Social Media Automation — Everything You Need to Know

Integrating effective social media automation into your business’s processes will result in more engaging content — and in today’s world, that could spell the difference between failure and success.

To put it simply, social media automation should be a crucial part of any business plan.

In this article, we will discuss how using social media automation tools can help create and schedule more engaging content.

What is social media automation?

Social media automation helps businesses organize their social media presence. Through the use of tools, you can create, schedule, and share content with audiences, usually for marketing purposes.

As a result, businesses can increase profit margins and dedicate more time to their team members and other tasks. Below are a few key points exploring why your company should use social media automation tools.

What are the benefits of social media automation?

Social media automation ensures your business doesn’t miss out on connecting with its customers. The number of social media users in the world today is 4.62 billion, which is more than half the global population.

Automating your social media with, for example, scheduled posts and chatbots to respond to comments, is a great way to reach those users. In fact, 80% of businesses that use social media automation reported improved lead generation and an 77% increase in conversions.

If this statistic alone doesn’t pique your interest, have a read below through some of the key benefits of social media automation.

It will make your content consistent, boosting your online presence

Maintaining a consistent stream of engaging, quality content is paramount to building your online presence. It is what separates you from the crowd.

Consistency can be achieved with social media automation tools like Buffer and Hootsuite that enable you to accurately schedule your content for historically peak times across multiple platforms.

Maintaining consistency in the voice and timing of your content is key to a successful marketing strategy. Consistency will help your business create a brand-specific voice and style.

Automation will free up time to use elsewhere

Integrating social media automation tools into your business can save you and your team hours of hard work. Devoting manual time to post content across multiple social media platforms once your business starts to pick up speed will limit your progress.

Familiarize your team with suitable tools that can help them strive toward your business objectives. Run your content through a grammar checker to ensure it’s free of errors. Enlist the help of friendly chatbots. Schedule posts meticulously with easy-to-use planners.

Automation improves engagement

Monitoring activity across all of your social media platforms in one place will make it easier to achieve higher user engagement.

Being privy to consumer consensus, brand mentions, messages from the community, and statistics on each post are all pieces of valuable data that can be leveraged to help drive engagement.

Maintaining a level of organization through social media automation applications will also ensure you are responding to your community in a prompt manner, making you more aware of your community’s needs.

Content marketing that is engaging and powerful will be what makes a difference to your company’s bottom line. One well-written advertisement or clever call to action can be worth countless poorly thought out pieces of content.

Scheduling posts ahead of time will mean you or a team member won’t have to stop what they’re doing numerous times a day to post or tweet. Since you won’t be rushed, you can make your content the best it can be. And you can spend your time on pressing tasks while automation takes care of social media.

Get to know your community

Social media automation tools can also be great ways to listen to what your community wants.

Social listening is when you use tools that gather data and then automatically piece together the conversation people are having about your brand or industry in the online realm.

This is highly valuable information, and if used wisely it will help you create even more engaging content in the future.

It can help you understand things like:

  • The best time to post future content.
  • Growing trends or needs that the community wants to be fulfilled.
  • The best or worst aspects of your competitors’ content.
  • How your content is better than your competitors’.
  • Ways your content is being beaten by your competitors.

This information is pivotal and should be at the forefront of future content design.

5 best social media automation tools

1. Postfity

Postfity Dashboard: create, automate, and analyze social media content

Easily schedule posts across multiple social media platforms to ensure you maximize audience engagement. Postfity’s seamless UI design helps you keep organized and on top of your social media content.

When you are posting on three or four platforms daily, it can sometimes get overwhelming.

With excellent functionalities across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and many others, social media automation is an attractive prospect on Postfity.

Use the platform’s sleek calendar dashboard to gain insight into the upcoming days and weeks of your social media content, and give desired group members secure access to simultaneously work on the same profile.

Postfity also recommends trending and new post ideas generated by AI that have analyzed search engine results, which can help inspire your team’s future content.

2. Sendible

Sendible Dashboard, Facebook activity overview

The all-in-one dashboard of Sendible makes social media automation easy.

Designed for use by larger agencies, Sendible is perfect for anyone who is on multiple platforms with several accounts on each. 

With an intuitive workflow and the ability to link multiple members to one account, Sendible will help you organize even the largest of content libraries.

Sendible posts are queued in bulk and then scheduled to be posted at a time when your community is most active. This drives engagement. 

Social Inbox is a feature that compiles all comments and activities of your community in one place. This makes it even easier to stay actively engaged with them.

Add streams from different social media platforms and prioritize new community comments and activity. Once you have responded to the messages from your community, simply archive them and keep your inbox tidy.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social Dashboard: publishing calendar

A great alternative to Postfity and Sendible is Sprout Social.

Sprout Social’s holistic approach to community engagement has made them an attractive social media automation application for many budding businesses.   

Similar to Postfity, Sprout Social offers a structured calendar dashboard that helps you stay on top of your future content.

The platform provides social listening analytics to help you gain excellent consumer insight, meaning you can adjust which content you are producing to more authentically engage with your audience.

Manage all your campaigns, development, and analysis from inside the application. Sprout Social is a one-stop-shop for efficient social media automation.

4. TweetDeck

TweetDeck Dashboard: organize and analyze tweets in one place

This one is helpful if you want to improve your presence on Twitter.

With over 330 million active users, marketing through this platform successfully can reap dividends.

The short lifespan of content on Twitter, as well as content length restrictions, makes creating engaging content difficult.

That’s why TweetDeck offers marketers the options to monitor unlimited “keyphrase” tweets, which are laid out in columns on your dashboard.

This helps you watch what is happening in the demographics which interest your team in real time.

Having several columns to monitor at a time can be strenuous.

This is why the platform built an excellent filtration system, helping you be exposed only to content that you plan to learn from and market with.

With this tool, it’s easy to create tweets ahead of time and schedule them to be posted on multiple accounts days in advance.

5. Tailwind

Tailwind Landing Page: Pinterest creation and scheduling

If you aren’t taking advantage of Pinterest’s platform as a way to market to your community, you should consider doing so.

If you use Chrome, the Tailwind extension is extremely user-friendly and can be integrated instantly.

Drag and drop to your editorial calendar and get a huge leg up on organizing your social media content.

The smart loop feature allows you to repin high-performing content and informs you which boards to republish to. This makes scheduling content to relevant times of the year even easier.

Comprehensive analytics track pins’ performance, enabling you to monitor and learn from past and current campaigns.

The innovative “Tribes” feature encourages collaborative community marketing. Gain access to group boards by creating meaningful Pinterest content and contributing to the tribe, which can have viewerships that can range into the millions.

Automate your success

There is no denying that social media automation is here to stay.

These tools will open up doors for your business. Staying active and informed in this space will allow you to remain ahead of the pack.

Your content can always improve, and your processes can always be more streamlined. Even if your social media marketing is already showing positive results, don’t be afraid of changing a winning strategy.

You’re likely to see even greater success with social media automation, and the hours you free up will be a precious resource as your business grows.