Turning Up Your Automation Game
November 14, 2018
Social media automation isn’t a new concept, in fact, an automated presence online has been around in e-mail form since e-mail first became a business tool. Now, social media is doing much the same thing, allowing businesses to keep in touch with customers, even when there’s no live employee to chat with, or post daily.
One of the most important aspects of social media, as far as Google is concerned, is continuous, genuine, relevant posting. The more content a social media feed has, the more relevant it is to search engines. Up-to-date newsfeeds appear to be more actively used than those that go days or even weeks without an update.
Maintaining social feeds is a fulltime job, and not every company has the time or manpower to keep this content moving at the pace Facebook and Google demand. Fortunately, there are tools you can use as a business or as a marketing professional which help get the job done with less time and less stress. Here are the top 5 social media automation tools in the biz.
Viral Content Bee: This is less of a full-on automation tool, and more of an activity boosting and shareability tool. The most important part of social media is sharing the information between users. When users share your content, it gets displayed to an entire new group of friends, family, and followers. Each “sharer” continues this cycle, which is how some content becomes viral. While Viral Content Bee doesn’t guarantee your content will become the next big thing on the internet, it does help to semi-automate your sharing process, sending it out to real live users on social media, who then have the option of sharing with their followers.
This is one of the best ways to get your information out there without pulling any questionable strings, leaving it entirely to fate, or shelling out big bucks for social media marketing gurus who have contacts to share for you.
My Tweet Alerts: This is less for posting new content and more for following what’s going on behind the scenes. Your business is sure to get mentioned through reviews, comments, shares, and basically any online word of mouth around. My Tweet Alerts scans the web for mention of your company and alerts you to what’s being said and by whom. Think of it like the Google Alerts tool of social media, it tells you if your brand is being mentioned and gives you the opportunity to look into good or bad press.
This is an especially good tool to use because it provides ample opportunity to fix any errors and interact with customers. It also gives access to a deeper kind of analytics you may not have thought to investigate before.
Dlvrit: The best way to view Dlvrit is exactly how it sounds, “deliver-it”. This app lets you deliver content from other bloggers to your followers. Why would you want to give your followers content from somebody else? Well, not only does it let you create a possible partnership and future guest blogger opportunities, but it gives you something to post between your own content updates. Some companies post twice a week, but don’t want to let the old news feed go slack. Dlvrit is the best way to breathe life into your Twitter feed. One word of caution to Dlvrit users: be sure to only program content from blogs you trust, known to be genuine and on topic, and which won’t be flagged for spam or banned content. This could reflect poorly on your Twitter account and social media presence in general.
Cyfe: This is the updating tool you’ve been longing for. No company puts all its eggs into one social media basket these days. Every business has a profile on multiple accounts to reach a larger variety of consumers. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram; they all take time to log in, update, and post. Cyfe is your go to app for updating every account you have at one time. You tweeted a short post to your Twitter feed about the upcoming in-store sale? Cyfe will send the same message, hashtags and all, out to any other social media account you sign up for.
Zapier: Finally, we saved Z for last, Zapier is an automation tool used for public interaction. You might start out having time and energy to thank every new follower or greet those who visit your social media pages, but over time, this becomes too much to tackle on a daily basis. Zapier picks up the slack when you’re unable to manage newcomers to your social media circle. It can send out welcome tweets, add followers to your list of who you follow, and generally promote your business without the need to login and type out a message every day.
Automation sounds a bit like cheating, but when used properly, it has every opportunity to turn your business into the popular online entity it was destined to become. Just be careful that your automation use remains minimal for large scale content flow and not for smaller instances, like a weekly or monthly content update. Your content should remain relevant and genuine no matter the automated process you choose, so a test run or two will help you keep things sounding and looking real and on point to what your consumers want to read and see. In the end, it’s your customers’ experience with your website and social media that’s going to sell your brand.