Social Media Automation: 4 Tasks You Can Automate To Save Time

Keeping up with your social media strategy is a full-time job. Between creating content, tracking your data, coming up with witty captions, and posting at the best time, it’s easy for some tasks to slip through the cracks. Luckily, there are tasks that you can automate to help eliminate your more mundane tasks and allow you to focus on the important things.

What Is Social Media Automation?

Social media automation uses tools to help manage monotonous tasks on social media platforms. This can include tracking results, scheduling posts, creating captions, and replying to FAQ’s. Automation can help you stay on top of these tasks without wasting too much time on them, so that you can focus on other projects.

What Can I Automate?

While you can’t automate every task, there are quite a few you can.

Social media posting is a task that is easy to automate. Switching between your social media accounts and remembering to post at the best times can be a hassle, and automation helps ensure that everything is running smoothly across your social platforms. This helps you keep up quality content without reducing your efficiency. Websites like Later allow you to schedule posts or stories ahead of time, so you never miss a post!

Customer service is another task that is frequently automated. Having an automated customer service option can help with basic questions like your hours, services, pricing, or any other frequently asked questions. Using an automated customer service tool helps save your customer service team from answering the same basic questions, and allows them to focus on customers with more complex needs. If you do choose to use an automated customer service tool, make sure that the customer is still able to reach a human representative easily.

If you are stuck on ideas for a headline or caption, you can use automation to help. Although you need a basis of what you want to say, automation tools can be incredibly helpful. Many automation tools use AI technology to rephrase your content into different tones, make it shorter or longer, and help clarify your message. Automation tools can also populate popular hashtags, or re-purpose your content for different platforms. Just make sure that the final product reflects your brand voice!

Automation tools can help you stay on top of social listening by alerting you to new trends and topics that your audience is interested in. Google Trends is a great tool for getting started. After you type in a keyword, it shows you data for that keyword, including what time of day is most popular for the topic, where people are talking about it, and related searches. Pinterest and Instagram also offer “trend forecasts”, which offer insights into the trends specific to those platforms.

Social media automation is fantastic when used correctly, and fun to experiment with. Remember that these are tools, and do not replace the human touch on your content. Customers want to be heard, and sometimes they just need to talk to another human. Test out different types of automation and see how they can help make your job more efficient and which ones do not benefit you or your audience. Do you use social media automation tools? Which ones are your favorite? Let us know in the comments!