25 social media accounts.
SociAlert
SocialAlert is a tracking tool that helps you to track your hashtags, keywords, and social accounts. If you want to avoid all the social noise and focus on the performance of your keywords and hashtags, Social Alert is the right tool for you. Hashtag tracking can help startups to grow their digital presence and tap into more customers. You can use this tool to expand your post reach on social media by using relevant industry-related keywords. The tool generates a report with the number of posts, impressions, users, reach, and top mentions, which will help you make your next marketing campaign a success.
Conclusion:
Social media automation tools help you “set and forget.” No more wasting your time on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram manually posting updates, scheduling new content, monitoring campaigns, and staying in touch with your fans. Instead, you can use free social media automation tools to grow.