Month: March 2014

I know I know, in my last article I talked about how you should be automating your social media posts. But you still actually have to be social in social media.

You cannot automate 100% of your social media.

When you’re involved in social media your aim is engagement. You want to start conversations. You want to contribute to conversation. You want to build relationships that will take your business into the future.  You can’t do this solely with social media automation.

You will never achieve this if you’re just blasting posts 24/7, and not paying attention to anything is going on there. You’ll need to plan to login at least once a day. You’ll need to be completely focused so you don’t get caught up in the new photo album of your best friends three-year-old.

You should also consider how many social networks you signed up to. If you can’t engage on all of them drop some of them. Take three or four and work on building a really strong following on these three or four.

Top Tip: Schedule a time each day for you to go into each of the social platforms and comment on feedback. It shouldn’t take more than about 15 minutes so you can schedule once in the morning and once in the evening, or just once a day. Just be sure to comment to everyone.

Don’t make a bad first impression

If you want people to follow you your first impression is important yes there are a lot of people who will click Like just because they like clicking Like. But most followers were confuse the your profile page.

If your profile page only has the automated posts we talked about in the last article, it won’t get you many followers. You’ve seen it, Twitter pages that are just full of “WOW this is cool!”.  Did you follow those people? I didn’t think so. Make sure you have a balance of automation and replies.

Be careful of your timing

On days where some global tragedy has occurred be mindful of any post you scheduled in advance for that day. You may want to rewrite them are just cause the automation completely.

Automation can be useful and save you tons of time, but make sure your customers know there’s a real person behind the posts.

Social media can be hard to keep up with. Having an online presence 24/7 is impossible. That’s why I think some automation is necessary to reach your entire audience.

#1  More consistent online presence

Automating your posts makes it easier to space them out so they’ll show up in people’s feeds throughout the day.

Coming online to do some posts just once or twice a day limits the chances that people will actually see your posts. Even if people are following you they only see posts at the time that they are online. Good automation allows you to spread out your posts without having to spend all day online.

#2  Be on more social networks.

A lot of people really find social marketing overwhelming. There are so many social networks online right now is really impossible to keep up with them and still run your business.

If you use automation sparingly, it can be less stressful and you will find it easier to manage your accounts. You’ll be present on more social platforms and still get some sleep!

#3  Reach more people

As stated in the first two points, being on more networks means you’ll reach more people. Being able to post throughout the day on more networks means you’ll reach even more people.

#4  Save time

If you do decide automate your social media you’ll still need to take the time to actually write the posts. But since your scheduling in advance you can do these in batches instead of one add a time. You can also outsource this and save yourself even more time.

#5  Have a more consistent message

We’re all busy and are distracted easily. If you don’t have a social media plan in place you can forget to post and especially for you to post throughout the day. Your message will be consistent and people will basically forget about your business.

If you incorporate some sort of automation you can ensure that you’re going to show up in people’s feeds. You can also promote your products and blog posts to more people.

#6  Don’t get sucked in

You know as well as I do that once we login to Facebook were gone for at least an hour. And, within that hour we’ve done absolutely nothing productive. With some automation in place and deciding on a very fixed time to login and check on things we can be much more productive with social media.