Social media… Love it or hate it, it’s part of the modern content marketing ecosystem. Optimizing your social profiles and feeding them with content can create engagement, website traffic, and conversions. But are you still stuck in manual workflows? You don’t have to be with automated social media posting.
Social media performance requires posting consistently and delivering value to your followers. A key part of a social media strategy is the mechanics of posting. It can be time-consuming and haphazard if you’re doing it manually. It’s time to evolve how you post, and content automation capabilities greatly help enterprise content teams.
Let’s look at the benefits of automating social media posting, what to look for in a technology tool, and how to optimize the process.
What Is Automated Social Media Posting?
Social media posting automation refers to using technology to schedule the publishing of social content in advance. It delivers a lot of benefits for content teams by centralizing all your efforts into one system. Individually scheduling social posts on social media sites can be a big time drain on your team.
Why Automate?
You can automate just about anything in marketing these days. It’s the extra help your team members need to be more productive and focus on higher-level work than stuff that’s task-centric. It gives your people time to do more on social media, such as building communities, creating more social content, and monitoring sites for insights important to your audience.
Automation also helps you develop social media as an avenue to distribute, promote, and amplify content. You don’t have to stay stuck in the weeds of execution. Instead, the focus can be across the landscape. By using content analytics related to social media engagement, you can identify what resonates and what doesn’t across:
- Topics or content clusters
- Formats (e.g., blogs, videos, infographics, etc.)
- Profiles
- Audiences
- Hashtags
- The best time to post (day and time)
For example, if your company produces accounting and billing software for small businesses, you may be pushing a new feature. You announce it and post about it on multiple social media sites. From the analytics, you can learn if your audience prefers to explore it in a video versus a blog. Without automation that tracks engagement and removes manual work, you might not have these insights so accessible.
These findings can be critical in updating your content strategy. The next step is considerations regarding the platform.
The Story on Social Media Posting Automation Tools
Social media publishing tools have gained significant adoption by B2B content marketers. According to a CMI (Content Marketing Institute) study, 80 percent of organizations use them. The extent to which they do this and the results they get aren’t always the same, though. Tools have different features and functionality.
The same study revealed that 51 percent of content marketers received the most insights from social media analytics, so it’s clear there is a disconnect between using a platform and getting value out of it.
So, this gap means there is room for optimization. Ideally, you want a solution that allows you to:
- Schedule posts across numerous social media sites.
- Include tags and mentions in the posts (i.e., @).
- Streamline the process between content publishing and social media distribution with integrations.
However, there are more things you can do if the software is robust enough.
Beyond Posting: What Can You Do with Social Media Automation Platforms?
Beyond automating posting, technology allows you to gather data on engagement (e.g., likes, comments, shares) for posts that you can combine with other analytics for a complete view of your distribution channels’ performance.
Again, this is a great time saver. The faster you have metrics, the more quickly you can respond to them and pivot if necessary. For example, you may post a blog about a trending topic that’s getting lots of comments, shares, and views. As a result, you can make decisions about additional content on the subject in the form of a video or a webinar.
There are lots of tools available with various functionalities and price points. You should consider the volume of posting, the number of profiles, your social media goals, and user roles when deciding on a platform.
Besides using a tool that’s only for social media management, you can also find that a content marketing platform supports social media publishing automation.
How a Content Marketing Platform Enables Social Media Posting Automation
One of the most critical factors in managing social media is planning and creating fresh content for your social sites. It’s typically the first step in distribution. Even with automation platforms that only focus on social media, you still have to do a few things manually — inputting text, links, and media.
Content marketing software can simplify this. Some platforms have specific functionality for managing the planning and creation of social media content. Taking DivvyHQ as an example, social posts can be created individually or in more of a bulk form and exported via CSV format for easy importing into your desired social media publishing tool.
So if you’re developing social posts for an entire month, or for an upcoming campaign, they can be planned and produced within Divvy, exported via CSV, and imported into your SMM to automate publishing.
Should You Automate Everything?
Social media is a dynamic channel. Much of it is timely information that has a lot of urgency. In cases where new developments arise or there’s a trending hashtag that has synergy with your brand, you’ll want to act fast. So, scheduling in advance doesn’t work here. You can still use automation to distribute the post, but you need the flexibility to be proactive and reactive.
Get the Most Out of Social Channels with Automation
If you want to develop social media as a channel where you inspire conversation and engagement, you’ll need to optimize processes so your people don’t waste time on execution tasks. Automation is a smart option. You can automate social media posting and lots of other workflows with DivvyHQ! Check it out by starting a free trial today.