Today it’s crucial every business ensures their social media content is valuable and relevant.
One element of a successful company’s digital profile is maintaining a high level of audience engagement and the one key component of this is consistently updated social media feeds.
One of the simplest ways to ensure consistency is the automation of social media posts. However, there are both good and bad elements to automation.
We look at the most significant implications that should be taken into account prior to utilising automation in your social media feeds.
Firstly, what do we mean by automation? Several online automation services, like Buffer and Hootsuite, offer free and paid tools to schedule multiple posts and post content on multiple platforms for the coming days and even weeks.
These type of tools can be incredibly useful to help you manage and automate your social media accounts, so should you include automation in your social media strategy?
Advantages of Automation
Save time
Social media post scheduling can be done on Monday morning by setting all of your social media profiles to post automatically throughout the week, which saves you time.
However, this may mean missing out on real time trends as well as replies to your content which could have a negative impact on the results of your social strategy.
Consistently posting updates
A consistently updated feed is one of the key components of high audience engagement, because it helps keep a profile visible and valuable to its audience.
If social media isn’t a priority for the business, it’s easy to forget about Tweeting or Instagramming. This is where automation is really valuable as it allows you to set all the posts you want to publish throughout the week in one go.
As well as setting specific days to send, it’s also possible to set certain times you want your posts to be published, helping you to fit them into the best posting time every day.
Post across all social media platforms
As social media scheduling tools have access to all your social media accounts, it’s also possible to set immediate multi-platform posting. But it doesn’t just allow you to publish the content to several platforms at once, their analytic tools also allow you to compare statistics on your most popular posts or engagement rates.
A good idea is to vary the body of the post for each social media platform to your different audiences, whilst ensuring you take into account the varying platform restrictions.
Disadvantages
Posting old and irrelevant content
Scheduling posts does save time, however, the earlier they have been scheduled the higher chance the content has of becoming outdated. Therefore, even if the posts are planned for the whole week upfront it’s still important to keep an eye on the news and social media trends to be able to add, replace or cancel posts.
Technical issues
Even though technology makes our lives easier, it’s never 100% reliable and glitches in the software can disrupt your social media schedules. If you’re automating all your social media and only dedicate limited time in the week to plan and monitor activity, one little glitch can cause all of your accounts to go silent without you noticing.
Lack of personality
The power of social media is its ability to connect with people on a more intimate level, however, if you prepare your posts all at once, it’s easy to make the mistake of them being too similar, boring and lifeless.
In addition to losing this personal touch, it gets harder for your business to maintain an engaging and lively conversation with your audience.
Possible comments and reposts may go unnoticed, while posts are still coming up at the exact same time each week which might potentially alienate consumers.
Even though automation of social media content is a really helpful tool when it comes to planning the social media content, it’s essential not to rely on it. Maintaining a mixture of scheduled content and real time posts is key to ensure you keep up with current trends online as well as maintain your audience engaged.
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If you want to discuss how we can help you with a social media strategy to win in an increasingly competitive world please get in touch for a chat on 020 7287 9233 or drop us an email on info@goldsanddigital.com.