Written by ContentPowered.com
The days when social media consisted of Facebook and MySpace are long gone. Nowadays, there are over 500 social media sites around, and the average user has an account on at least one tenth of them. Factoring in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest, just to name a few, you could easily spend eight hours a day just keeping up with social media and doing nothing else! Fortunately, there are a number of free and low-cost options for small businesses that are designed specifically to make social media more social and less of a headache for intensive social users. In this article, we’ll look at some of the easiest and most effective ways to put your social media on autopilot.
1) Schedule Ahead Of Time
Setting up your social media accounts so they post automatically at a set time or on a regular basis is a quick and simple way to arrange your social media so you don’t have to spend time during your day keeping up with it. Especially if your followers and circles are heavy on people in other parts of the world, this can be very effective for making sure the most people get the information you’re trying to convey. HootSuite, SproutSocial, and Twuffer are all good sites for this (more on them later).
2) One-Click Publishing
Being able to publish to multiple social media outlets at once using one log-in is a powerful time saver for people who spend a lot of time on the net and may not have much time to copy and paste links to multiple social media sites. WordPress has a number of excellent plugins for this. The popular blogging service allows you to publish a blog across multiple platforms, including but not limited to LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. However, SproutSocial also offers one-click publishing and scheduling features. If you don’t have a WordPress account, SproutSocial and HootSuite are both good, free to low cost alternative for setting up updates and information in advance and dispersing them across a wide range of social media platforms.
3) Make It Happen…Again And Again!
If your objective is to make customers and potential customers aware of new information, products, or services, you need to make sure your social media feeds incorporate this information as at least 20% of your daily social media activities. Setting up recurring posts to social media is relatively simple and can help automate this portion of your social media activities. Of course, you still need to engage with others and do more than simply say “Buy my product!” This will frequently turn users off. If you “feel” accessible to other social media users, they are far more likely to be interested in what you have to say.
4) Keep Up With Trends.
If you have an opinion on something or you see something on the news that prompts a response, you can create a number of posts at the outset to discuss, analyze, and assess what’s going on and why. You need to be careful about this, however: if new developments suddenly make your information irrelevant, you’ll need to go in and edit your automatic social postings to account for the new factors in play. People who don’t do this are the reason why many social media gurus simply say “Don’t automate your social media!” However, with a little due diligence on your part, you can put out timely, relevant content ahead of the curve, establishing yourself as a “thought expert” on the subjects that interest you and your circles!
Making Social Media Easier On Your Schedule
Among many small business owners, social media is the top complaint. The reason for this is because it takes so long to long into and post your content to a dozen, two dozen, or more social sites. So far, HootSuite, SproutSocial, and WordPress seem to have the best and most integrated one-touch publishing capabilities. Many of these services are slanted heavily or even exclusively toward Twitter, leaving other social media users out in the cold. Some of these include TweetULater, Twuffer, and FutureTweets. Each of these has their own benefits and liabilities, but for the hardcore Twitter aficionado, these services offer a lot of advantages for targeting Twitter users specifically.
Scheduling social media posts is relatively easy, but still requires that you take time to compose the Tweet or surrounding text with a clear call to action. You also need to take into account the fact that social media accounts whose content consists solely of “Buy my product!” or something similar will generally wind up getting ignored. Because of this, you have to set aside some time each day or each week to compose content that’s not all about business.
One major advantage of many social media automation services is that you can set them up to receive emails when someone mentions you or responds to your posts. This allows you to be more flexible and proactive in managing your media and engaging with users, because these “as it happens” updates keep you informed on who’s talking about or to you and what’s being said. The other advantage of this is that you can keep tabs on potential problems, such as flamers and trolls talking about your company without your knowledge.
Scheduling your social media ahead of time is a great way to get the most out of your social media accounts while simultaneously reaching the largest possible amount of users. With the free services available, you can tailor your social media posting to your preferences, target groups, and the services you like and use the most. You can also engage users on sites you probably wouldn’t use otherwise, giving you a greater reach and more opportunities to communicate with users. While you still have to put in the work to create the content you want users to know about, putting your social media on autopilot can take a lot of the stress out of managing your social media interactions!
Wendy West
says:Don’t forget software like Onlywire where you can post to multiple places at once. They have a free version, but the paid version is better because they take care of captchas for you, which is worth every penny.
Karl Cruikshank
says:Scheduling Tweets! How have I never heard of this! Thank you so much for the suggestion to Hootsuite