If you aren’t careful, social media marketing can eat up all of your precious time. It can be a bottomless pit if you don’t manage it, as there is always more to do on social networks and not always the ROI to back up spending huge amounts of time on it.
Automation can be your salvation, helping to save time and be more organised with your marketing planning. Let’s take a look at the benefits of social media marketing automation in more detail…
- It saves enormous amounts of time
Research in 2015 found that 43% of businesses in the U.S. were spending the equivalent of nearly a whole workday or more on social media marketing, with a third of CEOs wanting to spend less time on it. By scheduling posts in advance, you can free up a huge amount of time that can be better spent elsewhere.
- It frees up time for engagement
Brands need to fill a steady content calendar in order to maintain brand awareness and keep their social profiles active, and automation can take care of that. The time you save you can use for more meaningful social media activity, such as engaging with customers, starting or joining conversations and those more fun or spontaneous posts that make social media platforms so enjoyable to be a part of. Speaking to DrumUp, marketing content manager Carrie Murphy explains:
“Automation gives you more bandwidth to be interactive. Being able to plan social promotions for events ahead of time gives you more time to be interactive with followers in the moment.”
- You can post at optimal times of the day
There are certain times of the day and week when your posts will receive the maximum amount of exposure and engagement. Rather than having to be online and posting live at these times, automation allows you to schedule these posts to hit every potentially lucrative time window.
- It improves your planning
Using automation tools such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Buffer makes it easy to plan your online marketing calendar, to make sure that the right posts are going on at the right time. If you have special dates around which content needs to be released, you can plan it in advance and stagger it to go out at optimum times. It simply makes social media more manageable.
- It conserves your marketing budget
To have an active presence on social media platform, you need resources. You need either in-house professionals or outsourced agencies working away to put in the hours to keep your brand on top of social media marketing…or you can make use of relatively cheap scheduling and automation tools to reduce the workload. The money you save you can put into targeted sponsored ads and other strategies that can boost your ROI figures.
Do you think automation is a good way for marketers to save time, or does it run the risk of de-personalising your marketing approach? Please feel free to share your thoughts.
