You may have seen the term “automation” being tossed around on the web or social media platforms. Social media automation is a process by which you increase your outreach, brand exposure, and reach. This is accomplished by automating many of the activities that drive results in social media marketing.
What Is Social Media Automation? Social media automation tools help to manage your posts, automate the routine and free up your time. These social media automation tools include scheduling posts to various social media channels and performing actions on them automatically.
Social media automation tools allow you to schedule and publish posts across multiple social media platforms quickly. They also offer many other features such as analytics reporting and engagement tracking. The benefits of social media automation are two-fold. You can schedule and publish content regularly which is an important part of building your online brand. This can help you build a consistent following across your social media platforms which will grow your audience over time.
MobileMonkey
More than a million businesses worldwide use MobileMonkey, spanning every industry and country. MobileMonkey helps businesses in real estate, eCommerce, restaurants, automobiles, and other sectors create chatbots that communicate with customers in real-time. Through the platform, administrators can contact leads, run drip campaigns, schedule messages, share links, and view insights on audience engagement. Businesses can also automate follow-up and lead routing processes to streamline customer care operations.
MobileMonkey provides businesses with a powerful combination of methods for communicating with customers, including Web Chat, SMS, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
It includes a multi-platform chatbot builder, which allows businesses to reuse chat marketing content across a wide variety of platforms, and a Unified Chat Inbox, which lets you manage all inbound and outbound messaging conversations in one place, as well as a toolbox of automation and integrations to help you scale your messaging efforts.
Pros:
- Automate Instagram engagement by replying to direct messages.
- Easily generate leads
- Very simple and easy to use
- Quick Integration with CRM
Drawbacks of Mobile Monkey:
- Conditions cannot be used in chatbot flows
- AI cannot be used to improve chatbot responses
- eCommerce integrations are not available
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media automation tool that encourages teams to work collaboratively. Whether you are looking to schedule, reschedule, queue, or bulk upload your posts, they have plenty of options to fill your content calendar.
With a social inbox to catch every conversation, it also provides one-click reports to its users. Agorapulse supports social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Instagram.
Pros
- Their social inbox offers you to send reports to your clients within a few clicks directly.
- You can easily label your content for smooth retrievals and analysis.
- With their inbuilt CRM feature, Agorapulse helps you understand your audience better.
Cons
- Their reporting feature is too basic for the ever-growing industry of marketers.
- It’s difficult for users to navigate through the tool, suggesting the tool to have a shift in their interface.
- This social media automation tool doesn’t integrate with any external applications or tools except for bit.ly.
- It is also expensive for all features it offers.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite aims to provide an all-in-one platform for social media management across multiple channels. As expected, there’s an option to search and filter through existing social media, in order to find brand mentions, insights, and demographic information, which is very helpful in skimming through your various channels activities.
Crowdfire
Cost: Free
Crowdfire began as a simple automation tool to help track how many people were following and unfollowing you each day, but it has since grown into personalized mini-marketer for all of your social platforms. Link everything from your Instagram to your Etsy shop, and each day Crowdfire will suggest new ways they they can help grow your audience organically (and automatically!).
Post Planner
Cost: $3/month
Finding great, relevant content to share every day can be completely exhausting. What are people talking about? What stories are people engaging with? For just $3 a month, you can have Post Planner dashboard, which answers all of those questions. Let them know what websites you align yourself with, and they’ll collect all of the best content from around the web in real time. To save you even more time, Post Planner also rates each piece of content based on engagement and can automatically post the best to any of your accounts at a future time.
Social Pilot
SocialPilot is great for small businesses, enterprises and agencies. Like other platforms it offers the core features of social media management tools;
- A single place from which to publish and schedule your social media posts
- Social inbox for monitoring replies, comments, and mentions,
- Analytics that offers white label reporting.
It allows direct posts via the web or mobile, or browser extensions, and content suggestions are provided to help you develop more. In addition, SocialPilot allows you to connect to clients accounts directly through the software, rather than having to ask clients to provide their login details directly.
Later App
Later App is the number one marketing platform for Instagram. This tool is great for visually planning, scheduling, and analyzing social media content, especially for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. In the free version, you can schedule up to 30 posts per single user per social profile. (one Instagram account, Facebook Page, Twitter account, and Pinterest account).
Effects of Using Social Media Automation
Automation allows your business to run social media strategy more seamlessly and efficiently. However, it is important to use the right strategies with your software to maximize your business potentials and return on investments. You should note that, if poorly done, automation can and will fail you. Here are some effects the use of social media automation will have on your business.
- Improved interrelation and efficiency between Marketing and Sales Departments. Both of these departments are mostly at loggerheads. They both rely on each other to do their jobs correctly. If there is a lack of communication, your business will lose leads, sales, and revenue. With social media automation software, the two departments can efficiently work together.
- Consistent feedback guarantees constant improvement. As your automation software works, it continually analyzes every piece of social media engagements, conversions, sales, and information. The software keeps track of what works, what doesn’t, and who is buying it. Hence, social media automation helps you to adjust your marketing strategies based on the information continually. So, you can improve as you go without manually having to engage your customers.
- Do more at once: Manual social media monitoring can be a very tasking effort, and in most organizations, it is the job of a dedicated staff member. With social media automation, you save time and money by doing less tedious and demanding things. Also, unlike you, automation software can handle many clients about different ideas on different channels simultaneously.
Using automation tools to handle your social media strategy can be costly, requires regular maintenance, needs a lot of information, and many more. However, the ROI would be noteworthy in the long run, and the results would far outweigh the human and financial implications.
Conclusion
If you run a large social media campaign, you might feel that you spend a lot of time adding new posts publishing new updates and managing your social media accounts . This is where social media automation tools can help you out. The variety of automation tools has continued to grow , from those that allow you to schedule content for weeks and even months in advance, to those that tailor their updates depending on their research into their target demographic.