Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. With more than a million people joining these platforms every day, it has become imperative for digital marketers to be highly visible on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are just among the many social platforms that are used to promote brand awareness and engage customers.

Additionally, it is important for companies to stay in touch with their subscribers and send them emails regularly. To ensure high open-rate, low bounces and good sender reputation marketers should use an email validation tool, to ensure a high open-rate.  

For social media marketing to be successful, there’s a lot of work involved. From posting daily updates to uploading images, sharing content, responding to comments and private messages, and keeping customers engaged through various activities such as contests, marketing through social media can take a lot of time and energy.  

Here are 10 tips for successfully automating your social media marketing: 

Use an automation platform

Basically, you need a tool that will automate things for you. Good thing these days, everything is more than available. For example, marketers can make use of all-in-one marketing platforms to facilitate their daily job. You will also find tools and apps that are designed for automating specific tasks, such as Hootsuite for scheduling campaigns, OptinMonster for generating leads, Facebook and Twitter Analytics for obtaining insights, Tagboard for creating contents, Sprout Social for monitoring and sharing contents, and Feedly for filtering news.

Know your automation limits

Automating campaigns should help save you a lot of time and effort. But that doesn’t mean you can just sit there and leave it all to your automation software. Of course, these tools have limitations. Social media marketing is all about creating high-quality contents that drive engagement among your target customers. Here are some of the things you cannot do with automation:

• Engage in meaningful conversations with your followers.
• Create unique, high-quality contents.
• Create a solid marketing strategy.

Learn about the best ways to market for each network.

Different social media platforms utilize different marketing strategies. You want your campaigns to be specific and targeted for each network. Therefore, it is a must that you spend time learning about the best marketing process for them, from the best time of publishing posts to the type of contents that drive the most engagement.

Schedule a variety of contents for each newsfeed.

One of the things you have to do manually is to search for sharable contents. If you’re scheduling posts for a week, you want to make sure that your contents are diverse so when people visit your newsfeed, they will be more than entertained to scroll through and know about your business.

Customize for each Network.

What you will post on Facebook should have to be different (at least at some degree) from your posts on Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Take note that each of these websites has different posting/marketing requirements. While you can have a very lengthy post on Facebook, you have a very short character limit on Twitter, and you need a really captivating photo or video clip for Instagram.

Design for each Network.

Additionally, you should design differently for each social media website. Even though you are basically sharing the same content (say a product update or a blog post), you want to create a design based on what is most suitable for each network.  

Create a posting schedule.

You can schedule posts good for a week or a month, it depends on how often you have fresh contents and what types of contents you wish to share. Surely, you won’t normally have original contents each day. What you can do is to simply share contents from other websites or influencers you follow. Alternately, you can post photos and video clips of your products or services.

Know the best time to post.

Based on research, the best times to publish posts on Facebook are at 9 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm whereas on Twitter, the best times are 12nn, 3 pm, and 5-6pm. On Instagram, it’s 2 am, 8-9am, and 5 pm.

Analyze your results.

When you’re doing any form of marketing (whether it’s social media marketing or not), your goal is to get good results. Different tools will have different features for gathering and analyzing data. Before initiating any social media campaign, you must first determine what your goals are. Is your campaign meant to generate leads or retain existing customers? Is it to promote product awareness or drive engagement? By knowing what your goals are, you can easily check if you’re getting the results you want.

Automate but stay connected and engaged!

Lastly, while you want to automate most of your social media marketing tasks, you must still give time to personally connect to your followers. This means that whenever your post goes live, you must check to see if there are questions or comments from your customers or prospects. You want to respond to their messages in a timely manner. The most important thing is to stay connected and engaged.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is a vital component of a successful online marketing strategy. Because everyone is on social media, it just makes sense to promote your business on social networking sites.

But in order to succeed, social media marketing requires a lot of work. Good thing, there is a plethora of automation tools that are designed to make your life easier and your marketing strategy even more effective.

Nonetheless, to automate your campaigns successfully, there are some things you should keep in mind. Apart from using an automation platform, you must make sure to provide high-quality content. Create a posting schedule that works for you. Create unique posts with unique designs for each social network. Learn about the best ways to market your business on each social networking site, including the best time to post. Lastly, allocate time to personally reach out to your customers and always be available to answer their questions or address their concerns.

Author: Nelly M.

Leading the digital marketing and communications for EmailOversight, with more than 5 years of experience in email marketing, Nelly M. is dedicated to helping customers make the right decisions. Being a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, her talent for managing digital content is impeccable and her definition of success is measured only when customers are happy.