Automation is already taking the marketing world by storm but has yet to take the world of social media marketing. The industry is moving at a fair pace…but what do we need to look forward to in the next five years? If you are like most small business owners, time is a precious commodity. This is especially true when it comes to marketing and managing your online presence. If you have ever had the thought:

Automating your social media marketing is often talked about as being a bad thing. Some people will tout it as the downfall of humanity, others say that it is lazy and wrong. Yes, automation does have its place in social media marketing, but only for certain kinds of posts.

Automating your social media marketing can be one of the most effective ways to improve your social media presence. It can help you grow your audience by increasing your engagement and by sharing relevant and interesting content with them on a regular basis. Social media automation tools allow you to post updates at specific times, find the best time to share content, as well as to schedule any type of tweet, Facebook post, and much more. Automating your social media marketing is relatively simple with the right tool.

Hootsuite Publisher

This is our favorite social media scheduling tool for obvious reasons. It features a “Best Time to Publish” feature that suggests the best time to post for your audience. It allows you to post more, high-quality content in less time.

You can also customize the content of a single post for multiple platforms. This maximizes efficiency while avoiding the concerns about cross-posting mentioned above.

And, of course, Hootsuite allows you to bulk schedule up to 350 posts at a time. This automated social media posting allows you to focus more on content creation and less on pressing Post.

Hootsuite Analyze

When you have solid data about what works for your brand, social media marketing gets a bit less scary. It also becomes more effective and produces better ROI.

Most social platforms offer native analytics tools. But it can be a huge drain on your time to analyze each platform separately and compile manual reports.

Automated, customized social media reporting through Hootsuite Analyze allows you to measure your content performance as often as you like. You’ll get real-time updates and high-level overviews for quarterly or annual reviews.

Heyday

Heyday can automate routine queries and order tracking. A virtual sales assistant provides product recommendations and increases conversions through social channels.

Proprietary natural-language programming models allow the AI virtual assistant to answer more than 80% of customer queries. For more complex requests, there’s a seamless handoff to human agents.

Heyday allows customers to reach you through:

• online chat
• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Google Business Messages
• Kakao Talk
• email

CoSchedule

The primary goal of CoSchedule is to achieve efficiency for both solopreneurs and marketing companies. This social media automation tool integrates with WordPress and helps with pushing content to your preferred social media account whenever you hit “publish” for every post.

The best of all is that CoSchedule offers users a “Top Content Report,” which gives users insights into the social engagement of the campaigns you send out on social media. This feature is useful for content marketers who are curious to know how their marketing campaigns are fairing to help them adjust whenever necessary.

Unlike other social media tools, CoSchedule focuses on content and social performance. It offers features such as “ReQueue,” which allows users to reschedule their best content. This will help your audience see more fresh content in their feeds.

Pros

• The tool allows users to visualize their content in one place. You can create a read-only calendar using CoSchedule, and your team members can view what is coming up next.
• You can easily tweak your calendar settings to match your preferences.
• CoSchedule will enable you to implement approval procedures.

Cons

• The tool has become sluggish suddenly, probably because of the massive amount of data users are entering.
• The tool indeed offers scheduling functionalities, but people experience publishing errors regularly.
• You will have to change your templates manually if you change your mind about scheduling posts.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a social network and content curation tool for content marketers. It is also one of the best free social media automation tools, offering users a free plan. With Scoop.it, you can create specific topics, share your ideas, and connect with like-minded individuals.

Using the Scoop.it content director, users can curate content from any other source. You can also share your idea across your most preferred social media platforms with just a click of a button.

This social media automation tool also enables users to generate ideas using specific terms called keywords. So, if you are a content marketer, Scoop.it will help you stay updated and know what to always share with your audience.

Pros

• Scoop.it regularly updates its users on trending topics, depending on the keywords you choose.
• You can share your content to various social media channels with just a click.
• Your front page provides you with all the relevant information you need – from curator profiles to topics.

Cons

• Social media marketers haven’t leveraged this tool because they are muddled about whether or not it is worth an investment.
• It’s pretty expensive – $79/month, which most beginner writers can’t afford to “lose” every month.

Zoho Social

With businesses growing at breakneck speed, Zoho Social is built to match their needs efficiently. This social media automation tool will help you work with your team and monitor brand mentions and social conversations.

It offers an unlimited social media scheduling feature and creates a custom report to analyze your social media. Zoho Social lets you manage social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business.

Pros

• Its SmartQ feature comes up with the best time slots to schedule your posts for maximum audience engagement.
• With its CRM integrations, you can interact with prospects and generate potential leads from social media.
• Automated report creation at Zoho Social enables report sharing with clients at any time complemented with a personalized message.

Cons

• Zoho Social lacks a combined analytics feature that takes it on a low for marketers, especially when some Zoho Social alternatives offer this.
• The most common feature in social media scheduling tools is missing in Zoho Social, i.e., RSS feed integration.
• The number of features it offers is looked at as an expensive tool in the market.

Audiense Connect

Audiense Connect is the best dedicated Twitter marketing platform on the market. Their Connect tool is designed to make marketing using Twitter easier and more efficient.

With Audiense Connect you can stay organized with the help of automated direct messaging chatbots and advanced monitoring and listening features. In just a few clicks, you can design and deploy your own Twitter messaging chatbot that can handle repetitive tasks such as responding to common queries and managing opt-ins, and more.

You can also use Audiense Connect to analyze and optimize your Twitter campaigns. With the help of automation features like filtering, following and unfollowing, feed organization lists, and more, it’s easier than ever to manage large-scale Twitter marketing campaigns.

You can also use the reporting, analytics, and competitor comparison features to make sure that your campaigns are the best they can possibly be.

When it comes to social media marketing, most platforms focus on providing solutions that target all the major social media outlets. However, Audiense Connect focuses solely on Twitter, meaning you can use this tool to create more advanced and effective campaigns.

SocialBee

SocialBee is a social media scheduling tool that can be used to plan and schedule content for a range of different platforms.

The tool makes it easy to manage social media campaigns at scale thanks to its intuitive category-based scheduling system.

When you schedule a post, you can assign each post a specific category to help you stay on track with your content. At any time, you can use the scheduler tool to pause posts from certain categories, make bulk edits, re-queue posts, and more.

You can use SocialBee to manage your campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and GoogleMyBusiness. You can also use the tool to plan your hashtags, create hashtag collections, and preview the posts before they go live.

SocialBee is useful when it comes to campaign tracking as well. You can use the custom URL and tracking features to create short URLs that are optimized for social media, and generate tracking codes so you can automatically measure interactions with your social media links.

SocialBee is a great choice for larger companies and agencies as it has some useful collaboration features. You can set up different workspaces if you manage more than one brand, assign users roles, and set up automated content comment and approval workflows.

Overall, SocialBee is an extensive social media management tool that can help you to effectively schedule posts and automate aspects of your campaigns.

How to Automate Social Media Posts

1. Look at social listening tools.
2. Use chatbots.
3. Gain valuable insights across several networks.
4. Produce content curation ideas.
5. Engage with your audience.
6. Achieve consistent scheduling.

1. Look at social listening tools.

Many social media automation tools can be used for social listening. Essentially, social listening is the process of monitoring what people are saying about your brand or industry online.

With automation tools, you can see brand mentions across all platforms in one place. Additionally, you can follow certain keywords, topics, or hashtags to see what’s going on in your industry. Moreover, social media automation tools can be used to follow your competitors. What’s the latest news? What are people talking about?

Ultimately, social listening tools can help you come up with ideas for social media posts or even product ideas.

2. Use chatbots.

Another way to use social media automation tools is to create chatbots. Chatbots can be used with sites like Facebook Messenger to streamline your marketing, provide customer support, and improve the customer experience. For example, you can create automated replies or suggested replies to customer questions or comments. When a customer asks for your hours, for instance, your chatbot can automatically respond.

Additionally, you can use a chatbot to let customers know that you’ll get back to them in a certain amount of time and provide resources.

Ultimately, a social media chatbot should help customers with small issues, but escalate larger issues to a human.

3. Gain valuable insights across several networks:

Most social media automation tools provide analytics that can be helpful to your social media strategy.

For example, after using and connecting these tools to your social platforms, you can use analytics to determine the best time to post. You can answer questions like, “When does my audience interact more?” and “What’s my engagement rate?”

A large benefit to automation tools is that you can get analytics such as impressions, reach, and engagement on all your social media platforms in one place. These reports make it easier to compare the success of a campaign across different platforms.

4. Produce content curation ideas:

While not all automation tools provide content curation, some of them do. This means that you can choose industries or topics that you think your audience is interested in. Then, the software will curate content that you can share and post on your social media platforms.

Some automation tools might draft a social media post for you, however, those should just be used as a starting point. You should write all your own social media posts.

Additionally, using the tactics mentioned above should help you get to know your audience better, facilitating more content ideas.

5. Engage with your audience:

One of the most important benefits of social media automation tools is that they can help you engage with your audience across several platforms in one place.

With this type of software, you can monitor brand mentions, replies, and messages. With all of these gathered in one place, it makes it easier to connect with your audience and helps your team respond in a timely manner.

6. Achieve consistent scheduling:

Consistency is one of the best ways to earn your follower’s trust and improve your online presence. With social media automation tools, you can keep a steady queue of posts. This can help you plan ahead and spend more time on creativity and less time on tedious posting tasks.

Additionally, you can use this software to schedule posts in bulk. Many automation software can be used to input a spreadsheet of posts and schedule them.

These are just some of the top ways to use social media automation tools. However, a human should still be interacting with the community, and planning creative, exciting content.

Conclusion

Nowadays social media marketing is becoming more and more important. With many new ways to promote your business through social media channels, the benefits of using social media marketing tools are clear. But choosing the right tools is not always easy.