Eight tools to save time with social media automation

Social media automation can help your team save time while focusing on more strategic tasks. Here are eight tools you can use.

Marketing automation has become an integral part of a digital team, as it can help marketers avoid repetitive tasks. Social media marketing is no different. It’s still important to keep a consistent content calendar, but there is a repetition in scheduling and posting content that can be avoided.

Social media marketing seems to be the second favorite field for marketers to use automation technology (67%)* and it can be useful in:

• curating content
• scheduling posts
• monitoring hashtags
• posting evergreen content
• starting a conversation

We’ve compiled a list of eight useful tools to improve your social media marketing by saving time while maintaining a successful presence.

Tools to facilitate social media automation

Buffer

Buffer is a powerful social scheduling platform that can help a team save time when planning the social calendar. Its easy and minimal interface make it easy to organise your social posts, while it also facilitates the option of re-scheduling content when focusing on evergreen posts.

Its analytics can provide the right insights when deciding which content was successful enough to be repurposed and the process is fast and efficient.

One of the most useful features when trying to automate social tasks is the Power Schedule. Buffer allows you to schedule a post multiple times across your social networks, simply by going through the scheduling process at once.

For example, if you’ve just written a new blog post, you can schedule it to be posted today across all your networks. If you want to post it again though on Twitter, you can simply choose the option to post it again after a day, a week, a month, or a custom date. This saves time from manual scheduling and helps you improve your content calendar with more content. 

Moreover, another useful feature is Buffer’s feeds, a tab that allows you to add your favorite RSS feeds in one place to monitor and curate them as fast as possible. This is another useful way to keep different social tasks in one platform to ensure that your social strategy is on track with relevant created and curated content.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media scheduling and monitoring platforms, helping you keep all your social activity organized.

It’s certainly a tool that saves you time by involving scheduling, posting, monitoring, researching and reporting. The ability to create many streams can help any brand in setting up an efficient social media plan. This can also improve team collaboration by involving all tasks in one platform, helping team members have an overview of all the aspects of social marketing.

Another useful feature is the option to Autoschedule your posts. There’s no need to manually add times for all your posts anymore. Hootsuite can schedule your content in the best time for your audience, increasing the chances of reaching a larger number of followers in their preferred time.

Moreover, a number of apps can make Hootsuite even more efficient, allowing you to add more social platforms, find content inspiration, curate content, or involve additional aspects of your marketing strategy, such as email marketing, community moderation, or productivity apps.

IFTTT

IFTTT is one of the first options to consider for social media automation. If This Then That (IFTTT) allows you to create recipes that automate repetitive tasks that can be avoided.

It can help you synchronize cross-posting among social platforms, send automated messages, save your posts in a spreadsheet, or even monitor a keyword or your brand’s mentions.

For example, if you want to backup all the photos that you’re posting on Instagram, along with the filters that you’ve added through your phone, you can activate a recipe that automatically saves all your Instagram photos to your Google Drive account.

It’s important to keep in mind that automation cannot replace all aspects of social media marketing and although it’s tempting to activate numerous recipes, it’s still useful to decide on the best ones to use, saving time, but also maintaining your brand’s successful strategy.

Here are 14 IFTTT recipes that can be useful for social media marketing.

Socedo

Socedo is a product that can help your business nurture leads that come from social media. Social media marketing can be the first point of contact for new prospects, but it’s usually time-consuming to engage and nurture them.

Socedo brings you closer to your target audience and it uses a smart nurture workflow to start a conversation. What makes it interesting is the fact that you can split your goals in different campaigns, reaching different audiences in each one. This way you maximize the chances of gaining new relevant leads, while you also save time from manually contacting every prospect.

The communication with prospects takes place on Twitter and email, while you can also sync the contacts to your CRM.

Thus, it becomes useful both for lead identification, but also for lead nurturing with targeted prospects. Most importantly, it can help you justify the ROI of your social media marketing, bringing new conversions for your business.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a powerful social marketing calendar that allows you to organize all your social posts in one calendar. This improves the planning of your content, along with the collaboration between teams and assigned tasks.

It becomes even more useful with ReQueue, a tool that brings automation to your social media marketing strategy. ReQueue offers built-in intelligence to promote social automation in the most effective way. It allows you to automatically fill your content gaps with relevant and successful content, deciding on the best hours that it should be posted.

The fact that it integrates with your existing calendar increases its effectiveness, building a list of evergreen content as part of your schedule. This saves you time from manual posting, while you are also keeping a consistent social calendar that is full of the best performing posts.

Curata

If you’re interested in mastering the art of curation, then Curata is the ideal tool to use. Its content curation software automates the process of finding and sharing new content, making it easier to fill your social calendar with relevant posts.

Curata uses natural language processing to discover content, while it becomes smarter to adapt to your preferences. Its search among a vast number of sources can help you find the most relevant content for your brand by using keywords, news sources, specific authors, or even social discussions.

It’s also useful that it can filter out the content by language, while it can also remove duplicate posts. Once it finds the best content for you to curate, it can also proceed to publishing and scheduling.

Although you can still review the content, you can also automate the process of posting it to your social networks or integrate it with your marketing automation platform.

Moreover, you can set your own publishing schedule with customized rules, creating a smart automation system for the most relevant curation of content.

Edgar

Edgar is another social scheduling tool that can save you time. What makes it special is the fact that you can never run out of content.

Evergreen posts can keep your brand active on social media, but it can be a time-consuming process to reschedule them. Edgar is storing all your social posts in a categorized content library, recycling them once you run out of new content.

This way it increases the chances of your brand reaching a new audience, or it can simply maintain the engagement with your existing followers.

It’s useful that it allows you to organize your posts by category, making it easier to find the right content as fast as possible. For example, if you may want to organize your content by “quotes”, “blog posts”, “memes”. This will help you decide on the frequency of all posts and how they can be part of your social calendar.

It’s certainly a useful tool for small businesses, as its pricing is affordable enough for any marketer.

Tailwind

The rise of visual content in social media has created the need to produce engaging images without spending many hours of it. Tailwind is a great addition to your social media marketing if you want to improve your Instagram and Pinterest accounts while also saving time.

Tailwind promises to help you organize and schedule your Pinterest pins and Instagram posts, in an attempt to optimize your posting times, increase engagement and learn more about your audience.

Visual content takes time to be organized and scheduled, but you can speed up the process with Tailwind’s platform that allows bulk uploading and cross-posting.

Its Smart Schedule posts your content to the best possible times for your audience, while it even considers the importance of spreading similar posts apart to maintain the followers’ interest. Moreover, you can also reschedule your older content, organizing your social calendar in the most appealing way.

Involving automation in social media

Marketing automation can be a great addition to social media. It saves you time while you can focus on more strategic tasks.

It can also help you avoid repetitive tasks, making your team more effective in social media marketing.

As more and more automation tools show up, it’s good to evaluate their use and how they facilitate your social strategy. There are many ways to involve automation in social media, but it’s good to remember that it’s still vital to oversee all the activities to ensure that your brand’s social presence is authentic.

It’s tempting to delegate as many tasks as possible to such platforms, but it’s wiser to consider how each one can really help you while maintaining the control of your social strategy. This way you’ll be able to master your brand’s tone, engagement, or even relationships with future prospects.

There’s no need to stay away from marketing automation technology. All you need is a strategic use of it to benefit from all the tools you’re trying out.