As a social media manager, you’re constantly juggling everything social, from publishing posts and engaging with followers to monitoring metrics and creating reports. You know that social media automation can save you time and free up your schedule for more high-level strategy—but you don’t want to compromise performance or put your campaigns on autopilot. So how can you embrace automation effectively?
Let’s take a look at best practices for social media automation and key mistakes to avoid.
Do Optimize Your Posts With a Social Media Automation Tool
One of the biggest perks of automation is gaining the ability to schedule your entire social media calendar in advance. Whether you want to plan a single post for later in the day or bulk upload an entire campaign, you can schedule content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other major social platforms, so it will publish automatically.
The benefits of using a social media automation tool, however, go beyond only saving time. When you use Agorapulse, you have additional ways to optimize performance. For example, you can opt to repost content multiple times to improve reach for evergreen content or use the built-in reporting panel to check the best times and dates for maximum engagement.
Don’t Hesitate to Pause or Modify Your Regularly Scheduled Program
Automating your social media content eliminates the need to publish every post in real time. But scheduling content in advance doesn’t have to mean putting your social media strategy on autopilot.
Rather than taking a “set it and forget it” approach, alter your social media schedule to incorporate company news, current events, and other time-sensitive items. Though you can share these posts in real time, you can also balance manual publishing with automated publishing. Add a special queue to your social profiles in Agorapulse, and then push time-sensitive content to the queue as necessary.
Do Streamline Engagement With Automated Rules and Saved Replies
When you schedule your social media campaigns in advance, you have extra time to engage with your followers. Whether your posts tend to generate a lot of comments or you regularly receive direct messages, social media automation tools can help make engagement count.
If you need to answer the same questions frequently, try creating a saved reply in Agorapulse. Once you save it, you can send the same reply again with a single click, preventing your team from having to type the same response over and over and ensuring that everyone uses on-brand messaging.
If you receive a wider range of messages and comments, consider creating Inbox Assistant rules in Agorapulse. For example, you can set up rules that assign messages with certain words to the sales or customer support team or automatically bookmark and label select comments.
Don’t Neglect Personalization in Comments and Direct Messages
As you set up saved replies for your social profiles, you might be concerned that your followers will start to recognize the same robotic responses popping up over and over. But automating your replies doesn’t have to mean you only send cookie-cutter responses.
Instead, take the opportunity to personalize saved replies before you send them. With Agorapulse, you can automatically add the sender’s first name into your saved replies. You can also take a moment to add specific details or personal notes to create deeper connections with followers.
Do Enhance Your Social Listening Superpowers
Social listening is essential for keeping tabs on profile mentions and key conversations in your niche. When you implement social media automation, you can easily transform your listening ability into a superpower to generate even better results.
With Agorapulse, you can create social listening searches that automatically surface terms, phrases, hashtags, and even websites. Check your social listening inbox regularly to gauge brand mentions and join important conversations.
Don’t Forget to Use Social Listening to Inform Your Strategy
Automating your social media listening tasks makes it easy to keep your finger on the pulse. But if you neglect the analysis component of social listening, you could miss out on a big opportunity.
When you use Agorapulse, you can track mention frequency and monitor keyword popularity over time. Consider using this data to track growing trends, inform your content and hashtag strategy, and stay ahead of the social media marketing curve.
Automation has the potential to transform your social media campaigns, especially when you keep these best practices and common mistakes in mind. When you leverage social media automation with customized scheduling and personalized engagement and listening, you can truly optimize your strategy.
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