Automation may never replace the need for manual involvement in a job, but can always go hand-in-hand to make things better and faster. If you know 'what', 'when' and 'how' part of automating any job and can maintain a synergy between human intelligence and tool's capabilities, you can always outnumber your score. Social media campaign management is of no difference. Automating certain tasks in your list of daily social media jobs can improve productivity as well as marketing ROI.
Today, with the growing volume and complexity of social media marketing jobs in hand, a marketer cannot help but find out the scope of effort optimization techniques and remove manual hand-offs in the process.
Simply put, you need a machine that understands your instructions, apply human intelligence, and are programmed as per the standard needs of a job. It reduces the amount of stereotype and repetitive computing tasks so that you can breathe a life beyond work.
The bottom line is that your social marketing effort should promote adoption and use of innovations and not be restricted to mundane tasks like post scheduling, data capturing, crunching, and ROI measurement. The life deserves to be better and we should do it.
According to a recent report by Simple Measured and TrustRadius based on the data from a survey of nearly 600 social media practitioners, measuring ROI is the biggest challenge for social media marketers.
The problems are manifold, though. Most of the marketers run short of time and ideas while trying to -
- Schedule and share posts/threads on multiple SM accounts
- Create original contents from various web resources relevant to subject matter
- Share the posts among blogs, SM pages and websites at a faster rate
- Address business, legal or regulatory risks of social media account
- Identify and prioritize social media efforts for better yield
- Monitor campaign performance or, identify prospects on a daily basis
- Remove spam and unauthorized content or curate them
- Generate consolidated reports based social media analytics
Neither spending long hours in social media campaigns fits in your time bucket, nor does it ensure a solid online presence of your business. You should focus more on your social media content and its production strategies than on its distribution. Is your existing marketing setup really up to it?
Do you know that using best-of-the-breed social media management tools can actually keep your entire social media activities hassle-free? In this article, we will learn what type of SM tasks can be automated with a tool and how that helps you optimize the overall marketing effort and cost.
1. Automate campaign setup, planning and content curation
Tools like Hootsuite, Oktopost, Sprout Social, and Social Oomph have some great built-in automation features. They help you pre-schedule your social media posts, create contents well in advance, publish posts to multiple SM accounts from a single platform and do more.
Fig: Hootsuite Publishing
For example, Social Oomph enables you to create multiple variations of a tweet so that you send out different versions every time without any additional effort. Oktopost can help you organize bulk contents on the web and categorize them for you based on specific topics. Its editorial calendar manages your social pipeline and simplifies content distribution. This saves time in content discovery from on-topic news and articles. With Hootsuite, you can connect 35 of your social media accounts. The best part of using these tools is that you can integrate them with your WordPress blog and manage SM campaigns right within your website interface.
2. Automate conversion monitoring and reporting
Conversions or leads - the bottom line of any social media campaign, much depend on how efficient you are in identifying prospective communications among millions of SM threads in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You set up a list of preferred keywords in Hootsuite and the tool will automatically fetch you all the threads relevant to those keywords. It is a simple, quick and effective way to know who might be your next customer. Tools like Oktopost goes one step ahead in lead acquisition in attribution. With its social acquisition dashboard, you can not only track conversions from various channels but also measure which channel brings you more business - all with a graphical view.
Fig: Oktopost Social Dashboard
3. Automate notifications on social media security
Being social also means that you are exposed to potential damage. A marketer needs to stay abreast of any social media activity that poses social risks to a business, its brand value, or employee recognition. And employees create by far the biggest risk in that regard. A business needs to ensure compliance with government rules and regulations, as well as to protect its data and reputation.
Tools like SecureMySocial give employees real-time warnings if they are violating a company's policies by leaking data, saying inappropriate things, breaking laws, or doing other things wrong. It scans posts by employees made from anywhere for internal keywords like product names, employee names, IP terms, and any foul language, and, if it finds a problem, either immediately lets an employee know, or, if the employee allows it to, automatically removes the post without requiring anyone to have to think about what might go wrong. It also scans posts to protect employees from harming themselves: their careers, their relationships, their finances, and even their physical safety. The best part is that you can customize security rules based on the nature of your business and employees will get automatic alerts in real time - so you can protect your business and your employees from harm without having to monitor them.
Fig: SecureMySocial
4. Automate content sharing and update
Your social media pipeline should always be full of engaging and fresh content. That means you cannot afford to spend hours in queuing, publishing and sharing content across the web. There has to be a better way of doing things. A tool like Babbly is excellent in this job.
Fig: Babbly Magic URL Sharing
For example, Babbly allows you to set a number of shares your post URL deserves. Just submit your post link and it reaches to diverse audience powered by Babbly's network. The best part of Babbly's magic sharing feature is that your high-quality content reaches to the top influencers and content marketers present in Babbly's community. Isn't it the simplest way to make your posts viral?
5. Automate content creation and discovery
DrumUp and Spundge are some other content discovery and scheduling tools that keep your FB, Twitter and LinkedIn pages always noisy. IFTTT automates tweets creation for every new blog post added to your website. The same goes with Zapier - a tool that generates tweets for any new video getting uploaded to YouTube.
Fig: Drumup Content Stream
6. Automate social media engagement data extraction for analysis
Social media engagement analysis is the first step to monitoring your social media strategies. The more powerful tool you apply to monitor how your social content resonates with your audience, the better decisions you are likely to take. Social analytics tool like Simply Measured, Brandwatch, Quintly are very much apt in this job. You may even try these free social media analytics tools to start with. Moreover, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, and YouTube - all these tools come with powerful analytics feature by default.
Fig: Simply Measured Social Analytics
Most of these popular tools present you with an intelligent dashboard that shows engagement metrics in a graphical manner. The metrics could be anything like audience engagement by networks, profiles, messages, hours and day of activity, clicks, conversions and similar data. The utilities of dashboards from Google Analytics and Moz Analytics are also worth a mention. You not only get the visibility of social media traffic sources and channel wise performance but also see how social media performance affects your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and overall marketing results.
If you struggle to perform all your social media tasks in a day, I believe trying these social media tools based on your job priority can really help. If you used any of these tools or similar ones before and were able to optimize marketing cost and effort to a great extent please share your experience with us. We hope to collect your thoughts and share them among our readers for their benefits.