Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Automation Tools

As a marketer, I must confess that I suffer from shiny object syndrome! I am always looking for the latest social media automation tools.

It is not strange. It is not weird. Most business owners and marketers in Lagos, Nigeria, and other places worldwide also suffer from shiny object syndrome. We continuously seek tools and strategies to help our business grow.

Business owners or digital marketers need to know ways that will help save time and improve customer targeting and customer experience with your brand.

You need to know how to optimise your business strategies and tactics. You need to know how to optimise your marketing campaign and measure results.

Know what tools to invest in that will help you attract better sales leads, improve your accountability. You need to invest in marketing technology.

If your brand is lucky, there will come a time when you amass a massive following on social media and across different social networks where your follower’s hang out.

When you reach that stage, managing your social media accounts may be a burden. At this stage, some business owners may outsource social media management to a reputable and affordable social media agency.

Other business owners on a tight budget may decide instead to look for ways and tools to automate their social media. Especially the ongoing management and repetitive tasks associated with social media.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using social media automation tools or marketing automation tools. These are the things that you need to know of before you dive into it.

What is social automation?

Social automation is simply the replacement of manual social media tasks with an automated solution.

An automated social media campaign will help you achieve your objectives. You will reach your audience on time and ensure they see your messages.

Automating doesn’t make work disappear entirely, but it makes it more efficient. By automating your social media work, you can reduce the time you spend on it from a few hours to 30 minutes, allowing you to take advantage of your time more effectively.

The big question is how to automate your social media presence and stay in the conversation with your audience.

Automation can lead companies to communicate with their customers too often. Companies can only be relevant when a customer wants to hear from them. The same applies to the automation of one’s marketing on social media.

What is Social Media Automation?

By automating your social media presence, you can optimise content curation and post scheduling in advance. Automation tools can help you spend less time gathering posts last minute so you can spend more time engaging with your audience and growing your account.

Automation of social media involves integrating multiple channels, users, and content. Because of this, your automation tool’s dashboard must remain clean and straightforward. To improve productivity, invest in automation platforms that provide an intuitive interface that makes all the essential elements easy to access.

How do you automate social media?

Many big businesses utilise processes and funnels that begin with social media lead generation from tweets, product improvements from social suggestions, troubleshooting, feedback, and more. Automate these tasks if it makes sense to you to reduce the time it takes to manage them. For example, triggering a lead generating process when you favourite a tweet makes your job that much easier.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of using social media automation tools or marketing automation tools. Click To Tweet

Most social media users will share thoughts, quotes, retweets, and more beyond content curation. As long as these posts are not time-sensitive, automating and scheduling them makes perfect sense.

Don’t automate all customer interactions. It can lead to a bad customer experience. It might be tempting for busy companies engaging in inbound marketing to automate simple responses like “thanks,” but anything more than that is a dangerous game for their online presence. Tread cautiously!

What are the best social media automation tools?

Social media automation tools display your followers’ mentions and highlights. As well as improving engagement, they can help you track clicks.

The market for social media automation tools is vast, with each offering its own set of automation features. Some tools provide almost all functionality at once, and some that focus more on a specialised feature. There is no way I can list all the best social media automation tools in a single post. So I will mention a few and in no particular order.

With HubSpot’s social media tool, you can streamline your social interactions. Sharing your marketing campaign content across all social media platforms is easy with this tool.

Agora Pulse is another comprehensive tool that could be an ideal social automation platform. It’s a robust social automation tool offering all the features one might expect.

No list of the best social media automation tools is complete without the mention of Sprout Social. This is a tool meant for teams that are serious about social media marketing. Though pricey, especially for small businesses, it is worth the money.

A pioneer in social automation, Hootsuite has been providing social media automation services ever since 2008. It’s a complete automation platform that gives you numerous features for your social automation.

Buffer is another tool worth mentioning. It has all the features you might need to handle your scheduling and other tasks.

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Advantages of Using Social Media Automation Tools

What are the benefits of social media automation tools? This is a question that I’ve been asked a few times over the years.

Social media automation tools allow you to engage with your audience across multiple platforms in one place.

If you want to spend more time interacting with your audience, social media automation is an excellent way to do that. Don’t use these tools to avoid engaging with your followers.

Social media marketing is challenging. By automating your marketing activities, you can focus on what matters the most: Sharing engaging content (rather than the time-consuming mechanics of what times, how often, etc.)

Some more benefits of using social media automation tools include:

Social Media Management

Automation tools may help relieve you of the daily repetitive tasks involved in managing a social media page. Automation helps to give you more free time to handle other areas of your business.

With proper social media automation, you can make your time spent on your social media online marketing as productive as possible.

No list of the best tools is complete without the mention of this one. Click To Tweet

Social media automation allows marketers to produce content that stands out and places them above the fold. That said, social managers need to prioritise which messages they respond to. Social media automation can help with that, particularly if you have a large audience.

Business owners can use many social media automation tools for social listening. Essentially, social listening is monitoring what people are saying about your brand or industry online.

Social media automation is an ideal way to leverage social media channels for the growth of your business. Choose the right automation tools and follow these best practices to get the most out of social automation.

Social media automation works for you 24/7 so that you are always available to customers. You can stay in touch with your audience when they are active.

Social media automation is a great way to eliminate day-to-day tasks so you can spend more time interacting with your audience. However, it would be best if you didn’t use these tools to avoid responding to or engaging with your followers.

Content Calendar

With the aid of social media automation tools, you can create a content calendar. Then organise your social media post for the day, weeks, and even months ahead.

These tools allow you to create posts in bulk and schedule postings to your various social media accounts.

A content calendar will help you keep abreast of the content you are posting to which social network and time.

It will also help you save a considerable amount of valuable time to invest in other essential activities in your business.

Post at the Right Time

Social media automation tools help you post at the right time when your fans and followers are most active. Then your post and tweets can generate the most interaction and engagement.

Most times, it’s better you use the inbuilt analytics provided by the social network where available. Using native analytics is much more precise than third-party automation tools.

Content Variety

With an automation tool, you will post various content with ease, even on your mobile devices. They make it possible for you to have a well-crafted content mix that suits everyone in your social media community.

Re-use Content

Do you have evergreen content you like to re-use from time to time? Re-using content becomes very easy when using automation tools.

Re-using is where social media automation tools shine. Because each time you want to re-use a piece of content, it becomes a breeze than a hassle.

Monitoring and Listening

Automation tools make it easy for you to engage in social media monitoring and listening. When you automate these tasks, you are sure that you will not miss a tweet or a post that relates to your brand or industry.

Business owners can use these tools for social listening. Click To Tweet

Monitoring and listening is another area where having the right automation tool will help outshine your competitors.

Disadvantages of Using Social Media Automation Tools

Now let’s turn our attention to the cons of marketing automation. Here are some problems with using social media automation tools.

No Personality

Relying on social media automation tools for a simple marketing task can make your brand lose its personality. Your post will be too mechanical. Your posts will not get much human engagement with your target customer base. This is something many algorithms on many social networks take into consideration.

No Organic Growth

These days brands are usually in haste to attract followers in their chosen social media channel. They want to get more followers, attract more interaction with their social media posts and get mentioned by top influencers in their industry.

In the old days, this was a reasonably easy social media strategy to do. However, these days, things are not as simple. These days, it takes a lot more than churning out relevant content as part of your marketing effort to reach your target audience. That’s why brands on social media resort to using automation tools to grow their followers.

Dangerous Tools

Automating the growth of your social media accounts is a double-edged sword. There are some automation tools out there that run contrary to the privacy policies, terms, and conditions of social media sites.

Using these tools is dangerous because it may get your account suspended or deleted from the social network!

Social media auto-follow tools, if not correctly implemented, can be detrimental to your brand image. Too much of it can make your brand seem ‘spammy’.

Fake Followers

If you use your social media account for business, you also risk accumulating counterfeit followers. These are persons that you would not like to associate with your brand.

If you’re not careful, you also risk sharing or retweeting and posting pornographic content from your fake followers and bots to your social media community. Sharing such content causes severe damage to your brand. For corporate brands, these types of accidents can ruin your brand overnight. So be very careful.

Using some social media automation tools puts you in real danger of having your account terminated for going against the terms and policies of the social network!

Best Practices for Using Social Media Automation Tools

Monitor your social networks regularly to ensure that your posting schedule is on point. Daily monitoring also prevents your posts from being offensive for holidays and similar occasions.

Don’t automate everything primarily on your profile. Leave room for being spontaneous and interact with your community. Don’t get lazy and expect tools to do everything for you. They are to make your work easier, not to take over your job.

It is an ideal way to leverage social media channels for the growth of your business. Click To Tweet

Conclusion

So what’s the best way to grow your social media community? My advice is simple! As much as possible, build your community on social media organically, i.e. the natural or manual way.

Learn to connect and engage with your fans and follower whenever they interact with your content through likes, comments, and shares.

Doing so can help you get a decent and active social media community. Remember the saying that ‘little drops of water make a mighty ocean’.

Need more information about social media automation tools? Or are you evaluating marketing automation platforms in search of the right marketing automation software for your marketing team? Schedule a meeting.

Have you used any social media automation tools? Share your experience in the comment below.

If you find this article of value, please comment or share it to let me know. Thank you.

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• The Best Social Media Management Tools for Business
• The Simple Management of Social Media that Wins Customers
• How Social Media Marketing Can Keep You Out of Trouble

 

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