atilt donovan: First Steps to Automating your Social Media ...

First Steps to Automating your Social Media Marketing

Posted by Amy Brown on Fri, Oct 26, 2012 @ 06:00 AM

At first glance, social media probably didn't seem like something that would take up much of your time. Twitter, for example, limits posts to just 140 characters, so how much time could tweeting really take??

The problem is that social media happens in real time, like a conversation. Individual items might not take much time, but they happen all the time. As much as multitasking is lauded, continuously going back to social media throughout the day can seriously hamper your overall productivity.?

The solution is to automate your social media marketing as much as possible. By taking care of your postings all at once, you free up the rest of your day to work on other things.?

To start automating your social media marketing, there are a few steps you should take:

Develop a plan.?Step one in automating your social media is to decide, in advance, what you want to accomplish and how you can accomplish it. Of course, this is a good idea whether you are going to automate it or not; you want to have a marketing plan for your social media. But the immediacy of social media can make it tempting to do things on the fly. One big advantage of automation is that it ensures you do this advance planning.
Determine which social media networks to use, and how to use them.?Each social media network has its own personality and its own function. You want to focus your efforts on the platforms where they will do the most good. If you just copy the exact same content to every social media site, you are not taking advantage of what makes each platform unique.
Decide when to post.?You will be scheduling social media posts in advance, so you need to set them for the times when they will be most effective. That means you need to know when your followers are most likely to be online and engaging with your social media, which may require some testing and analysis of results.
Choose the right automation tools.?There are a number of applications and services, such as HootSuite, which allow you to automate your social media marketing. Many are free, or at least offer basic functions for free with the option of adding more features through a paid account.?
Maintain the ability to respond.?You do not want your social media efforts to look automatic. Social media is still about interacting with people, not robots. So make sure you only schedule posts when there is someone available to respond to any important questions or comments that come up, and set up notifications to let you know when someone does reply to an automatic post.

By following these steps to automation, you can save time on your social media marketing?while making it more effective in the process.