When you automate social media, it’s important that you understand its limitations. Social media automation will help you be more efficient, but it’s not meant to replace actually being social with your audience.
Here are important things to practice when you automate your online social presence.
Different posts for different folks
Remember to customize your posts to remain relevant for different social networks. Each network has a distinct style, so it’s best to try and match that style to make your best impression.
When posting across the social media spectrum, you could appear insincere and robotic if you don’t try to simulate the unique style for each network. Learn each network’s best practices and follow them for improved engagement.
Schedule posts no more than a week out
By scheduling your posts no further out than a week, you have better control over keeping them timely. What makes sense today could quickly lose relevancy due to current events.
Too much scheduling isn’t your goal. Social media loses its social aspect if you’re creating a full-on automation system. By not scheduling too far in advance, it helps to keep a customer focus.
Be aware of current events
Part of keeping to a one-week scheduling mark is being aware of what’s happening in the world. Some of the greatest social faux pas have been from well-intentioned posts that went awry due to a dramatic change in current events.
Whether it be a natural disaster, political movement, or national tragedy, staying abreast of current events is critical to your social media success.
Grow your global appeal
Perhaps one of the most immediate benefits to automation is scheduling posts for different time zones. Increasing your impact across time zones helps you to grow a global audience.
Even small businesses are able to create a global conversation about their products and services with a well-planned automated social media schedule.
Follow The 5-3-2 Rule
Use The 5-3-2 Rule of social media to keep a human voice and keep your audience first. What this means is out of ten posts, five are from other sources, three are from you, and two are personal.
When you increase your content curation, none of your posts should be direct sells, and they should all be relevant to your audience.
Think personal
As part of the two out of ten posts in the 5-3-2 Rule, your personal posts can include anything that’s not considered urgent.
Think of posting quotes, retweets and reshares, and audience-focused ideas and thoughts.
Automate your blog posts
Because you want to share your latest blog posts to as many social media networks as you can with as little effort and time as possible, automation is key.
You can set up your account so all new posts get automatically posted to all your social media channels. Make sure that your content formatting makes sense for each network. You don’t want to overtly appear like an automaton.
You can also post new content more than once in order to reach a wider audience. It helps to reformat your post by using a different headline.
Never automate interactions with your customers
Customers know when they are interacting with an automaton rather than a human. Social media is your opportunity to show your human side. Take that away, and you’ve removed the social aspect.
Obviously, any troubleshooting and problem solving must be handled by a person. Outside of fixing a common problem with an automated response, anything else is bound to make matters worse.
Even responding with an automated “thank you” can be risky. Your chance to show genuine appreciation is lost, and customers often like social media due to the opportunity to interact and have real, individual responses.
Use the time you’ve freed up with filling your social media queue by creating spontaneous, last-minute social updates, responding to your customers’ needs, and finding great content to share.