The Complete Guide to Automating Your Social Media Marketing

Social media is an indispensable component of digital marketing today. With billions of active users, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer immense opportunities to connect with current and prospective customers.

However, the fast-paced nature of social media presents a major challenge – how to create, share, and engage with relevant content consistently across multiple accounts and platforms.

Posting and managing social media manually on a daily basis can be incredibly time-consuming. Even with a robust content calendar, the hours needed to create posts, engage with followers, monitor conversations, and analyze data really add up.

This is where automating your social media marketing can make a phenomenal difference. Social media automation tools and services enable marketers to schedule posts, reuse content, publish automatically, manage engagement, and analyze performance.

This saves enormous amounts of time while growing reach and improving results. In fact, over 90% of marketers leverage some form of social media automation today.

This comprehensive guide will explore proven techniques to effectively automate your social media marketing. Let‘s dive in:

The Case for Automating Social Media Marketing

Before we look at specific automation tactics, let‘s examine some key data points that highlight why automating social media marketing has become absolutely vital:

• 4.48 billion people around the world use social media today. Facebook alone has 2.91 billion monthly active users currently.

• On average, social media users spend 2 hours and 25 minutes on social platforms daily, going up to 3 hours for Gen Z.

Source: Datareportal

• 93% of marketers agree that social media marketing has been essential to their business growth.

• 65% of people prefer connecting with brands on social networks before contacting customer service.

• An astounding 5 billion pieces of content are shared on social daily. 500 million tweets are sent and 300 million photos uploaded per day.

• Social media channels drive around 31% of website traffic today on average.

These staggering engagement statistics make it impossible to ignore social media for business growth. However, posting relevant content consistently at the right times and managing conversations manually on multiple busy accounts is extremely challenging.

This explains why over 90% of marketers automate their social media activities and why social ad spend exceeded $153 billion in 2021.

Automation makes social media marketing scalable, efficient, and delivers hard results. Let‘s look at the main ways to automate your social media presence.

Key Ways to Automate Social Media Marketing

Social media automation tools and services enable marketers to streamline repetitive tasks, save time, and scale their efforts. Here are the most popular ways to automate different aspects of social media marketing:

1. Content Curation and Scheduling

Planning and scheduling social media content in advance is one of the most basic and valuable automation tactics.

Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer allow you to:

• Curate content ideas from different sources based on hashtags, keywords, URLs etc.

• Schedule posts with images, captions, tags etc. in advance

• Optimize post timing based on your audience‘s activity patterns

• Publish posts to one or more social channels automatically

Scheduling content in advance results in a steady stream of updates without gaps that hurt engagement. It also saves the daily time needed for content creation and ideation.

For instance, a tool like Hootsuite can help medium businesses save 25+ hours per week typically spent on manual social media posting.

2. Content Amplification and Recycling

Creating fresh content daily across social channels is extremely resource-intensive.

That‘s why automation tools like MeetEdgar focus on amplifying existing content effectively. Such software lets you:

• Repurpose old social posts that still resonate with your audience

• Convert existing blogs, videos, emails etc. into bite-sized social updates

• Add new media, captions, hashtags to recycle content

• Schedule reused posts intelligently to avoid repetition

• Automatically publish recycled content across channels

Recycling and amplifying existing high-performing content with automation minimizes the need for creating new updates manually every day. It also helps maximize the mileage from your top-performing posts and assets.

3. Auto-Posting from RSS

Automating the publishing of your latest content to social channels is another time-saving automation technique.

Tools like SocialPilot integrate with your RSS feeds and let you:

• Auto-publish your newest blog posts and articles to social profiles.

• Customize the content with images, captions, hashtags etc. for each platform.

• Schedule the best times to post new content based on analytics.

• Stagger cross-posting across accounts to avoid duplicate content penalties.

Automated posting from RSS feeds provides a steady stream of live content from your site without any manual intervention. It takes your blogging content and amplifies it across the social web automatically.

4. Auto-Engagement: Liking, Commenting, Following

Engaging genuinely with your audience is the lifeblood of social media marketing. But manually liking, commenting on, and following relevant accounts daily becomes challenging at scale.

This is where automation bots like Jarvee and Combin come in. These tools let you auto-execute tasks like:

• Liking posts based on hashtags, mentions, topics etc.

• Commenting on posts with predefined snippets and responses

• Following accounts relevant to your niche

• Unfollowing non-followers after some time

Auto-engagement tools use AI to engage contextually with relevant audiences and content for you. They save dozens of hours spent daily on manual engagement.

As per a study, automation can deliver 3x more engagement than possible manually for the same time spent. But safeguards are needed to prevent being seen as spammy when automating engagement.

5. Influencer Marketing Automation

Influencer marketing on social media requires identifying and engaging relevant influencers in your niche. But doing this manually does not scale well.

Dedicated influencer marketing automation platforms like AspireIQ, Upfluence, and Grinn enable streamlining the process via:

• Sourcing influencers based on audience, engagement, relevance etc.

• Managing outreach and relationship building at scale

• Tracking campaign performance and optimizing based on results

• Payments, contracts, and compliance automation

Automating influencer marketing improves campaign performance and achieves much greater scale than possible manually. It results in better ROI from influencer budget spends.

6. Social Customer Care Automation

Monitoring mentions and responding to customer questions and complaints on social media channels is vital for customer satisfaction.

Integrating social media automation tools like Sprout Social into your customer care workflow allows you to:

• Monitor keywords and brand mentions across social networks automatically

• Use automation rules to classify mentions as queries, complaints etc.

• Respond to frequently asked questions automatically via canned templates

• Assign incoming messages to correct team members for response

• Track resolution times and performance metrics

Automating aspects of social customer service improves response times and satisfaction. It also provides visibility into important performance metrics.

7. Automated Reporting and Analytics

Analyzing the performance of your social media marketing efforts provides vital data to refine your strategy. But compiling reports manually is tedious and time-consuming.

Tools like Agorapulse and Sendible enable automating:

• Key metrics dashboards across profiles and platforms

• Scheduled daily, weekly or monthly reporting

• Customizable reports with graphs, charts and visualizations

• Exporting and sharing reports with stakeholders

Automated analytics and reporting provide on-demand access to the latest performance data without manual work. You get a pulse on the health of your social media marketing at all times.

8. Ad Campaign Management

For businesses investing in social media advertising, managing campaigns optimally involves extensive testing, iteration, bid management and budget allocation. Doing this work manually across accounts does not scale.

Automated ad platforms like Kenshoo, AdEspresso, and Ryval enable streamlining ad management by:

• Automating bid adjustments and budget allocation

• Creating and optimizing campaigns based on performance

• A/B testing multiple campaign variants

• Monitoring KPIs across accounts in one dashboard

Sophisticated automation maximizes the return on social ad spends by continuously optimizing based on data and results.

9. Image and Video Creation

Visually appealing images and videos perform much better on social media compared to plain text posts. However, consistently creating customized visual assets manually is very resource-intensive.

Graphic design automation tools like Canva and Design Wizard empower non-designers to auto-create:

• High-quality social posts with custom images

• Animated GIFs, infographics, and videos

• Branded design templates, logos, graphics etc.

• Modified versions of visuals for multi-channel needs

Automated visual content creation improves engagement while saving hours of manual design work or costs of hiring designers.

10. Social Listening and Monitoring

Monitoring brand mentions, discussions, customer feedback, and conversations across social channels is crucial but manual tracking does not scale.

Social listening automation using tools like Awario, Mention, and Hootsuite helps by:

• Automatically tracking keywords, brands, products etc.

• Analyzing sentiment of conversations

• Classifying mentions as positive, neutral or negative

• Giving alerts for urgent/critical mentions

• Providing historical data on conversations

Automated social listening provides 24/7 monitoring across the social web – manual tracking of the same breadth is just not feasible.

Top Social Media Automation Tools Compared

Now that we have explored the major ways to automate different social media marketing tasks, let‘s look at some of the best automation tools available across these categories:

Tool	Areas Automated	Key Features	Pricing
Hootsuite	Scheduling, Engagement, Monitoring, Analytics, Team Management	Robust platform for social media management, great for agencies and teams. Scheduling, content suggestions, automated engagement, unified social inbox, and detailed analytics.	$99-$599/month
Sprout Social	Publishing, Engagement, Monitoring, Reporting, Collaboration	Complete automation for social media publishing, monitoring brand mentions, managing engagement, generating reports, and team collaboration.	$99-$399/month
Buffer	Scheduling, Publishing, Engagement, Analytics	Intuitive AI-powered scheduling, engagement, and cue management. Easy-to-use.	Free-$99/month
MeetEdgar	Content Recycling, Publishing, Analytics	Focuses on amplifying existing content across social media through recycling, scheduling, auto-posting, and analytics.	$49-$259/month
Jarvee	Auto Engagement, Commenting, Messaging	Powerful Instagram and Facebook marketing automation for auto-posting, liking, commenting, following, unfollowing, and sending bulk direct messages.	$49-$99/month
Upfluence	Influencer Marketing, Campaigns, Relationships	End-to-end influencer marketing automation platform for identifying relevant influencers, targeted outreach, campaign management, compliance, and more.	Custom pricing
Agorapulse	Publishing, Engagement, Monitoring, Analytics	Unified social media inbox integrating scheduling, engagement, analytics, team collaboration, and monitoring capabilities seamlessly.	$99-$249/month
Sendible	Scheduling, Analytics, Publishing, Monitoring, Team Management	All-in-one automation for scheduling, engagement, analytics and reporting across social channels. Collaborative team features.	$99-$599/month
SocialPilot	Auto-Posting, Scheduling, Reporting	Focuses on auto-publishing content from RSS feeds, scheduling posts, and measuring social media analytics.	$25-$199/month
eClincher	Scheduling, Publishing, Monitoring, Visuals	Automates content queueing, posting, engagement, visuals creation, and analytics for social media. Ideal for individual users and startups.	$25-$59/month

This is not an exhaustive list, and many new social media automation tools are emerging constantly in this space. Choosing the right platform depends on your specific goals, scale, channels used, processes, and budget.

Expert Tips to Optimize Social Media Automation

While social automation delivers tremendous efficiency and scale, you need an optimal strategy to maximize results and avoid common pitfalls like get flagged for spam.

Here are some tips from social media experts on successfully leveraging automation based on proven best practices:

Take a Phased Approach

Jumping headfirst into aggressive automation across all channels and activities can be risky. It may result in your accounts being suspended for appearing bot-like.

Experts recommend taking a phased approach when first getting started with social media automation:

• Start small: Begin by automating just one or two tasks like scheduling or recycling posts.

• Gradually scale up activity: Increase automation volume, frequency and scope progressively as needed.

• Monitor closely: Keep a close eye on account activity to watch for any signs of issues arising due to automation.

• Do periodic check-ins: Assess whether your automation strategy is achieving its goals or needs tweaking.

Customize Automation per Platform

Each social media platform has its own culture, algorithms, and best practices. Automation settings ideal for Twitter may not work well for LinkedIn.

Tailoring your automation strategy per platform based on their individual character is vital.

• Study each platform‘s user base demographics and behaviors.

• Analyze competitors‘ activity patterns on the platform.

• Identify the type of content and engagement that works best.

• Adapt automation volume, timing, and messaging accordingly.

A one-size-fits-all automation approach fails. Customizing per platform improves performance.

Focus on Quality Engagement

Many marketers make the mistake of focusing excessively on vanity metrics like follower counts, likes and shares.

As per analytics firm Simply Measured, less than 1% of Facebook fans engage with brands regularly.

The reality is that raw numbers matter much less than actual quality engagement and building relationships.

When automating engagement, focus on:

• Commenting meaningfully on relevant posts rather than just liking

• Following those interested in your niche vs. random accounts

• Interacting consistently with loyal followers

Prioritize quality over quantity of engagement for better ROI on time invested.

Balance Automation With Human Touch

According to a study by Social Report, completely manual social media efforts result in 22% higher user engagement compared to fully automated actions.

Maintaining a human touch in your social media marketing is key for audience rapport. The ideal strategy is to balance automated actions with manual interactions for optimal results.

Ways to add the personal touch:

• Schedule some regular dedicated time daily/weekly for manual engagement.

• Respond to user comments personally when possible.

• Hop on live streams or Clubhouse discussions relevant to your audience occasionally.

• Create some content like videos with a natural feel vs. over-editing.

• Insert real experiences, personality, and humor in some posts.

Automate intelligently but don‘t lose the human element that attracts and resonates with social audiences.

Secure Personal Accounts

Using automation extensively on your personal social media profiles can be risky and cause account bans. Reserve automation primarily for professional brand accounts only.

For personal accounts, experts recommend keeping limitations in mind:

• Use scheduling minimally to space out some posts.

• Avoid automated mass following, liking or commenting.

• Do not automate messaging strangers or people you don‘t know well.

• Monitor activity closely and stop immediately if issues arise.

Drawing clear boundaries on using automation for personal profiles is wise to avoid permanent bans.

Scaling Success with Social Media Automation

When leveraged strategically, social media automation delivers tremendous value through improved efficiency, wider reach, better engagement and lower costs.

It enables lean teams and solo entrepreneurs to manage social media marketing at enterprise scale and maximize ROI from time and budget invested.

With over 4.5 billion global social media users today, automating your presence is no longer an option but an imperative to stay competitive.

Hopefully this guide has provided you extensive insights into proven social media automation tactics. The key is finding the right mix of automation and personalization to elevate your social media marketing.

Automate intelligently, analyze regularly, optimize continuously, and propel your brand growth on social media.