You’ll Like This: Marketing Automation for Social Media
11.27.18
Social media is a marketing tactic that is becoming invaluable for any business. However, many businesses don’t put in the time and effort to learn how to use these social tools. If they are using them, it’s often without a strategy.
Brands large and small should leverage these accounts to share their message with loyal fans and potential followers alike and understand who they’re targeting and where they’re reaching out to them. Fortunately, many marketing automation tools have made reaching your target social audience more efficient.
Social Sharing
Social media management may seem time-consuming. After all, you have to manage the messaging for all the different platforms your business has a presence on. To alleviate this headache, marketing automation tools let you schedule posts across each social media account at once. These tools enable you to create your message, schedule a publishing time and observe your audience’s engagement with it in real time–all from one window.
The advantage to being able to schedule your posting, besides the obvious time save, is that you can always ensure your posts are sent out at optimal times during the week. There are specific hours throughout the week where it is more advantageous to post on different platforms. Some of your contacts may prefer to start their day checking LinkedIn, log onto Facebook during lunch and post their dinners onto Instagram later that evening. Being able to schedule these posts out in advance will help maximize engagements with your audience.
Contact Management
Each social post should be written with your audience in mind, but who is that audience? Keeping track of how your target is engaging with your social media will lead to a more informed segmentation and content strategy. When using marketing automation tools that have a built-in CRM, you can keep track of your contact’s activity on your social posts. Every like, comment or share can be tracked down to the individual contact in your CRM. This is great for automation campaigns and analyzing engagement.
Let’s say you tie in your marketing automation tool into your social posting, and five of your contacts like your newest Facebook post. Those contacts can be placed into a brand new list, perhaps titled “Social Engagements.” As with any list, you’re now able to build campaigns around it and send messages only to contacts interested in those specific items or posts.
Social Listening
Some marketing automation tools will also track the times your company is mentioned by other social media accounts. This is great not only for tracking popularity, but also analyzing what your target really thinks about you. Tracking your brand’s reputation is vital to ensuring that everything you post online is true to your identity and will resonate with your audience.
Social media marketing is a difficult landscape to navigate. We may understand social platforms from a passive user perspective, but implementing marketing strategies takes a large amount of strategy and data to inform those strategies. However, marketing automation tools take this marketing technique to an entirely new level of efficiency. Once you master these tools, you will reach your target audience more effectively and communicate your brand’s message more clearly.
