What is Social Media Automation? To put it very simplistically, it refers to the process of automating all your social media marketing efforts. However, the benefits that you can derive from it, is phenomenal and cannot be explained in just a sentence. All Marketers are aware of the huge power of social media and marketing automation. Now imagine combining these two powers together! If undertaken properly, the benefits that a company would get are immense. I have listed a few of the huge implications for a company in investing in social media automation strategies.
1) Amplify your company brand by many fold with just a small investment
By automating your social media marketing efforts, you free up your marketing team’s resources and at the same time constantly feature on the various social media platforms, making sure that your prospects never ever forget about you (In a good way of course!)
2) Be known as the Thought Leader of your industry
By regularly posting interesting and good content in the right places where your prospects do actually spend their time at, you build up your reputation as a reputable subject expert who can be relied upon for reliable and timely information. Automating content to be posted to the right Facebook group at a specific time when people are most active on Facebook, would drastically increase your company’s reach. Becoming a thought leader makes it much easier for your company to convince your prospects about the validity of the solutions that your company’s products provide, making your sales process much more effective.
3) Engage your audience
By personalizing your automated social media postings, you provide content that your prospects would be interested in and actually care about. Educating them and increasing their knowledge would empower them to make better decisions and this would strengthen your relationship with them. They would come back to you for any clarifications or to fill any gaps in their knowledge. This increases your engagement with your audience and attract them to visit your website and social media pages more frequently.
These are just a handful of the several benefits that a company can derive from social media automation. However, this does not entirely remove the necessity of a human element from marketing. At the end of the day, you are dealing with people and not machines and hence there needs to be a human touch to your marketing efforts. For example, imagine hearing a lovely voice on the phone vs a recorded message when you call someone. Which do you prefer?
Hence, to fully experience all the benefits of social media automation strategies, marketers would need to utilize the magic tool of curation. By curating content unique to your different customer segments,which is actually the crux of content marketing, you would be able to effectively automate your social media marketing efforts without losing the special human touch. Curation is actually a very simple and in fact, fun process which would simplify marketers’ efforts considerably. But, let’s reserve this topic for another day as it’s a huge segment of its own.
I hope this blog post did provide some insights into the power of social media automation and maybe even persuade you to undertake it, if you have not already done so!
