A cat among PVC pipes, penguin on a trekking bike, koala bear with teflon pan in his paw, a meme which was so funny 3 weeks ago: these all are not elements of social media strategy, but just random Pinterest browsing. You can’t create breath-taking content or build relationships what way. You can however lose energy, time and money: the effect hardly matches the amount of effort. Marketing Automation helps optimize social media, turn fan into customers and distribute content efficiently. Find below a handful of tips on how to do so.
1 Invest in Facebook Application
Main benefit: it allows you to gather not only Facebook fans (therefore an audience highly dependent on Facebook whims), but potential customers – email addresses, accompanied with more data, which can be transferred to SALESmanago, put on contact card and then person is monitored, scored and nurtured. SALESmanago can be integrated with any app, including designed by third-party agency.
Although advantages are huge, remember that a good app must give user substantial profit. If you find it hard to answer the question “Why would anyone use that app?”, just drop the idea. There are plenty of other means of lead generation and social media activity. For some branches of business an application seems just unsuitable and just don’t be scared of admitting it. Be scared of that sandpaper producer who comes up with an idea for really funny app.
2 Precise targeting: SALESmanago and Facebook Ad Account
You have to pay for content promotion on Facebook, no matter how great, informative and amusing it is, simply because that’s how Facebook works.
Though investing in ads without determining its recipients precisely makes no point. Target your campaign, using data on your recipients both from Facebook and from SALESmanago (Facebook Custom Audiences).
Take into consideration as many factors as possible (geolocalization, gender, age, knowledge on the product and engagement with brand, persona) and monitor campaigns carefully. And what about running some A/B testing?
3 Zapier for social media
Synergy between social media channels! Generate rule that if new blog post or video is posted, publishes automatic notion about it on Facebook, Twitter and whatever other channel you use. It will also improve your company’s internal communication (i.e. information about new tweet is posted also on your slack) and enable to do simple reports.
There is much more – read 101 ways for Zapier in social media
4 Social Oomph: reuse evergreens
The secret of best business blogs is to reuse high quality content. That can be automated thanks to Social Oomph: you can queue posts-evergreens from your blog.
5 Planning
Automation in social media will encourage you to planning posts in advance, therefore change your habits and give you better perspective on your actions as a whole.
Rule of thumb says that out of 10 post:
- 5 should be content relevant for readers and from different sources that brand’s materials
- 3 should be original, relevant content but provided by the brand
- 2 should be informal, even funny, not relevant to the business.
It’s not a universal, but you should definitely prepare one of that kind, showing proportion and amount of content.
Common mistakes in social media automation
Key to social media is interaction. But wait a moment… isn’t automation impediment to that aim? Isn’t it going to transform your social media into content-spitting robot? Does it leave a room for real conversation?
Many companies at the beginning of their marketing automation adventure stumble into that trap. Below we share our experience to help you avoid it.
1 Automatic responses
Social media is all about conversation. If you fake it with automatic answers (i.e. “Thans for following” or “Thanks! We’ll be back soon!”), your recipient feels:
- Cheated – as you fake the conversation.
- Treated as an idiot – because you suggest that he might just fall for such trick.
2 “Automation” doesn’t equal “Autopilot”
On Monday you plan post and you’re done with social media for the week. Not so fast.
Automation improves actions which are either too tiresome or too simple and mechanical for manual, individual operation. Therefore you can focus on things by which you can’t be replaced: handling customers, creative ideas, analysis.
3 Spam & stalking
With great knowledge comes great responsibility. Having all the information you have, you might really become stalking-spamming monster. Please, don’t. Don’t set rules which react with automatic response to keywords (mostly such responses will be considered spam anyway). Don’t try to be omnipresent using automation. Nobody want wants to read automatic, artificially looking texts.
The simplest rule here is:
- automatize content distribution
- use knowledge gathered via MA for better targeting and personalization
- Don’t automatize interactions. Ever. Don’t try to outsmart your customers. They will see you want to buy them cheaply.
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