Gosh, managing social media takes so much time, doesn’t it? Especially if you have an Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn account, and you juggle all of your content and hope that it all publishes correctly. Then you cross your fingers and hope that a lot of people comment on your posts, but how do you have the time to respond to everyone? You don’t. And you have to ignore some people.

Oh well, just the price of doing business online, true? False!

One of the best things you could do with your social media is to automate it. No, that doesn’t mean hire a robot to handle everything for you, it also doesn’t mean outsourcing it to a virtual assistant in some tropical island.

There are several key social media processes that you can automate without compromising anything. And this would free up loads of your time that you can spend on creating content, managing your team, and running your business.

Here are five easy steps to automate your social media:

#1 ­ Automate Posting and Scheduling

The first and obvious thing to automate on social media is your posting. There are numerous apps and tools that can help you do that. Although the basic features are all the same, the advanced features are very interesting.

And if you are anything like a social media nut (like I am) you will find the advance tips pretty interesting.

For basic users:

• Schedule your posts to publish on all social media channels at once
• Schedule a specific post to go out on a specific date
• Schedule a series of posts to go out every week

For advanced users:
­

• Bulk upload hundreds of posts
• Schedule your content to cycle and repeat (Evergreen Content)
• Schedule your posts to go out at the optimum time (here is an infographic from HubSpot)
• Automatically publish every blog post on your social media.

Here are some things to consider:

If you have a blog, then you should definitely automate your publishing process. Every post should be published on all of your social media channels. You could also re­purpose it to customize it to the look and feel of each social media network ­ more tags for Instagram, fewer characters for Twitter, etc.

Take the most popular posts and re­use them on all of your channels. You can use a queue or posting schedule to automatically publish the most viewed posts over and over again, to show your newest followers some of your top hits.

Now you could spend more time away from your social media, running your business, creating things, or just loving life

#2 ­ Automate Engagement

Engagement is perhaps the most important aspect of social media. Obviously, if you are posting a lot of things but nobody is responding to them then your content has no value, DUH. We post to engage with people, that’s what content is for.

But how do you make sure to touch every single follower?

How do you respond to 49 DMs on Instagram, 200 DMs on Twitter, 56 Facebook comments, and 43 Youtube comments­ all in one week? Ok, maybe that number is doable, but what if you get that amount of traction per day?

That’s where the social inbox comes in. Numerous companies out there offer the social inbox feature.
The social inbox displays all of your engagement in one place;­ all of your DMs, comments, shares, likes, new followers, ad comments.

Instead of having to log in to each social media channel separately you can simply connect all of your profiles to the social inbox and get all of the info there. Some companies allow you to assign items to your team so you can have them engage with your followers.

This won’t look fake because you are still doing the engaging, it’s just that it’s made easier for you by displaying all of the information you need in one place.

#3 ­ Automate Social Listening & Monitoring

Ever since the hashtag revolution, it has become way easier to look for and find specific content on social media. For a growing business this has two advantages ­ you can find all the people that are talking about you, your business or your brand, and you can find everything that your competitors are posting.

Social Listening

Social listening is the art of listening to all the social media conversations that are about you. This is pretty easy to do.

For example, if you are a Nike lover, you want to look for #nike or #nikeshoes. If you do a hashtag search on Instagram or Twitter, you will find a lot of people that are talking about your product.

The way to automate this is to create social media feeds where you put in the hashtag, and you get new results every day. That way you don’t have to search for them yourself, you can simply find them on your social media management tool (whichever one you are using)

Social Media Monitoring

Contrary to popular belief, monitoring is not the same as listening. Listening is about your specific brand. Social media monitoring is more about tracking specific conversation on social media that are important for your business.

For example, if you are Nike you could look up the hashtag #bestshoesever to see what people like and dislike about their shoes.

Obviously, for a big brand like Nike each post is not that crucial, but for a small business that is just starting out, it’s very important to know customer preferences in order to put out the best product.

When I looked up #bestshoesever ever I got this:

Clicking on one of the first posts I immediately saw some of the people talking about Nike, which is great. That’s how I would know that my shoes are doing well (if I was a wildly successful marketing executive at Nike.. yeah right, in my dreams)

Mmm… looks comfy…

Same with listening, the best way to go is to get a social media management platform that allows you to save hashtag searches or feeds. That way you can go back and find all the content you need to monitor, without having to search for it anew on the various social media networks.

Recap

Social media automation doesn’t mean that you relinquish all control of your social media to a robot army. Although that would be cool.
Automating the main three processes that we outline will save you loads of time, here they are again:

1. Automate Posting ­

Automatically schedule all of your posts for the next 30­ – 60 – ­90 days and never bring back old popular posts so you won’t have to spend as much time on content creation.

2. Automate Engagement ­

View all of your engagement events (all your DMs, comments, likes, and new followers) in one social inbox, instead of having to log in to every social media channel separately.

3. Automate Social Listening/Monitoring ­

Create feeds or save searches where you automatically see all the newest hashtag searches that are either about your brand or a related topic. This allows you to easily see everyone that is talking about your brand or product.

For more tips and tricks check out my blog.