If you are a website owner or digital marketer, you’ve probably discovered how easy it is to spend a very long time on social media accounts! Marketing automation is available for social media and can certainly save you a whole lot of time. We’re going to take a look here at tools to help you automate your social media.
Hootsuite is one tool that we really like. It is in a dashboard format which links to all of your social media accounts and allows you to manage them from one place rather than logging in separately to each one. The great thing with Hootsuite is that you can sit down and write a series of posts for your social media accounts and schedule them out over a period of time. You can also keep track of any responses that you are getting to your posts and reply to any comments made.
One of the best things about Hootsuite is that you can keep your social media accounts up to date without falling into the trap of spending a long time scrolling through other posts, checking out the latest video or browsing through albums. Hootsuite shows you a basic dashboard for your accounts without all of those other details so it is great to be able to follow-up your own posts and increase your productivity by not being distracted by others. If you still want to be able to check out all those videos and updates from friends, then you can set aside time outside of your business time so that the two are kept separate.
Another cool function with Hootsuite is that there is an applet available which you can install for whichever web browser you use. This means that if you are surfing the web and come across articles or videos that you would like to share on your social media accounts, you can click on the applet. The applet will automatically reduce the size of the website URL, allow you to add your own comments and then you can schedule when that is to be posted to your account.
We often find that people say they find it difficult to measure their ROI (return on investment) for their social media activities. This is often because they are spending a lot of time getting caught up with browsing while they are in their accounts. Hootsuite allows you to track this more easily as if you know you are spending a certain amount of time each day posting a certain amount of material, you can track what your response rate is and more easily connect it to ROI.
You can connect up to three accounts to Hootsuite for free, after that you need to pay a monthly fee for the premium version. They have some great resources available to help you out such as tutorials so check them out!