How to Automate Your Social Media Marketing

Automating your social media marketing campaigns is a great way to free up time and resources for other tasks. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 3 in 4 U.S. adults use social media on a regular basis. Therefore, there’s a pretty good chance that your customers or clients are using social media. While certain marketing tasks must be performed manually, others can be automated. So, how can you automate your social media marketing campaigns?

Curate Relevant Content Beforehand

Rather than waiting until you are ready to make a social media post to find relevant content, it’s recommended that you curate and prepare the content ahead of time. According to TA McCann, small business owners should follow the 5-3-2 rule when promoting their brands on social media — 5 pieces of content should come from outside sources, 3 pieces should come from you, and 2 pieces should be personal and/or funny. You can follow this format when curating content for your social media campaigns, preparing them days or even weeks in advance.

Schedule Facebook Posts

Did you know that you can schedule Facebook posts to be published at a future date? Well, you can — and using this feature is a great way to automate your social media marketing campaigns. Just craft your Facebook post like you normally do, but instead of clicking the “Publish” button, click the drop-down arrow next to it. From here, you can specify the date on which you would like to the post to be published.

Schedule Other Social Media Posts

Of course, you can schedule posts made on other social media networks to be published in advanced, as well. Twitter, for instance, allows users to schedule their posts in advance, but only if they have an advertiser account (note: you don’t have to actually spend money on your advertiser account to use this feature).

But if you’re searching for a more hands-off approach to social media scheduling, you should consider using a third-party service like HootSuite. This web-based service allows small business owners and entrepreneurs to schedule their social media posts in advance for Google+, Twitter and Facebook, eliminating the need to manually log into each account.

Facebook Ads

Last but not least, Facebook Ads can be used to automate a portion of your social media marketing campaigns. Using Facebook’s paid advertising platform, you can create ads that run automatically based on the targeting criteria which you provide. The key to running a successful Facebook Ads campaign lies in the targeting, as you want to match your ads with the appropriate audience. Check out this page to learn more about Facebook Ads and how it works.

Do you use any tools to automate your social media marketing? Let us know in the comments section below!

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