Brands on social media have come a long way, and so too has the technology to promote them. Social media is a powerhouse for marketing, and anything that makes your social media marketing activities easier should be taken advantage of… Right?

Wrong.

The cornerstone of social media it’s social-ness, the way it fosters social interactions amongst communities and networks of individuals. For business purposes, this process is typically a dialogue between a brand representative and the customer. In recent years, one thing has emerged to assist companies send out more messages, more often: social media automation. But just because it exists doesn’t mean that you should always use it.

What is social media automation?

Social media automation aims to make the managing of social media activity more streamlined. Where it really excels is in the area of scheduling and managing the publishing of content, which reduces hands-on publishing time drastically.

Increasingly, however, businesses are turning to other types of automation to manage their customer interactions. Robots or more commonly ‘bots’ are tiny computer programs that are designed automate certain tasks, in this case, replying to a Facebook messages, or automatically Liking an Instagram post, to name a few… Users should feel like they are interacting with a real human, but in the worst examples, this type of engagement is contrived or spammy.

Here, we explore which social media automation tools you should be using, and which ones you should avoid.

The Good

Scheduling posts on social media and sharing unique content

Unique, engaging content is like gold in content creation currency. Many marketers know that consistent, unique content is the mainstay of a good website, and the same rings true for an effective social media strategy.

Scheduling posts in advance with scheduling tools is one of the best things you can do to save time uploading posts in real time. These kinds of tools can help you to plan your social media calendar in advance and easily chop and change when posts will go live. This is great as it allows you to control your messages and post them at times when your particular audience is online.

Done correctly, using scheduling tools for unique, curated content can expand your social community, generate traffic and produce new leads.

The Bad

Not adding unique copy to scheduled/shared content

Automatically sharing content across multiple social media accounts without writing unique posts is an example of bad practice in social media automation. One of the most counterproductive things you can do on social media is sharing content that doesn’t have a personal message in your brand voice included. These kinds of tools lend themselves to this common mistake, so it’s no surprise that this is one of the most widespread errors in using social media automation.

When you use automation tools to share photos, links to your website content or links to third party content without crafting your own engaging message to go alongside the post, it’s ineffective and doesn’t engage the consumer, which goes against the ‘social’ aspect of social media. Sure, using tools to automate your content is quick and easy, but the best approach is to customise your message for each channel.

You should be including your own unique copy in every post that you share on social media. The rule of thumb here should be customise, customise, customise.

The Ugly

Using tools to automatically follow accounts/set automatic replies

If you want your social media presence to scream ‘robot’, then use programs to automatically follow accounts that follow you and send automatic replies to them. If you want to cultivate an authentic presence with genuine followers and an engaged audience, then steer clear of anything that does the work for you.

There are tools out there that can automatically make your brand a follower of anyone who follows you and send automated generic replies to people who comment on your page or follow you. Lest you want to act exactly like a spam bot, we don’t recommend using these.

Automating direct messaging

There are also tools out there that will automatically Direct Message (DM) your followers for you. Like the above, these come across as spammy, impersonal and kinda stalkerish, and are a counterintuitive way of trying to generate leads. Automated direct messages – especially coupled with a cheesy sales pitch – come across as overly pushy and bot-like.

The key takeaway here is that social media should be social. The name itself implies a human touch, and that’s what customers will expect from you. Social media automation should be used strategically in order to propel your company forward with a distinctive, personal brand voice, rather than alienating your customers by letting a robot do all the talking.

Need a hand with staying social? We can help with that. Get in touch.