Think of any big name in the market and social media marketing is an important part of their strategy in these times. Not only big companies but small businesses are also immensely benefiting from tapping into the massive potential of social media marketing.
If done right, social media is massively rewarding for businesses and marketers. With the effectiveness, reach and penetration of social media in lives of potential customers, it is undisputedly an important aspect of your marketing strategy. In 1 minute, there are about 1 million Facebook users logged in and 87,5000 people tweeting. Also, there are 3.8 million queries on Google, 347,222 people on Instagram, and about 188 million emails sent. These stats reflect the importance of social media marketing for any business.
However, marketers are well aware that it is also a hive of time-consuming, tedious and repetitive tasks. Whether it is recycling old posts, engaging with customers, leaving thank you notes at end of their thread, being available for customer support etc. this takes up a lot a lot of time off our hands. Here social media automation comes in play. Social media automation is the process of optimizing interactive and definitive tasks using social media automated tools.
You can schedule posts for an entire month and then practically have to do nothing about them at all. Just invest your time in more productive work and your posts will be taken care of by your automated tool. These tools and plugins can add immense value to your online presence and this blogging guide will explore how your business can benefit from social media automations.
- Saves time
- Automation will optimize your reach
- Keep the consistency with less effort
- Improves your engagement and connection with consumers
- Improve organisation
5 Reasons Your Business Needs Social Media Automation
1. Saves time
Let’s first come to the most obvious and basic reason your business needs social media automation. It will save you a ton of time! By automating some repetitive tasks like posting consistently, posting at audience peak hours, replying to generic FAQs, maintaining consumer interaction you will have more time at your hand which can be used for more exclusive and creative tasks.
Scheduling is the most common type of social media automation and also saves you the most time. By scheduling your posts, emails and other form of content in advance, you don’t have to deal with the pressure of posting in real-time situations. Specially if your business is such that you have to post multiple times in a day, then you might need a separate person altogether to post your content on social media. By automating this aspect, you can save that extra bit of investment.
2. Automation will optimize your reach
It has been observed and researched upon by marketers that for individual businesses, their audiences have a different and specific period of time when their traffic is at its peak. This golden window, when your audience hits a peak, is the perfect time to push your best and core content to them. If you are well versed with your audience, then you can just browse through your analytics to figure out when your audiences are at their peak level of traffic and interaction.
Social media automation here is your messiah! Suppose you experience a peak at some odd hours every week, it will make it difficult to manually post in real-time. Once in a while you can do that but every day, posting at odd hours is not always practical. Simply automate your schedule. Set your content calendar in such a way that you cover the peak period and then simply relax. This will maximize your reach; it will let you work in comfort and send your most important message at the right time.
3. Keep the consistency with less effort
Social media is all about generating content. Without creative content social media marketing is not conceivable. Once you have a certain level of online presence and your audience is well defined, then they automatically expect you posting your content at given intervals in time. This is called as predictable content. Consistently posting content creates an interactive loop with your audience which you can use to boost your engagements.
If you are inconsistent with your content then it is a big turn off for your audience. They do not know when to expect what from you and they might eventually loose interest. To maintain this consistency, scheduling your posts in advance is the simplest way.
4. Improves your engagement and connection with consumers
It is important to have meaningful engagement with your consumers. Engaging with them leaves them informed and they develop a feeling of connect with you. It also strengthens your brand identity. However, it is always not possible to connect with each and every individual personally. Here automation can be used to create automated replies for generic FAQs, comments and automated email responses.
This ensures that none of your customer is left hanging. This also paves the way for the consumer to go deeper into the communication spiral of your organisation.
An important aspect of handling consumers is directly supporting them for their individual problems. Chat bots can be used for customer support which means that you can be available for your consumers 24\7. This will boost your connect massively. It not only engages with all your consumers but also saves a lot of time from repetitive conversations.
5. Improve organisation
If your business generates a lot of data and don’t know what to do with it, then you have to undeniably try social media automation. From organising your files, emails, posts, calendars, consumer feedbacks, consumer profiling to automated responses you can handle all sort of data and further push your organising capabilities at the same time.
Let another tool do the cleaning up for you while you simply sit back and relax. You can later on browse through the analytics and reports, surf through the reports of your data and manage how you want it to be organised in the future.
Conclusion
Social media platforms hold massive potential to reach out to audiences and get a meaningful interaction going on with them which can later be converted into sales. There is no business that cannot benefit from social media. There are tasks that require more attention, time and creativity but sometimes the repetitive and tedious tasks bind our hands. Automation will set you free, it will leave you with sufficient time which you can invest in more important and meaningful activities.
There are various tools which can be used to automate your social media presence. Automation seems rather simplistic in nature but can be a solution for a lot of complex problems.
See also: How can I get better at social media marketing this year?
