What CMOs Need to Know About Social Media Automation

If you are a CMO, you know that no marketing plan is complete without a social media aspect. With access to billions of people around the globe, social media is essential for any business to communicate its message, products, and services. While social media scheduler is easy and familiar for us to engage within our personal lives, managing business pages can take up a lot of time and effort. Between brainstorming, posting, and maintaining pages on multiple social media platforms, it is easy for CMOs and social media managers to get overloaded with work. That’s where social media automation tools can save time with planning your posts and save employees from burnout. These incredible tools are great for consolidating your social profiles into one place, scheduling your posts, and posting them all while you plan your next campaign.

But with so many tools out there, what aspects of automation do you need to pay attention to while you craft your social media strategy?

Assess Your Needs and Set Goals

Before you begin to look for the best social media automation tool, you must understand your needs and goals. Depending on the types of social media accounts you manage, what content you want to automate, and your future goals can change the tool you need. For example, do you need only social media automation or email integration and automation as well?

Checking your current needs is a fantastic starting point to pinpointing your perfect program, but also brainstorming your marketing goals can cut back on headaches down the road. If you plan on utilizing omnichannel marketing, you might want to research the best tools for optimizing efficiency. Or, if you plan to create and automate webinars, you may look into the best webinar platform for automation. It’s all according to your plan.

Try Different Platforms – See What Works for You

Not all social media accounts can work on a single platform, so it is necessary to research the different options for you. We can’t cover every tool and app here, but a few of the most popular include:

• Hootsuite: Chances are, you have heard of Hootsuite since the beginning of your career. With an easy interface and a variety of plans, this automation tool is perfect for crafting each post and scheduling it for a specified day and time. Some features give you the ability to measure ROI metrics and manage your team.
• Moosend: This email marketing tool is a great option for both small businesses and established corporations. Moosend utilizes AI technology to assess and filter target customers or inactive customers to make the most out of your automated emails.
• Asana: There is no progress without organization and planning. Asana is a stellar project management tool that helps you create, assign, and manage your team and tasks. With several view modes for task lists and analytics that measure productivity, the Asana alternative checks many boxes when it comes to online task managers.
• Later: If you are a brand that thrives on Instagram, Later is your tool. This app allows you to craft and schedule content specifically for Instagram. Even though this app has the same capabilities as other schedulers, it does not execute posts in quite the same way. Later will send you a notification at the time of your scheduled post. From there, you open the app, follow the prompts, and manually publish the post.
• Facebook: Of course, there are ways to include a Facebook business page in a third-party application, but Facebook offers a myriad of features by itself that are worth mentioning. Using a familiar interface, users can share updates, Instagram content, schedule posts, send automated messages and measure analytics. So if you are only starting to build a social media presence, this is a great place to start.

Keep it Real and Authentic

This point might sound contradictory to using automated machinery to carry out your social media posts but, your audience must know that a real person is responsible for the account. Community networking is essential for building a social media following and, if every response, post, and direct message is automated, it’s hard to maintain a connection with your audience.

One way to show off your authenticity and dedication to your followers is to personally respond to their comments and complaints. However, if you receive direct messages from bots or simple inquiries like business hours, automated messages are not a detriment to community engagement. People come to social media to have real-time, authentic exchanges and automated bot responses to every person who does nothing for community management.

Carefully Curate Your Content

Even though customer engagement is a great way to build a personal presence on a page, posting a variety of specifically curated content can help as well. Each social platform and communication channel has a formula that works for that specific channel. For each post and interaction to have the most impact, you must curate your content accordingly.

Not only does the content need to be curated, but the days and times that your posts go live must be different for each platform. For example, if you cater to an Instagram audience, your best post times are between 11 am and 1 pm or 7 pm – 8 pm. While on Twitter, users tend to use the app the most between 12 pm and 1 pm.

Use Analytics to Measure, Learn and Improve

If consolidating posts and schedules into one platform can lessen the burden on yourself and your employees, imagine the impact of condensing your analytics as well. While most apps come with a type of metric tracking system, it might not be exactly what you need. Some may have the ability to track social media traffic and engagement, while others let you assess ROI and team productivity.

Summary and Key Takeaways for CMOs

Social media for business and automation is a different way to utilize social media than what we are used to in our daily lives. There are many different considerations a CMO must make in order to find the right tools to make their social media campaigns the most efficient and effective. Whether you need an email marketing tool, social media scheduler, or omnichannel capabilities, there is something to help you manage your projects.