Owing to the increased amounts of time that consumers are spending on social media, the best way of getting your brand out there is by having a consistent presence on the channels that your customers are utilising.
Social media can end up taking up a lot of time – precious time that you should be spending working on growing your business. Understanding social media and how to use it will however lead to tangible business benefits and assist in growing your profits. Thankfully, there are several automation tools that you can use to automate your social media posts and help you get the most out of your social media presence.
Hootsuite
If you speak to any digital marketer about what tools they use to assist them in maintaining their social media presence, they’ll probably tell you that they use Hootsuite. This tool allows you to bulk schedule your social media posts over various channels at a date and time that you choose. You can also generate reports about the posts that you put out using the Hootsuite tool.
The free version allows you to schedule up to 30 posts over three different social media channels. Once you’ve reached your queue limit, you won’t be able to post anything else until a scheduled post is published or deleted. If you want to increase the number of posts you can schedule, as well as the number of social media channels you can post too, there are other paid-for options available.
Buffer
Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer lets you schedule your social media posts over a variety of networks. It also allows you the ability to draw reports from the social media activity that they have published for you.
What the difference between these two tools is, that while Hootsuite allows you to make 30 posts over three social media channels, Buffer only allows you the ability to make 10 scheduled posts over three social media accounts. If you want to increase the number of posts that you can plan, you will need to opt for a paid-for version.
Social Alert
One of the most powerful aspects that social media has introduced is the hashtag. If you add a hashtag to your social media posts anyone searching for the particular hashtag will be presented with a collection of the posts, you have made around that particular topic. This gives people a holistic view of the message that you are trying to portray.
Social Alert provides an easy-to-use interface that will help you to monitor hashtags as well as social media accounts. This is very useful because if you’ve created a branded hashtag – or often associate your brand with a particular hashtag – you can monitor these and see what your customers are saying. While this doesn’t have a free version that you can use to test the system, their plans are quite affordable and they have big name clients who trust in their solution.
Before you start to use a social media automation tool, do your research. Make sure that the tool you ultimately choose will respond to the requirement that your business has. Find out what the experiences other people, who you trust, have had with this tool as they will give you an honest opinion.
A good foundational knowledge of social media is also essential to have so that you know how to monitor your interactions and evaluate your results. The Digital School of Marketing is an online provider of accredited digital marketing education. To find out more, visit our website on www.digitalschoolofmarketing.co.za, call us on 0861 428 710 or e-mail: info@digitalschoolofmarketing.co.za.
