Between email marketing, traditional radio and television marketing, digital display, organic and paid search, and social media marketing, the marketer’s task list is busier – and more challenging – than ever.
Yet only 33% of businesses use marketing automation software. This means that the majority of marketers and business owners are spending more time working on their marketing efforts and campaigns than they would be if they employed automation for some of their tasks.
When every minute counts, marketing automation software can make all the difference in the world.
Here are some of the best ways you can automate your social media marketing as an SMB and get back more hours in your day.
Schedule your posts once per week.
Aside from actually coming up with ideas for your social media content and creating that content, actually posting across your platforms can take up a lot of time. This is especially true as different platforms have different ‘ideal’ times of day to post, so you can find yourself logging on to post throughout the day, interrupting the flow of your other work.
You can quickly and easily recapture the majority of that time by scheduling your posts ahead of time each week. You can load all of your content and set it to post throughout the week with no further input needed from you.
Social media marketing automation tools such as Thryv make this time-saving tip a reality.
RELATED: 3 ways to simplify your social media marketing.
Embrace the bots.
How much time do you spend responding to social media direct messages, and how many of those messages are basic questions that customers could answer with a quick visit to your website?
As much as it’s nice to respond personally, it’s probably not worth your time to deal with simple, repetitive questions every day.
That’s why a standard chatbot can be a huge time-saver, and one of the best social media marketing tools available. You can teach it to respond to simple questions such as ‘what hours are you open?’ and ‘what is your returns policy?’. If you have customer relationship management software in place, you may also be able to connect your chatbot to your CRM to answer specific client-related questions, such as a status update for their order.
You can program your chatbot to be just as friendly and helpful as a real person and to pass on customer messages that are too complicated for it to deal with to a human, so you can save time without short-changing your customers or compromising your brand.
Software such as ChatBot is tried-and-trusted and easy to use.
Let AI automate your content ideation process.
The first few months of content ideation are often filled with inspired and creative ideas. But sooner or later, business owners often run out of inspiration for their social media content and struggle to make it a priority when there are so many other pressing matters to deal with.
While automated software can’t quite create content for you (yet), it can come up with topic ideas inspired by what’s currently trending in your industry.
A simple, free tool such as AnswerThePublic can give you dozens of content ideas based on a single keyword at the click of a button. Then all you need to do is pick a few and get started.
RELATED: Content ideas for every industry.
Set up social listening.
Social listening is the term used to describe the action of checking in on the conversations happening online in your industry, and specifically, about your brand.
A big part of any successful social media marketing work is knowing what people are saying about you. If it’s good, you can promote those mentions and lean into that positive commentary. If it’s negative, you can work quickly to remedy the situation.
Either way, simply knowing what’s going on can give you a major advantage, but manually monitoring all this online chatter can be time intensive.
Instead, automate this step and save yourself the trouble. A tool such as Zoho Social will allow you to monitor your brand mentions without doing any of the manual legwork, so you can stay on top of what the market is saying.
RELATED: 7 free tools to analyse and measure your social media marketing.
Download our handy infographic checklist – 5 steps to automate your social media marketing.
How Thryv can help you automate your social media marketing.
Thryv is software that is designed specifically to help small businesses with a wide variety of everyday tasks, from customer relationship management, to communication, to marketing automation.
Marketing automation may be just one of their tools, but it is an important one for any small business owner or marketer.
Thryv’s social media tool allows you to connect your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place. From there, you can publish content across all these platforms without having to sign in to each one to post manually. You can also schedule posts, respond to comments and use pre-made posts from Thryv for inspiration when you simply don’t have the time.
And that’s just one way Thryv’s automation tools can save you precious time! Try a demo to see how it all works.
