As your online presence expands, you may find it difficult to maintain your social media responsibilities. And while you should continue to regularly post original content, there are occasions when it's acceptable to set your marketing efforts on automation mode. In fact, it's arguable that no successful social media marketing campaign can be done without some sort of automation.
In this post, we'll look at six examples of great social media marketing automation tools that you can use in addition to regularly posting original content to help maximize your performance.
1. Dlvrit
If you follow a variety of blogs specific to your industry, chances are that your audience members will also enjoy the same content. As such, you can keep your Twitter account/s from going stale on your off days by using Dlvrit to post updates each time new posts are released on your favorite blogs.
This needs to be done carefully to avoid spam, and only with sites you trust. Also, don't forget to tag your favorite bloggers in your tweets to help build relationships with them.
As an extra benefit, Dlvrit can also be used to release updates when you add a new post on your own blog.
2. Viral Content Bee
Whenever you publish new content, you want other people to share it on social media, right?
Viral Content Bee (Disclaimer: This is the project I founded) semi-automates this process by enabling you to auto-submit your new articles to its dashboard for VCB users to manually share them on social media.
This way, only one part is actually automated - the discovery. You get your content discovered by active social media users, and if the content is worth it, they'll be happy to help spread the word.
3. Revive Old Posts
If you have a long-standing WordPress blog, you likely have some great nuggets of information buried deep in your archives. Rather than letting these old, useful posts go to waste, you can keep them fresh in the minds of your readers by utilizing Revive Old Posts.
This is a great automation tool for those bloggers who fear their earlier posts were never read due to a slowly established online presence.
If you have newsworthy posts, make sure to exclude those categories from being tweeted. Also, you may want to alert your followers that these come from older archives with a note ([From my archives] or something similar).
4. Cyfe
These days, if you want to be successful online, you can't just rely on one social media platform to achieve the results you desire - rather, you're likely currently managing multiple accounts including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
Updating each account manually can be tedious, and will ultimately detract from valuable work time. Cyfe (Disclaimer: This is my personal content marketing client) enables you to automatically update all accounts in one fell swoop.
Don't overuse cross-posting though. It can be a good idea to use cross-posting when you're away (schedule updates) or when you have a company update that's good for all the platforms, but remember, each platform is different. For example, you can't tag Facebook and LinkedIn accounts unless you're using a native app to select the name from the drop-down - and social media tagging is huge for building relationships and getting more engagement.
Look to use native apps whenever possible, but keep Cyfe handy when you need to schedule cross-posts to go live on all the channels you manage.
5. MyTweetAlerts
If you enjoy tracking what others are saying about you and your business via social media, you'll love MyTweetAlerts. Use this automation tool to receive emails when your name or the keywords you specify are mentioned. It's sort of like Google Alerts, but catered to the social media world.
MyTweetAlerts gives you lots of searching and filtering options. One of the unique ones (and my favorite) is to use Twitter bio search to only be alerted of tweets published by users with a certain brand name or a certain keyword within their profile:
6. Zapier
When your online popularity starts growing, you may find it very difficult to personally thank each new follower you get. That can be an important touchpoint in some instances, and you can set this process to automation mode by using Zapier.
There are several options here:
- Tweet to your new followers to greet them and start the conversation (but that's a bit risky route, especially if your brand is getting several new followers a day - you can end up tweeting too much)
- Automatically add new followers to a public Twitter list. That's something I'd recommend doing. It's quiet, doesn't do any harm, and your new followers will be pleased seeing themselves added to a "Rockstars" list or similar.
Another idea is to create a separate Twitter list to automatically add people who mention your brand name. That way, you can have a separate list of your brand promoters, enabling you to reach out to them personally and thank them on a regular basis.
Social media provides great capacity to generate a following, and share information regarding your products and services. However, as your online presence continues to expand, managing your social media accounts can become tedious - your best option to free up more time, and still generate your desired results, is to use automation tools for your marketing efforts. But again, use them carefully. These tools are like valuable virtual assistants that can simplify your online operations