When it comes to your business, social media automation tools are a prerequisite to managing your social media account. If you want to strengthen your base online and effectively run your business without any hassle, you need the right kinds of social media automation tools.

As we discussed in the previous article, it is important that you treat your social media platforms with the same amount of careful consideration as any other aspect of your business. But in order to provide the best experience to your followers, it is possible that your everyday tasks may turn out grueling. Whether it is to find new clients, schedule posts at the appropriate time, search for potential customers or to drive traffic to your website, using your basic skills for social media isn’t quite enough.

However, if you have some of the best social media automation tools in your arsenal, you won’t have to worry about all that anymore. These management tools help you to analyse and automate mundane tasks and have better control over your accounts while you focus on running your business. They are quite useful for auto-scheduling or when you want to know the appropriate time or the effective contents for your updates. Moreover, some of these tools also allow you to monitor keywords, discover influencers, and generate reports automatically.

So do you want to consider using social media automation tools to improve your social media marketing strategy? If so, then you have come to the right place! In this article, we have compiled some of the best social media automation tools in the business so that you can easily manage and optimize your social media accounts.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATION?

Social media automation is the process of handling some of the time-consuming tasks using automated tools to improve your social media presence. It involves content curation, scheduling posts in advance, triaging routine customer queries and producing analytics reports. With the help of automation tools, you can save a lot of time so that you can focus on the more creative work and other tasks like engaging with your audience. In other words, you get more time for selling.

They also come in pretty handy when you want to find more content to share or when you want to develop a content plan. You can use them not only to schedule posts at the perfect time but also measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Additionally, they give insights so that you can take the necessary actions to improve your social media presence.

However, it’s important to note that these social media automation tools shouldn’t be used to automate all of your tasks like writing your posts, etc. That would be dishonest on your part, since there wouldn’t be any creativity or authenticity behind your contents. In fact, they end up looking like spam, which would be a bad look for your brand. The same thing goes for the case of buying followers. It can reduce your engagement rate and drastically affect your website traffic. 

These tools are to be solely used for scheduling, reporting, and monitoring. They are meant to free up your time so that you can engage with your customers and followers, analyze your posts and come up with more creative solutions. (Source: Toolbox)

THE RIGHT WAY TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATION TOOLS

When done right, any work through good social media automation tools can be pretty much invisible to the outside eye. And that’s the key – to make everything look as seamless as possible. Any poor attempts are blatantly obvious to an organic social media user. 

Thus, you have to use social media automation tools in such a way that you can reap the maximum benefits while also maintaining a smooth workflow. You may need to put in a bit of an effort initially, but it is worth it in the end when your work is rewarded. 

Listed below are some of the pro tips through which you can get the better end of any social media automation tools, so that you can start towards the right direction in your marketing.

Social listening

In order to stay on trend, you need to be updated on conversations that may be happening on any topics related to your business, or even your competitors. Social listening function through social media automation tools can flag and monitor such conversations, topics and mentions that may be going around about your brand, so that you can track the audience sentiment. This also makes it easy to gather user generated content. Moreover, they are built to avoid getting swayed by the algorithm and also catch any fake accounts that may target your audience. (Source: Hootsuit)

Using Chatbots in moderation

As your account expands, it is not possible to keep track of all the conversations. In such cases, chatbots can be used to effectively simplify your marketing by providing automated customer support for simple tasks like answering common questions and providing basic resources like prices, timings, etc. This improves the overall customer experience.

On the other hand, it is also important that your comments aren’t too automated. Limit your use of chatbot through social media automation tools to only small issues. When it comes to larger issues, then it is time for humans to intervene. This is because such services don’t necessarily always pan out, and conversations with potential customers end up looking fake. This can cause your brand reputation to plummet. (Source: SproutSocial)

Constant scheduling

It is a tedious task to keep a steady stream of posts. As important as it is, maintaining consistency can take up a lot of your time. In such cases, you should make use of social media automation tools for scheduling. Through this, you can plan ahead of time and even bulk post, so that you can focus your time on creative ideas for your business.

However, the audience’s schedule should also be kept in mind during this. Since the contents on your account is tailored to them, the best time to schedule your posting would be when they’re online. (Source: Buffer)

But even then, it is not a good idea to leave all the postings up to your tools. Make sure that your posts are copyedited, on-brand and in tune with the current tone of your audience.

Engaging with your audience 

As we have discussed earlier, engagement with your audience is an important aspect of social media management. If you keep them as authentic as possible, your credibility automatically increases. But to come off as genuine, you must avoid being repetitive like posting the same message to every network. The expectations of your audience can vary on different platforms. They might have different demographics and vocabularies, so failing to recognize that can look careless on your part.

To avoid this mistake, you can use social media automation tools to monitor mentions, replies and messages across several platforms in one place, so that you can accordingly base and adjust your replies to them, within a short time.

Also, customer support is a highlight of any business and it would be extremely beneficial if you are able to offer that service 24/7. When it comes to inquiries, you can pay to have customer service agents on deck around the clock or use chatbots, as mentioned before. (Source: Buffer)

Best Social Media Automation Tools

Now that we have covered the right ways to use social media automation tools, let’s get on to the main part and look at some of the best social media automation tools.

1. Hootsuite

This social media automation tools comes with an auto-scheduling function that selects the best time for your audience, and allows you to post more high-quality content in less time. It’s customized social media reports can measure your content’s performance so that you can get real-time updates and overviews. While through Insights tool, you can take part in social listening and analyze the latest conversations among your audience and the industry, so that you can identify trends and create ideas based on them. You also have the option to manage conversations and mentions across all of your platforms and address common interactions in one place.

Beside these features, Hootsuite also provides content curation tools for tasks like organizing. With its Hootlet extension, you can instantly post and share content you find online while you’re browsing or reading content.

2. Agorapulse

If time management is your top priority, then go for Agorapulse. This all-in-one social media automation tool automatically combines all your conversations and messages in a chronological order in one place so you can review and label them and then use saved template replies to respond quickly.

Agorapulse’s scheduling tools allow you to store and publish unlimited posts as many times as you want. For reporting, it works in the background to generate analytical reports through the insights gathered from your content performance. You can also keep up with the latest trends, hashtags, and keywords via automatic notifications.

Additional features also include fan profiling through its Social CRM tool, engagement breakdown, page views, ROI analysis and competitor analysis. This would allow you to get more information on the people viewing and engaging with your account, so that you can adjust your content to better suit your target audience.

3. Missinglettr

For better engagement in your social media marketing campaigns, you can try Missinglettr. This social media automation tool is perfect when you want to save your time and still want to keep your posts alive throughout the year.

It specializes in monitoring your contents all the time and creating a campaign to run for the whole year. The 12 month duration is set as the default but you can change it to suit your own schedule. It uses a technology called ‘Natural Language Processing’ that can detect the important highlights of your social media contents. Then it accordingly creates a marketing schedule to post over the next twelve months along with relevant hashtags recommendation. There’s also a new feature called Curate. This allows you to source content for easy and efficient sharing. 

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo offers one of the best services when it comes to improving your contents.It is highly efficient in tasks like content discovery, content research and monitoring. These can help create impactful content that works best for your business and also identify influencers to work with.

For content insights, it gathers information on whatever topics are trending in whichever platforms you are active on. This social media automation tools allows you to set up keywords and posts alerts, so that you remain updated and consequently, base your next steps. Its competitor analysis can help you avoid things that aren’t very effective and gives you insights into what works best, and where you stand in comparison to competitors.

5. SEMrush

Best known for its SEO and Social Media Toolkit, SEMrush is a social media automation tools that enables automated posting, tracking, promotion, and analytics across the major social channels. It allows you to collect, review content ideas from five RSS feeds and add them to your posting queues. 

Its Social Media Tracker tool automatically finds your competitors for campaign analysis and also compiles all your engagement metrics into one simple table, so you can decide the best for your contents. You can even report the progress of your social media campaigns to your teammates or clients with customizable, easy-to-read PDF reports. It also consists of a Brand Monitoring Tool that tracks the online mentions of any word or phrase you wish to monitor.