Whether you are launching your business to the world for the very first time or trying to keep up with a deluge of social media interactions, social automation can help save you time and get more meaningful engagement.
Social media automation is all about managing your marketing channels using a number of tools available in the market. The automation tools do most of your work for you and help you save time, reduce workload and increase efficiency.
Social media automation involves using software to schedule and publish posts for social media accounts. Social media automation tools make it possible to carry out a large number of tasks, starting from publishing various kinds of updates at certain time intervals, retweeting, liking, and much more.
What can be automated on social media?
1. Scheduling and publishing
Logging in and out of different social accounts to publish multiple times per day can eat up a lot of time. Especially because the best time to post varies by platform.
This is a case where social media automation saves time and increases efficiency without reducing content quality. Dedicate a block of time to content creation. Then, use automated social media posting to schedule the appropriate post times on each network.
2. Data collection and reporting
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of marketers automate their marketing measurement and attribution. The remaining one-third are either:
- missing out on key insights from marketing data, or…
- …spending way too much time collecting and analyzing it manually.
3. Basic customer service
Automating customer interactions is one of the top use cases for marketing artificial intelligence tools in 2021. Yet, the Hootsuite Social Transformation Report found that only 13% of organizations increased their use of customer interaction automation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You don’t need a human team member to answer common questions like “What are your hours?” and “Do you have any coupons available?” Likewise, you can automate service requests related to package tracking, refund status, and other issues that are tied to your CRM.
4. Social commerce
Well-designed customer interaction AI can also:
- walk potential customers through the buying process
- provide personalized product recommendations
- increase conversions through social channels.
5. Social monitoring and listening
Social monitoring and listening allow you to understand the social conversation about your brand, your industry, and your competitors. They provide valuable market research and business intelligence you can use to guide your social media strategy.
Manually seeking out relevant content in which you’re not directly tagged can be time-consuming. So, it’s a good idea to put an automated social listening strategy in place.
6. Social ads management
To get the most from your social ads budget, you need to:
- test ads
- track results
- allocate spending
- determine placements
Automating these time-consuming tasks frees you up to dedicate more time to crafting great copy and other advertising assets.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is a social media automation and analytics tool for businesses – from small to medium and even large companies. With this social media automation tool, you can expect to enjoy a ton of features such as social media scheduling, calendar management, client management, and more.
Additionally, it doesn’t matter what social media channel you are using because SocialPilot has your needs covered. That said, you can integrate SocialPilot with social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram (Direct Publishing), and TikTok simultaneously.
The best of all is that SocialPilot offers users a social media calendar feature, which will help you monitor your social media campaigns. You can incorporate filters into your calendars and monitor your social media campaigns by groups and accounts. Even more, the calendar functionality allows users to drag and drop their social media posts and reschedule them, depending on what has changed.
Finally, SocialPilot users can analyze their social media post-performance basis how engaged their audience, influencers, demographics, and competitors are.
Core Features of SocialPilot
Now that you know what SocialPilot can do for you, let’s discuss the core features of SocialPilot below:
- SocialPilot gives you the freedom to schedule your posts as you want with advanced social media publishing capabilities and audience targeting.
- You will get helpful analytics of your automated social posts and know where to adjust with downloadable PDF social media reports.
- Set access levels to your team to maintain the content flow in your company. With its team collaboration feature, you can add your team members and assign accounts and access levels.
- You can use your Social Inbox to moderate conversations on Facebook pages.
- You have control of your Facebook ad campaigns by using Lead Ads or Boost Post.
- Excellent customer service available 24×5 to help you whenever you need assistance via chat/email/call.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an essential social media search tool if you want to have a greater understanding of your content marketing strategies. So instead of wasting time guessing the content topics, use BuzzSumo that will help you discover some of the popular keywords in your industry and the publishers.
Over the years, BuzzSumo has grown into a popular social media marketing tool because of its ability to provide in-depth insights into what your competition is doing.
If you want to become a savvy content marketer and stay ahead of your competition, BuzzSumo will help you discover the most popular content by entering either a keyword or a domain name on the search bar.
You have the option to filter your results, depending on what you want – from duration to location. BuzzSumo can also collect analytics from popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among others.
Pros
- It’s a great tool to identify the most popular or widely shared content in your niche.
- You can identify influencers within your niche and build stellar relationships with them using BuzzSumo.
- It helps with link-building strategies by identifying the most suitable content topics.
Cons
- It is limited to specific mediums.
- It does not have enough backlink data to help content marketers build links.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is yet another social media engagement tool that you can use to ace social media marketing.
Sprout Social allows users to organize and assign tasks to members. This tool also helps run ads on limited social platforms.
With the tool, you can schedule your posts or campaigns and it also provides analytics and social listening features. What’s more? Sprout Social serves all tiers of businesses – small or large enterprises.
Pros
- The analytics features by Sprout Social helps you track followers, link clicks, the number of posts, change in your social media engagement, etc.
- Sprout Social has a smart inbox where you can monitor and reply to all your brand mentions.
- You can monitor campaigns across social media and search for posts mentioning you or your brand.
Cons
- Sprout Social is not at its best yet when it comes to scheduling campaigns on Instagram.
- Some users also encounter issues with LinkedIn posting. They say that when they schedule a post on LinkedIn, the image often looks smaller than what they thought had been scheduled.
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.
Missinglettr
Missinglettr is a social media platform with advanced drip campaign features. The tool is designed to automatically detect when you’ve posted content to your chosen medium, be that a blog or even a YouTube video.
The tool will then gather the information in an intuitive dashboard which can be used to set up automated drip campaigns on social media.
This tool is the perfect choice for bloggers and website owners that are keen to push their posts on social media but don’t have the time to devote to a full-scale marketing campaign.
In addition to the drip features, MissingLetter also has a Curate feature, that can help to automate aspects of the post creation process, by pulling blogs, videos, and other media from around the web that your audience will be interested in.
You can then use this to create fresh and engaging posts for your social media accounts. You can also use this tool to connect with influencers in your niche and get your own content shared around the web.
Not only does Missinglettr offer some great automation features, but it also comes complete with a powerful content calendar. It’s an all-in-one calendar that can help you to schedule and publish posts and manage your automation, all from one dashboard.
You can also use the calendar to manage your automated drip campaigns and keep track of how your posts are split between the different social channels.
PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is a social media automation tool designed to help businesses manage hundreds, to thousands of social pages all at one time. They offer 3 different solutions for different-sized businesses from small businesses to mid-sized agencies and enterprises.
PromoRepublic has a range of automation features that can help reduce the load for social media marketing teams, such as:
- Auto reposting of high-performing content – If you had a post that performed particularly well, you can use PromoRepublic to automatically repost the content at a later date to increase engagement.
- Content approval workflows – If you’re working with a range of brands and different agencies, you can set up automated workflows to ensure that everyone is happy with the content before it’s published.
- Smart automated posting – Schedule posts from a curated database to be published at the perfect time for your audience.
One of the best features of PromoRepublic is the selection of ready-to-use content available for small businesses.
If you want to populate your social profiles, but you don’t have time to dedicate to creating social media content, you can choose from a selection of PromoRepublic’s wide selection of industry-relevant content to keep your followers engaged and improve your reputation.
Overall, it’s a great choice for small businesses or larger enterprises that want to streamline their processes.
Conclusion
Social media automation is a tool that allows you to boost your engagement on your social profiles based on the audience you target. There are many benefits of social media automation for your SMM campaign, including sending out personalized and targeted messages.
Automation tools for social media are taking the world of marketing by storm and for very good reason. Social media used to be just a distraction until automation tools came along. These tools can help people who are too busy to spend all their time on social media marketing for their business. Social media automation is about saving time and the more time you can save, the better.