Social media automation has a lot of lovers and haters. The main reason is that in some cases people go overboard with automation and never personally engage with their followers in any way. That’s not what automation is for! Automation, just generally speaking, should be used to rid yourself of repetitive tasks, but it should not end your physical engagement on each platform!
Why is social media automation important to streamlining your social media process?
Who has time to sit in front of a computer all day posting to social media (except social media managers)!?
Plan Messaging for Each Platform
In addition to the content you’re creating for your products and services, you’ll also need to create messaging for each platform you want to share that content on. So, for example, let’s say you have a whitepaper that you want to promote and one of the platforms you want to use is Pinterest.
Pinterest is literally only visual, so you can’t just share a plain link to your whitepaper. Instead, pull out data from the whitepaper to make a vertical infographic. Share that on Pinterest. Create custom media like that for each platform. You’re still sharing the same message but how you’re doing it is slightly different based on what each platform dictates.
This is why automatic cross posting from one platform to another *ahem* you know who you are, DOES NOT WORK. Images are sized differently, hashtags don’t translate and the people you’re tagging on one platform aren’t necessarily on the other with that same username. SO FREAKING JUST STOP POSTING YOUR INSTAGRAM PHOTOS AUTOMATICALLY TO TWITTER.
Develop Platform-Centric Content
Consider each platform and how you can create content only for that platform.
For example, on Facebook you might create a quiz, tell a story using Facebook Live, etc. On Twitter, you might use quotes and an image pulled out from your whitepaper, give easy and short business tips, and do it all in about 200 characters or so along with a couple hashtags. On Pinterest, you will need to figure out how to style your messaging in a portrait/vertical graphic.
Design Graphics for Each Platform
As mentioned, each social media platform not only has different size requirements for images depending on where you’re going to use them, but they also call for slightly different styles. Instead of using the same image resized get creative and start from scratch on images to use for each platform based on the mood of that platform and the point you want to make with the content you’re sharing.
Create a Posting Schedule for Each Platform
On every single social media platform, there are different best practices about when you post, how often you post, how many times you post the same thing, etc. Look at your analytics and using that information create a schedule for each post so that when you put it into your automation software it’s easy and you’re not just guessing.
Engage on Each Platform Individually
Using automation to schedule each post is a great way to cut down on the amount of work you do and the things you remember. But, outside of the scheduled posts, make it a point to spend some time on each platform that you use so that you can respond to posts, share other people’s posts, and engage with your audience. It will humanize your business and people like spending money with humans more than corporations (sorry).
The main “don’t” is to not automate the things that need to be done personally. Besides being hecka annoying, people resent receiving automated messages within private areas until you have spent some time getting to know them, and letting them get to know you. This means no more automated DMs and no sales pitches right away after connecting with someone new on LinkedIn!
If you use social media automation already, what tool are you using? What social media management tool do you want to learn more about? Leave a comment and gimme some names, I’m going to be doing some reviews in the next couple of weeks to help ya’ll out.
