What Is Social Media Automation? Definition, Best Practices, and Top Tools
What Is Social Media Automation? Definition, Best Practices, and Top Tools
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.
In this article, let us look at the process of automating social media, the best practices to follow while automating social media, and the benefits offered. We will also review the top social media automation tools available today.
Table of Contents
- What Is Social Media Automation?
- What Are the Key Features of Social Media Automation?
- What Are the Best Practices of Social Media Automation?
- 6 Best Social Media Automation Tools
What Is Social Media Automation?
The global acceptance of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn has largely influenced the online reach of companies. Statistics show that around 42% of the world’s population uses social media, which roughly adds up to 3.2 billion users worldwide. Moreover, the number keeps increasing with new users joining every day.
These growing numbers indicate the potential of social media channels for marketers. But leveraging this powerful tool is a challenging task for marketers. Your brand needs to be consistent, available, and relevant on social media. It is also important to track trends, measure the performance of social efforts, and engage constantly with prospects on social channels. Performing all these activities while running multiple marketing campaigns is difficult. Which is why social media automation plays an integral role in marketing strategies.
As we discussed earlier, social media automation helps marketers automate social media processes to save time and effort, and get maximum ROI from all social media efforts. It includes content publishing, tracking, and measuring.
Automation includes tasks such as publishing content, scheduling future content posts, republishing popular content, curating trending content, and tracking the engagement on content posts. Some advanced social media automation tasks include social listening and sentiment analysis, which enable brands to engage with their prospects on a much deeper level.
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 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.
7. Social Media Ad Automation
Advertising on social channels like Facebook and Instagram provides brands with opportunities to communicate the value of their products and services based on interests, behavior, location, etc. Hence, it is important for your automation tool to provide robust ad automation functionality to build, execute, and analyze social media ads.
What Are the Best Practices of Social Media Automation?
Social media automation is a continuous, dynamic, and real-time marketing function. It enables your brand to be always active on the social media hemisphere with constant scrutiny, analysis, and iterations. Here are some best practices to incorporate while executing social media automation.
1. Beware of time zones
Publishing and scheduling social posts on automation tools can be tricky when it comes to global marketing teams. Ensure that you configure correct time zones for your automation tools, and also make sure you use the right time zone while scheduling posts in advance. It is also important to reach your audience with the right message at the right time, track the automation tool’s analytics to find out the best time to post each format type. Experiment with different timings for different content types before you follow a standard pattern when it comes to setting the time for publishing your content.
2. Constantly monitor your automation tool
Although automation reduces human effort, eliminating human involvement is not a good practice for social media campaigns. Constantly monitor the process of your automation tool to ensure seamless engagement with your prospects, and analysis of content. This helps in optimizing your current process with the best outcomes from past campaigns.
3. Don’t schedule too far in advance
Social scheduling has made life easier for marketers with future planning of social content. But planning too far in advance is not a good practice given the short life of trends and buzzwords. Social media is all about being available in real time, and making the best out of popular culture references, current social issues, and technology trends. Hence, make sure you do not schedule your content too much in the future to avoid sounding irrelevant.
Learn More: 10 Best Social Media Marketing Books to Read in 2020
4. Track automation tool updates
Social automation platforms are constantly upgrading based on changing requirements and social behaviors. New features are continuously added to platforms, with changes in current functionalities and user interfaces. Therefore, you need to be aware of the upgrades provided by your social automation tool and make the best out of new features.
5. Optimize campaigns using reports and analysis
Publishing and scheduling content on your social platforms is a primary feature provided by social automation tools. But utilizing your tool to optimize the performance of your social campaigns is also important. Make sure you create detailed reports to measure the performance of your shared content based on engagements and outreach. Use this data to alter your future social campaigns for better results.
6 Best Social Media Automation Tools
There is a wide variety of social media automation tools available, each offering its own set of automation features. While some are comprehensive tools providing almost all functions together, some focus primarily on a key feature.
Let us look at six of the best social automation platforms available in the market.
1. Hootsuite
One of the most popular names in the social automation space, Hootsuite provides social media automation services since 2008. It is a comprehensive automation platform that offers full scope for marketers to play around with their social automation.
Features offered by Hootsuite include social scheduling, integration with almost all social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.), custom reports, measuring social ROI, real-time updates, and notifications on brand mentions. Advanced features also include social listening, sentiment analysis, and in-depth reporting for advanced campaigns.
Hootsuite also helps marketers with location-based content searches. This and social influencer tracking. The basic features are available for a lifetime free account with one user and three social accounts. Advanced packages range from $18, to $650, and above based on the number of users, social channels, and feature sets.
2. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is another mainstream social automation platform, with a key focus on discovering trending social topics based on industries, domains, and keywords. BuzzSumo makes it easier for marketers to keep track of viral content and measure its relevance as well as performance. This helps marketers leverage the real-time value of viral and trending content.
Features offered by BuzzSumo include post publishing and scheduling, content analysis based on location, domain, and platforms, integration with multiple social channels, and influencer tracking. Some advanced features such as content analyzer, question analyzer, Facebook analyzer, crisis alert, and competitor intelligence tracking are also included in the feature set.
You can avail the limited free plan offered by BuzzSumo with basic content and influencer search capabilities. Added features and packages start from $99, to $499, and more based on the capabilities you choose.
3. CoSchedule
As the name suggests, CoSchedule makes it easier for marketers to schedule their social posts in advance. It is a highly recommended platform for social media marketers to easily manage multiple accounts in one place. It enables scheduling of over 60 posts at one time, making it a seamless experience for you to plan your social calendar.
Other features offered by Coschedule include social organizer, headline analyzer, social inbox, analytics, and requeing of content. It also offers a wide feature set for other marketing features such as marketing calendar, asset organizer, and content organizer.
The basic social media management tool can be availed for a price of $100 per month, which goes up to $300, and more based on advanced features.
4. Agora Pulse
Another comprehensive tool that perhaps is an ideal social automation platform is Agora Pulse. It offers all the key features expected from a social automation tool.
Features offered by the tool include planning and scheduling social content on multiple platforms, performance tracking of social content, team collaboration, and reposting. It also enables smart analytics to predict trends.
Explore the features of Agora Pulse for 28 days using the free trial version, following which you can subscribe to paid plans from $89 to $459 per month based on the features you choose.
5. Buffer
If you are a social media agency or an e-commerce platform, Buffer is an ideal social automation platform for you. Easy bulk scheduling and seamless handling of multiple social channels are the primary features offered by Buffer.
Growing businesses can rely on Buffer for building their brand using social media to its utmost advantage. Basic features include social posting and scheduling, social inbox and responses, analytics and custom reports. An easy-to-use dashboard facilitates breaking down of complex social workflows. Sharing of social data also helps you collaborate effectively within the team.
Buffer is also an affordable tool with a price range starting at $15 per month and going up to $99 per month for bigger teams.
6. Sprout Social
A well-known brand among marketers for social media automation, Sprout Social is an exhaustive social media platform. Its offerings are segmented based on the user-type – enterprise, agencies, and small businesses.
The features kit includes social planning and publishing, social conversion tracking, analytics, platform integrations, social community building, and engagement tracking. It also offers advanced features such as social advocacy platforms, trend and influencer tracking, sophisticated attribution for campaign measurement, and advanced analytics for social decision making.
The standard package offering basic features starts from $99 per user per month, which extends up to $249 per user per month based on the features availed.
Parting ThoughtsSocial media has proved its mettle and there’s no running from it. Every marketer must implement social media in their marketing campaigns and what better way to do it than with automation.
Social media automation is an ideal way to leverage social media channels for the growth of your business. Choose the right automation tools and follow these best practices to get the most out of social automation.
Do you plan to include social media automation in your marketing strategy for 2020? Let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
