If you haven’t explored social media automation for your brand or business — it’s about time. Automation offers a wide variety of features that will make your online presence more fruitful and impactful.
When you need to save up some of your valuable time when planning your marketing strategy, choosing to use this automated technology will definitely be a lifesaver. By intelligently using automation you can get a great kick out of your time and multitask with maximum efficiency. It’s incredibly efficient, plus it isn’t too sophisticated, which means that anyone can learn to use it in no time. And what’s more important — it drives your business’s development.
This article explores the latest and the most powerful features available in social media automation. However, it is crucial that we eliminate all confusion behind what automation can’t do, before we look into the technical capabilities that it provides.
What Are the Limits?
Automation is a fantastic way to save time when it comes to managing your brand’s or company’s social media profiles, but that does not, by any means, suppose that you can now avoid communicating with your customers. Speaking to your clients, assisting them, and taking their feedback into account is essential to maintaining a right image and making your product better over time.
What Automation Can Do
Canned Replies
Although live communication with your clients is absolutely imperative, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get some of the more technical exchanges out of the way. For instance, you can program your automation tool, like Crowdfire, to send someone a “thank you” message if they retweeted or shared your post. This basically sends an immediate reply, and can even be programmed to include the person’s name or handle along with the template message.
To make sure that your responses don’t look “template-like,” it’s always a good idea to add something specific to your brand to the message, just to give it a personal spin. It’s also a good idea to regularly change your replies since it is often the case that the same people who reposted something from your feed, will do so again. Getting the same template response can be annoying.
Keep Your Comment Section Clean
You need to pay as much attention to your comment section as you do to your content. The main idea isn’t behind censoring users. It’s instead about keeping comment exchange reasonable and helpful. Having a fuzzy comment section, full of spam and vulgar language can negatively affect your company’s image. There is also an essential aspect about keeping both comments and messages clean, and immediately hiding outbursts of violence, racism, and general obscene language.
What comment section moderation offers you is beyond simply blocking certain words. Although that is among the essential features that automation can provide, moderation has an entire spectrum of unexpectedly useful applications. It allows you to block and delete messages that contain specific keywords or word combinations. There is no reason to accept comments that include combinations like “free money,” “casino,” “1000 followers,” and many others that are specific to somewhat dubious businesses over the Internet. Facebook’s “Profanity Filter” can be set to medium or strong to block profanity specific comments. You can also customize your filter in Page Moderation, both found in your Page’s settings. This is something easy that you or your social media agency can set-up quickly.
Secondly, there is a convenient application of comment section moderation, which can significantly improve customer service. You can assign messages that feature a particular word in them so that they are immediately forwarded to a customer care agent, which can significantly improve the speed at which a client will receive professional assistance. Management platforms like Sprout Social integrate with your social networks to make this possible.
Scheduling and Re-queueing Content
This is a big one. Scheduling your content on a daily basis is important because you decide what is going to go online and when. This can be defined by your audience’s online usage and behavior. For instance, specific industries post exclusively early in the morning, while people are commuting to work, which forces them to scroll their feeds. The second batch of posts might go out from noon to 2 PM when the vast majority of adults are having lunch. The last post will probably hit the readers’ feeds at around 6-7 PM when people are off from work. As you can see, posting cycles often depend on the behavior of your audience, based on their age occupation, and a host of other factors. By scheduling your posts in the morning, you can set it and forget it and move on with your day.
Scheduling your content natively or on platforms like Sprout Social, allow you to see how your content is laid out for the week or month all at once. It also allows you to duplicate posts or choose or post to multiple channels at once. Some platforms will even suggest the optimal time to post based off past user behavior. Re-queueing your content is a fantastic instrument too if your content remains relevant throughout a more extended period. This way, you can program a specific article to appear in your audience’s feeds, say, once in five days. You’ll be able to attract more traffic with this tactic, and respectively get a bigger kick out of a single piece of content.
Wrapping it Up
When speaking of automation, there is a line that needn’t be crossed. Although tens of different features can make our social media management more accessible, we still need to focus on the quality of service and communication that our customers receive. So it is worth looking at automation as actually “semi-automatic”, a human is always necessary to ensure that everything runs smoothly and that relying on a single tool to manage your social media profiles is slightly irresponsible. It’s essential that you try to locate the ideal balance between programming online activity and maintaining a helpful conversation with your customer.
Otherwise, if used correctly, automation is a blessing to any brand or business owner, considering the amount of time it saves. Especially, if you’re a small business, and you’re managing the project on your own, as the founder. It will allow you to keep a clean comment section, which will bring a lot of benefit to your business.
Kristin Savage nourishes, sparks and empowers using the magic of a word. She does her voodoo regularly on the Pick Writers blog and occasionally contributes to other educational platforms. Along with pursuing her degree in Creative Writing, Kristin was gaining experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in marketing strategy for publishers and authors.
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