You’ve finally gotten all the accounts going for your company’s social media. You have a great Facebook page, a cool Twitter handle, lots of Instagram followers and even a Google +, Pinterest and LinkedIn page. Now what?
You know that you need to keep all of this current; stagnating social media is a total turn off, but where’s the time?
Between managing your business, ordering supplies, client meetings, employee issues, you’re already spread thin enough. Do you have any options for your social media? Many people advocate automating your social media.
Let’s take a look at why or maybe why you shouldn’t, automate.
Pros of automating your social media:
• Probably this biggest reason to even be thinking about automation is as a time saver – And yes, automating your social media will save time. You will have more time to attend to the other things you need to do, social media related or not;
• You can set the time for posts to go live – Because of the short shelf life of social media, posts often get buried in a pretty quick time frame. Because you can schedule posts with automation, you don’t have to just to do at your personal convenience, which may be making a lot of your readers miss it. You can even extend the shelf life by sending out automated reminders and refreshers;
• You can reach a wider audience – The more active your social media is the more people you can reach. It doesn’t always mean you’ll keep them forever, but reaching them is the first step and with automation, this is a lot easier than without it.
Cons of automating your social media:
• You risk appearing fake – Automation just doesn’t have the same feel and tone as your own posts. You may have written something but when it goes live, you’re in a totally different place. You can’t always set the tone according to the platform, either, so you need to go a little generic. Maybe that will turn some readers off.
• You lose some engagement – If your posts are automatic, you’re not always there to give a personal reply. Again, this can be a turn off for those followers who seek a close relationship.
If you decided to go ahead and automate, you need the tools to do so.
As the following article looks at, here are 3 Great tools to automate your social media:
1. Hootsuite – You can manage multiple social media networks from one dashboard. Hootsuite allows you to track conversations and see what is going on all of your social media.
2. IFTTT – If This Then That is a great tool for your marketing efforts by automating a wide range of social media activities. With result-based automation, it works when a “trigger event” happens, then everything kicks in.
3. Buffer – This is a popular social media message scheduling system. You can share content and schedule when your posts go out with just one click, and then it hits the big names in your social media world, instead of doing them all separately.
As you decide what to do, remember, like most things in life, social media automation is probably best served with a balance of both automation and live, personal posts.
Use a good combination of live engagement, promotional posts and toss in a touch of humanity. You’ll figure it out and go with what your customers, followers and friends seem to like.
Best of luck and feel free to share what works (and doesn’t work) for you.
Photo credit: Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1DxOJqM via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1EPpZBl
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