Growing a business is a process aimed at continuous growth. And where there’s constant growth, there’s a need for great efficiency.
Keeping your business growing at a satisfying rate might prove very challenging if your resources are limited. In this blog post, we will take you through the basics of social media automation, and show you how your business can benefit from it, even if you have a small team or operate on a tight budget.
Social media have become one of the major fields for business development. The times when businesses used them merely for building their image are long gone. The truth is that social media can be used for almost all stages of the customer journey process.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others can be used for:
- Building brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Paid advertising
- Sales
- Customer service
… and more!
So if you manage social media marketing for multiple clients or your own business, you already know that it’s hard work. And as your channels and online communities grow, there’s more and more to wrap your head around.
This might eventually become overwhelming, and if you have a small team and your other resources (budget, tools, etc.) are limited, you might want to consider using automation software to make your life easier.
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Save time with Social Media Automation
How to automate your social media marketing
To understand how automation solutions can elevate social media strategies, we first need to realize how much work goes into effective social media marketing on a daily basis. Let’s discuss the bread and butter of every social media manager’s job.
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How to automate your social media posts
Creating social media posts requires creating visuals and coming up with an engaging copy. If you want your posts to have the planned impact on your audience, this process alone can be time and resource-consuming.
Once a post is drafted, it has to be published. If your brand is only present on one or two social platforms, this might not be too big of an issue. However, if you manage multiple social media accounts across several platforms, it might become too much to handle manually.
Using social media scheduling and publishing tools like NapoleonCat’s Publisher, you can manage a shared publication pipeline for all of your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business accounts from one dashboard. What does this mean, exactly? Using the tool, you can:
- create and publish posts,
- schedule content for publication ahead of time,
- set up targeting rules and restrictions,
- assign posts to designated team members and exchange internal notes about upcoming publications,
…and more!
Create, schedule, and auto-publish your content with NapoleonCat
How to automate community management and social customer care
The need to stay on top of how you handle customer service on social media is a similar story. If you start out small, you probably won’t mind answering a handful of comments, messages, and reviews every day. But as your business grows, the volume of interactions will grow too.
For instance, imagine that you own a few big, active business accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Your audience is quite engaged, so you get 60-70 comments and messages a day. According to community management best practices, you shouldn’t leave any of them unanswered. And some conversations don’t end with just two or three responses – complaints and negative opinions are usually harder to handle. Can you imagine yourself addressing all those inquiries manually, without any support? You would need a sizable team to ensure good response rates.
Social media automation tools can also help in such cases. Using NapoleonCat’s Auto-moderation, you can automate:
- answering simple questions,
- deleting spam and hate,
- hiding comments that contain sensitive information,
- and redirecting issues to designated team members.
Save time and money with social media automation
Automate social media publishing, reporting, and community management. Make more time for creative and strategic processes – with an all-in-one social media tool.
How does it work? You set up what we call automoderation rules. Each rule works on the same simple model: specific user actions trigger specific automatic reactions. Here’s an example: you can define the trigger “comment added to any post on my Instagram containing the keyword amazing” to set off the automatic reaction: “reply to comment with: [@user], thank you so much for your opinion!”.
You define the triggers and reactions, and setup only takes a few minutes. All of the predictable questions that customers ask in comments about sizing, delivery times, item availability, and so on can be answered with Auto-moderation at scale, leaving your team with more time to handle more complex inquiries. And improving your response rates. Easy peasy!
You can create rules that will answer your specific business needs. For more inspiration and specific examples, check out this article. The feature works on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.
You can also check the video below for a quick overview:
How to automate social media reports
The last major area of social media marketing is tracking performance and reporting. It’s not as exciting as content creation, but without it, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether your strategies are bringing in the desired results.
Social media managers who work on several channels will agree that having performance data and reports stored on separate social media platforms makes analysis chaotic and time-consuming. Trying to process data while jumping between different reports can also undermine the accuracy of your analysis. Relying on native social media analytics (Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc.) is simply not the optimal way to understand your overall performance.
In-depth analytics and automated reporting are both features you can find in NapoleonCat. You can set up the tool to regularly send you (and your team, clients, stakeholders) reports that include a custom set of metrics that you track! This way you can automate everyone’s access to data from multiple social media channels.
You can also track your competitors and generate automatic reports for their accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Since you and your competitors share a similar or the same target audience, monitoring competition on social media will provide you with a handful of actionable insights.
What content works best? When is it best to post? How often you should post? All of these questions can be quickly answered after analyzing a report that you generate within 2 minutes. Check out this video to see how to create a report for a competitor’s profile (a sample report is included at the end of the video).
The benefits of social media automation
If you choose to automate your social media management process, you will surely quickly notice the benefits that come with it. The solutions described above can help you optimize your processes and make the most of your team’s time and other resources. Simply speaking, social media automation can save you a lot of time and money. Here’s how.
- An automated scheduling and publishing tool allows you to better plan your work and create a publishing pipeline ahead of time. This can give your team more time to focus more on the creative aspects of your social content strategy. And preparing better, more engaging content can effectively get you closer to reaching your goals: generating more sales through social media, promoting new products or services, etc.
- By taking simple, repetitive tasks off your shoulders, automated moderation gives your team more time to handle complex inquiries with appropriate care and attention. This, in turn, can increase the chances of leaving your customers with a positive impression of your business and improve the way your social community interacts with your brand.
- Auto-moderation not only saves you time – it can also have a positive impact on the ROI of your social ad campaigns. Deleting spammy comments and competitive links from your sponsored posts will help you build a professional, trustworthy image and make the most out of your ad spend.
- Auto-moderation will also help you improve your response rates and overall customer satisfaction. This is crucial when building an engaged community around your business.
- Automated reports and analytics will save you hours of tiring data crunching. Having all your data pulled for you in the form of easy-to-read PDF files will allow you to invest more energy into understanding your results and adjusting your strategies to improve performance.
- Having all these features in one package will save you money that you no longer have to invest in expensive single-purpose tools such as chatbots.
Not having to answer the same questions over and over again, to remember when it’s your time to post, or to manually hide unwanted comments can have more impact on your business than it may appear at first glance. It can help you organically scale your social presence without growing your team and investing in advanced technologies.
Protect your social media from spam & hate
Automatically hide or delete offensive comments, hate speech, and spam – with an all-in-one social media tool.
Wrap up
Growing a business comes with many challenges. Keeping your social media channels in good shape is one of them. If you want to manage growing social media traffic on multiple platforms without a large dedicated team, the NapoleonCat is the tool for you.
Social media automation tools will help you to save time and money by performing some simple yet time-consuming tasks for you. They can also make the more complex tasks – like data analysis – much easier to get done. As a result, you’ll have more time to focus on making sure your strategies are effective and building engaged social communities.
Make sure to give our software a try, and let us know if the automation features helped you address some of your business needs. Have fun!
If you’d like to learn more about social media automation, we recommend the following articles:
- Keep Your Customers Happy – Social Media Automation Will Help You (why and how?)
- Top 11 Facebook Automation Tools
- The Easiest Way to Implement Facebook Automation
- 6 Uses of Social Media Marketing Automation
- Your Guide to eCommerce Automation on Social Media
- How to Automate Your Social Media During Holidays
- How Is Social Media Automation Affecting Social Customer Service?
- Best Instagram Automation Tools
- 10 Most Overlooked Social Media Marketing Apps
