How Automation Can Help You Engage Productively With Social Media

Many digital marketing blogs talk about how to use social media for marketing. We're no different. Our article on how to make social media work for B2B marketing is one example.

Discussion around social media and marketing often centres on campaign planning. We pay less attention to the actual day-to-day implementation.

But implementation is often the Achilles' heel of any social marketing strategy.

Creating, posting, and analysing content across your social channels can be a huge time suck. That's time busy marketing managers like you do not have. This is especially true for a small marketing teams, where social can feel like a resource drain—leading you to question its value.

This shouldn't be the case.

In this article, we offer a framework for thinking about social media in a more productive way.

Using Social Media for Marketing

Rightly or wrongly, businesses often focus on building an engaged audience on social media. However, there are benefits of social media marketing that come from broadcasting on your account—regardless of the organic engagement rate.

Social is an important paid promotion channel with extensive targeting options. It can also be a valuable tool for data gathering and audience research. There are also the algorithmic benefits of posting regularly. If you have something to promote or something fascinating to say, you don't want to be speaking to an empty room because your organic reach has dropped through the floor.

So, you might choose to maintain a social presence. Even if it doesn’t immediately represent a ‘good ROI’.

But, as previously mentioned, it still takes a great deal of time and effort to maintain a consistent presence on social media.

Unless, of course, you utilise a marketing automation solution.

Enhancing Social Media with Automation

To clarify: there is a distinction between assistive automation and exploitative automation. We are not talking about using automation to create spammy, botfarm-type content or scrape for personal information. 

The focus of any business process automation should be squarely on providing an excellent experience for your customers and your marketing team.

Automation is best for social media tasks where the output doesn't suffer from a minimal human touch. When done correctly, it can not only reduce the time you spend on repetitive tasks; it offers value to your audience. For example, social media marketing tools can help you:

• Create a consistent posting scheduling

• Produce content curation ideas

• Offer 24/7 help for routine customer queries

• Gathering intel on audience content preferences

• Gain valuable insights across several channels

You can not, or rather should not, automate some social media tasks. These are your 'best foot forward' moments. Automating outreach on LinkedIn or to comment on posts will make your brand look lazy and insincere. It will feel spammy to your customers, because that's precisely what it is.

However, using automation for scheduling and broadcasting frees you up and allows you to put the social back into social. The end goal is not to automate the job of social media away. It is to make room for you to be creative and engage in person.

A final note on social media automation: Always ensure that your use of automation adheres to platforms’ terms of service, and monitor policy changes. LinkedIn is notorious for its hard stance against the use of unapproved third-party software. They are quite explicit that you risk getting banned from the platform if you use automation apps or extensions.

A Framework for Social Media Content

The extent to which you should automate your social posts will depend on the type of content and your aim in creating it.

Think about the content in your social media arsenal as a sort of engagement hierarchy. By creating a broad base of automated 'presence' posts, you free your team up to engage your audience in more creative, high engagement, in-person content.

This hierarchy is like the one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many approach used for account based marketing content strategy. The goal is to give value to your audience in a way that scales effectively. Using this framework for thinking about managing your social presence will help you determine when and how to automate tasks.

High Engagement Content 

These are your ‘best foot forward’ interactions. They should be all about the personal touch. Share content in real time, and remain on the platform for a while after posting to facilitate conversation.

For example, you might share a blog post with a particular point of view, commenting on a newsworthy story or trend, or kicking off a debate on a topic. Alternatively, you might want to set aside time each day to interact with key industry influencers and high-value leads. The immediacy of social, and being available to engage, is what gives you an edge.

Realise that with this type of content, one-to-one engagement may not happen in public spaces. Instead, they may occur over WhatsApp, Messenger, or LinkedIn Inmail. The value of the post is that it creates a point of connection, not the visibility of your interaction or vanity metrics.

Handcrafted Posts

Where top-tier content is like a bespoke garment, this type of content is a ready-to-wear outfit that you have altered to fit. These types of posts will be lightly tailored to the moment while also including templated elements.

Perhaps you're announcing a new piece of research, a webinar, live stream or podcast, or a regularly scheduled blog post. Your team will use a library of pro-forma posts and branded design assets they amend to suit, making these posts quick and easy to pull together.

Unlike your high engagement content, you can use automation to schedule these sorts of posts ahead of time. However, make sure someone is available to engage with viewers when content first goes live to boost its performance and answer questions.

Regular Drumbeat Content 

These are the automated social media drip campaigns and curated posts that will make up the bulk of your social content. The focus here is on the consistency of presence, so you can schedule posts months in advance.

If you've ever tried to build up a three-month bank of content, you'll probably be rolling your eyes. It's easier said than done, right?

This is where automation comes in.

Instead of ploughing all of your resources into hand-crafting every update, use AI and automation to support you. There are services that can take existing content and automatically repurpose it using AI to generate a batch of social updates, including the images and video content to support them.

With these services, the role of your marketing team is to review, apply some quick edits where needed, and schedule.

How to Use Social Media Automation Technologies

With that in mind, let's explore how to use automation to manage your social profiles more productively.

Scheduling and Publishing

Logging in and out of different networks to publish content is undoubtedly one of the most time-consuming parts of social media management. Fortunately, automating your social media calendar can save you time and increase efficiency without affecting the user experience.

With a scheduling tool, you can you can organise all your social feeds and posts in one place and set content to publish automatically at the most active times for each social media platform. Combined with AI content creation tools, you can drastically cut the time and resources you need to plough into presence level posting.

The ability to schedule posts in advance allows even small businesses the time to plan and be more strategic. Instead of trying to come up with posts on the fly to feed the machine, you can re-dedicate blocks of time to creating quality content.

Content Curation

You can also bolster your own content creation with content curation. Posting high-quality content from other sources on your social accounts helps to show off your industry expertise, share information, and provide value to your audience.

Automation can help here too. Aggregators aid the curating process by combing through blogs, websites, and influencers your audience is interested in for relevant content to reshare.

Some automation platforms can even draft these social media posts for you, including visuals and hashtags. As with any form of automated output, you need to schedule time to glance at everything before it goes live to ensure it is on brand. Even so, such tools save you a lot of time, which you can use to engage with content creators and your audience. 

Social Listening

Social listening is monitoring what people are saying online about your brand. It is critical for running an effective digital marketing strategy. It helps you understand customer pain points and come up with ideas for content (or even product/service solutions). You can also follow relevant topics, keywords, and hashtags to see what's going on in your industry and with your competitors.

However, manually seeking out relevant content and monitoring social feeds for brand mentions is time-consuming. So, automate your social listening strategy.

Unlike humans, with their pesky need to eat, sleep, and spend time with loved ones, an automated tool can monitor social feeds 24/7. You can see brand mentions across each social media network and track relevant social hashtags all in one place.

Doing so provides valuable business intelligence and market research that can help inform your social media strategy. It makes it easier to stay on top of industry developments and what your target audience is talking about.

Streamlining Basic Customer Service

Another way to more effectively manage your social media accounts is to use chatbots to automate certain types of customer interactions. For example, you can integrate chatbots with sites like Facebook Messenger to streamline your customer experience.

Chatbots can answer routine customer inquiries and redirect people to more in-depth support where required. AI-enabled chatbots go a step further and use machine learning to analyse behavioural patterns. Doing so allows them to provide an even more relevant answer the next time they encounter a similar query.

Think how a search engine algorithm analyses the searches of a million users to determine the most relevant result. It is leveraging data to ‘learn’ how to better serve users.

We are not suggesting that you entirely automate your social channels with chatbots. There will always be a need for human intervention in certain situations. Rather, you should strategically use bots to enhance your user experience and help your team work more productively.

Cross-Channel Analytics Reporting

Another task that is ripe for automation is marketing measurement and attribution. It is a long and tedious a task to collect and analyse social media data manually.

You are also likely to miss out on key insights, such as what percentage of your audience are active users on a platform. With a marketing automation tool, you can gather performance metrics for all of your social media platforms in one place. These reports make it easier to compare campaign performance across different social networks.

Depending on your software provider, you can integrate your marketing tools with sales automation and your CRM. Doing so gives you a 360° of your customer journey. You can more concretely understand how your social strategy ties to your business objectives and better attribute ROI.

Automate Your Social Strategy with 1827 Marketing

The key takeaway is this: social media does not have to be time-consuming. You have a variety of options for managing your profiles and more productively engaging with social.

Learning how to pick your battles will help ensure you do not invest too heavily in areas that have little impact on your business. Case in point, trying to handle routine social media tasks manually that are more effectively completed via automation. There are more profitable ways to use your time!

Please reach out to us to learn how you can automate social media and content management or if you’d like us to do it for you. More than a B2B digital marketing agency, we can help you develop an automation solution to create great experiences at scale.