How to Automate Your Company’s Social Media Management

Tomas Smith

May 10, 2019

There’s no reason you should spend endless hours on social media management. Learn how to automate social media management to streamline your social media strategy.

Persistent social media activity is vitally necessary in today’s digital marketing environment. As I always tell my clients, however, you don’t have to expend endless hours on tweeting or crafting Instagram posts to find clothing manufacturers for your brand and build a customer base that will see your company through thick and thin. Here are some of the strategies that I use to automate my social media management.

#1 Determine Your Social Media Strategy

As I developed by social media strategy, I followed the guidelines laid out by Entrepreneur. First, I established my goals. In my case, the main goal of my social media strategy was to increase brand exposure, and other goals like increased sales were secondary. You’ll need to have a firm understanding of what you want to achieve if you expect to be successful in your social media automation efforts.

Next, I made sure that my goals were realistic. I decided that I wanted to improve my social media following by 10 percent in the space of a month. While I obviously wanted to achieve even greater goals, I knew that aiming too high breeds disappointment and kills momentum.

Lastly, I came up with a detailed buyer persona and took a look at what my competitors were doing. You can’t target customers without knowing who they are, and studying what other businesses in your field are doing can help you rapidly catch up to their levels of success.

#2 Assemble Your Toolkit

Now that I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve with my social media automation strategy, I was ready to start looking into the tools I would need to get the job done. I found a list of the top 25 social media automation tools on Forbes to be useful, but I also did my own research.

No single tool is going to drastically change your social media presence overnight, but unless you’re a programmer or an app developer, you’ll need to rely on third-party tools to make your social media automation efforts streamlined. Here are the social media automation tools that I ended up using along the way:

Buffer: When you’re juggling multiple social media accounts, Buffer can be incredibly handy. At Sewport, we used Buffer to queue posts on our various accounts, and this service also comes with handy image editing and data analytics tools that help you go the extra mile with your posts.
Hootsuite: After taking a look at the features of this service, I eventually dumped Buffer and started using Hootsuite. This service offers the same types of features at Buffer, but it offers more of them. Hootsuite is team-oriented, and its analytics tools are highly robust.
Socedo: If you ever wish that you had the time to search through Twitter for industry-related keywords and chatter, Socedo is the tool for you. At Sewport, we use this tool to find potential leads who are talking about their need for services like ours. This tool crawls Twitter for relevant keywords and gives you real-time reports.
Brand24: This tool is like Socedo, but instead of searching for industry-relevant keyword chatter, it searches for mentions of your brand instead. I use this tool to exploit positive chatter regarding Sewport and get on top of negative chatter before it spreads.

#3 Understand the Limits of Automation

At this stage of the game, there’s no way to fully automate your social media management. No matter which tools you use, you’ll still need to craft posts, engage with customers, and use human creativity to relay your brand’s message on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This reality doesn’t discourage me, however. I find that relying on automation tools gives me more time to create the type of social media content that will generate meaningful engagements. Instead of worrying about scheduling posts and juggling multiple login credentials throughout my team, I let automation do the dirty work and free myself up to use social media to its full potential as a humanizing tool for my brand.

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Tomas Smith

Tomas Smith is a production process specialist at Sewport - an online marketplace connecting brands and manufacturers, former advisor to various clothing manufacturing businesses. He is passionate about process optimization and all things related to garment manufacturing, writing and sharing his knowledge with the world.