Social media automation is a valuable tool for social media managers to help them efficiently prioritize their time. There are different ways to automate your accounts, ranging from programming a bot to comment and like posts on your behalf, or the less extreme options of scheduling new posts, randomizing reposts and syncing your accounts to condense the number of posts you’re manually making.
The Challenges of Managing Social Media
Authentic Engagement
This is a huge challenge that social media managers have to overcome. With over a third of the world’s population using social media, how can you possibly keep that connection real? Interacting individually with every single follower is near impossible, after all, there are only 24 hours in the day. It is a very important aspect of social media
Growing Your Followers Organically
The need for individual attention on social media strikes again. It’s easy to just bulk buy followers, but really, this isn’t going to help you achieve your goals in the long run if none of your followers are real. Growing your followers organically can be very time consuming and rules, guidelines and algorithms on social media are always shifting, so often strategies have to be tweaked to keep up. Social media managers are already so busy, this can be a big struggle.
can be very time consuming and rules, guidelines and algorithms on social media are always shifting, so often strategies have to be tweaked to keep up. Social media managers are already so busy, this can be a big struggle.
Maintaining High-Quality Content
It might seem like this is obvious and should go without saying, it’s not a challenge, it’s the job. However, when you add this to the rest of the role, it can be challenging. Creating and curating content, scheduling posts, monitoring engagement, responding to followers and updating and sharing content across platforms. When you are trying to stay on top of all of this, actually getting down to creating high-quality content can be incredibly difficult. Being creative under time-pressure can easily dry up anyone’s creative juices.
Widening Reach
As a social media manager, you want to be continually growing your followers and your target audience. That’s how you know you’re doing your job well. It’s no good staying static and appealing to the audience you already have, the whole point of using social media for business is that you use it to grow your brand or company, not merely maintain it.
Overcoming These Challenges
The answer to a lot of these challenges is to learn and instigate automaton into your social media strategy. This helps you keep up with engagement, which in turn will broaden your audience reach and help you grow your followers. It’ll also free up some of your time, so you can focus on curating really great content.
Automation isn’t as simple as programming a bot to do your entire job, because if it were that simple everyone would be Instagram famous, the role of social media manager would be redundant. A well automated bot will interact with the help of a human, and you’ll need to be updating it with as much information as possible to keep it as authentic as a bot can be.
The golden rule of using automation is that you don’t use it as a replacement for human interaction. It should be seen as an assistant. It’s helping you out with the bulk of your work, but it’s so important to still have that real human interaction on your account in addition. Automate as much as you can, but
Why Use Automation?
The point of automation is to free up some of your time by programming a bot to perform the mundane and repetitive tasks you have on your daily to-do list. It’s important to keep real connections too, but let’s face it, liking your followers’ posts and uploading photos doesn’t need to be done by a real person.
Types of Automation and Tips To Use It
Scheduling Posts
Often it can be easier to create a whole slew of posts in one go, and then upload a couple of them each day. Logging into Instagram, Facebook or Twitter to do this can take up valuable time and also pull you away from another task. It’s easier to just get it all done at once and then forget about it.
Some platforms offer scheduling options, where you can choose different amounts for each social media site. For example, you could tweet seven times a day but only post to Instagram twice a day. It also allows you to pick whatever time gets the highest engagement levels for your audience. If it’s the middle of the night for you, it makes it easier just to schedule it in advance. This is a real time saver and takes nothing away from authentic interactions.
Reusing Content
No one Instagram post or tweet is going to reach everyone at one time, so many social media managers reuse the same posts over again in a bid to widen their reach. Keeping track of what you’ve used, and when to use it again can be time-consuming.
Automating this can take another thing off your mind, to let you get on with other things. You can also schedule posts to reuse content without having to do any of the reposting yourself. By uploading your post to different automation providers and services, they can randomly reuse your posts at different times on different platforms in order to try and maximize reach. Some services allow for a more targeted approach, requiring you to program the automated system with exactly what, where and when you want posted.
Syncing Accounts
Spreading your content across a multitude of social media platforms is imperative, however, it can also be time-consuming. Make sure you’re setting up all your accounts to be synced with each other. For example, if you upload a new video on YouTube, have it automatically set to post it on Facebook. If you post a new WordPress blog, have it set to automatically post it across all social media outlets. This may seem obvious, but it’s a huge timesaver if you’re not already doing it.
What Not To Do
The main things to avoid when automating your social media accounts is not to program a bot to replace interactions. Avoid having a bot commenting on your behalf because they can’t read the context of a post and could comment inappropriately.
If you opt for an automated bot that auto-likes other users and your followers’ posts, ensure there is a limit on the number of likes it’s allowed to make per day and that it’s set to only like recent posts. This avoids the appearance of being spammed.
You can have a bot trawling social media for new users to follow, but again put a limit on this to avoid looking like a spam account. Also take the time to look for new users to follow yourself every so often, as a bot could miss someone who might be of interest to you.
Final Words
Automation is definitely something all social media managers should be using, but in what capacity is up to you. When you first start out, try to transfer over the repetitive tasks a human doesn’t need to be doing so you can focus on connecting with your followers personally. Remember to always keep some kind of genuine human interaction across your social media outlets, but that in order to do this more effectively, you’ll likely need to be automating a lot of your other workload.
Fantɑstic! I am getting ideaѕ from thiѕ article