Have you automated your social media marketing? It’s a work-in-progress still for me as I experiment and learn new things, especially over at the MaximizeYourMoney Financial Coaching site.
The social media marketing challenge
Honestly, a lot of marketing really isn’t rocket science. Yes, it definitely takes some thought, and oftentimes some creativity, but once messages are created it comes down to tasks. Managing marketing channels can be tedious – especially social media marketing channels. The reason is that success often requires TIME and CONSISTENCY.
Time is in short order for most entrepreneurs so when they don’t see quick results from something, that “thing” often starts to get neglected (for example, my lack of consistency writing here on my blog). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because being a successful entrepreneur is often largely dependent on managing priorities and focusing on where you can get the largest return on your investment – and time is indeed a resource to be invested.
Consistency is often a challenge for entrepreneurs. At least it sure is for me! We like to solve problems! We want to develop plans, and strategies, and then conquer things! When there are tedious little tasks that need to be done on a regular basis, these activities often frustrate and annoy us. BUT they can be SO important.
Far too often I see this
Here’s something I notice a lot. Someone mentions a new business to me and it seems interesting. I then check out their website, social media, and go some Googling to find out more. Unfortunately about 75% of the time I see that the new venture hasn’t updated their blog in weeks (or months!); they had a burst of activity on their social media accounts but then they went quiet; their website was given some design thought but then no effort was put into search engine optimization or visitor conversion.
It’s a shame really. So many missed opportunities. Letting these “little things” (or at least easy thing) slip through the cracks says a lot about a founder and the business. And what it says isn’t good.
Why not automate what you can?
I agree that time is short. (Though I also know from working with founders that often the time is available but focused in the wrong areas, but we’ll discuss that some other time.) But marketing takes time, and it takes consistency. Rarely can you hit a potential client with a single message and cause them to take action. In business school they told us that you needed to get your message in front of potential clients 6-8 times before it clicks with them.
So what do you do? Well, you should certainly be automating everything you can. Your time is valuable and there are a lot of ways you can build efficiency through automation. Here are a few things you should consider to free up some time while still maintaining consistency with your social media marketing.
Pinterest marketing automation
Pinterest is a huge and continuing to grow rapidly. The demographics are also changing and the percentage of males using the platform is growing faster than the percentage of women. It’s definitely a platform to consider as part of your marketing strategy.
Two very popular automation tools are BoardBooster and TailWind.
At MaximizeYourMoney we use BoardBooster to pin our personal pins to group boards of similar topics. So specifically we are members of group boards related to personal finance and we use BoardBooster to share our pins with the followers of those group boards. BoardBooster makes it very easy to set this up and even to re-pin to the group boards – and set rules so the same pin doesn’t get sent too frequently that it feels like spam.
We also use TailWind for our daily pinning. Yes, we schedule some of our own pins this way but we also schedule mostly other people pins on topics similar to ours. The goal is to be active on Pinterest “all the time” and share content that your potential audience is going to find interesting. Don’t only share your own materials – definitely share from other sources. Using TailWind we can spend some time about once per week and fill up our pinning queue to pin multiple times per day for the next week or longer. This saves a TON of time and makes sure that our Pinterest boards are active.
Twitter marketing automation
Even though Buffer killed their Library feature, we still like them. For just $10/month you can queue up to 100 tweets to get published on a schedule of your liking. Similar to how we use TailWind for Pinterest, we either spend time once a week – or a little time over several days – finding great content on the web that we know our followers will like. We then schedule that content to go out consistently through the day. A couple hours of work can easily fill up your Twitter queue for a week or longer.
We also use Recurpost for Twitter. This allows us to set up our own posts – ones that are valuable always without any time sensitivity – and have them get sent out to our Twitter account on a regular schedule. So our followers might see the same post go through their feed every 4-5 weeks, but it’s easy for them to ignore and the new hundreds of followers who haven’t already seen it get exposed to that older content. It’s great and very effective.
Facebook and Google+ automation
We use Buffer for our Facebook and Google+ automation too. Sometimes we queue up the same posts that we tweet, but oftentimes we mix it up. Part of the reason is that FB and G+ posts have a longer lifetime. Tweets come and go and probably only 5% of your audience will even see a certain post. On Facebook and Google Plus those posts site there so anyone visiting your feed or profile page will see those posts. That tells me to be just a bit pickier on that curated content because it will have a larger defining impact on visitor impressions of your brand.
What do you do for social media automation?
What social media automation tools do you use? Comment so we all share the love and learn from each other.