However enthusiastic you are about your business’s social media campaign, there are times when you simply can’t (or don’t want to) turn your computer on, let alone dream up and post insightful and original content. Christmas, with its family commitments, heavy drinking and even heavier spending, is very likely to be one of those times. So, give yourself a break; social media automation tools can automate your updates and following while you get on with the “fun” stuff. Santa won’t mind if you sneak a social media automation tool into your stocking! Here are our top 5 tips to make sure you use it properly….
1. Don’t worry about the Naughty Or Nice List
It’s true that some social media purists view the use of automation tools as a sacrilege akin to serving Aunt Bessie’s frozen potatoes with the Christmas dinner. But, in our opinion, there’s nothing naughty about scheduling a few posts and tweets for times when you know you’ll be otherwise engaged. Actually, we think the potatoes are rather nice too!
Of course a good social media presence requires regular updates, quality content and “real time” engagement with your audience, and we would never suggest using automation to replace what you do. But, used wisely, sensitively and in moderation, automation tools can be enormously effective in enhancing your existing social media strategy.
2. Choose wisely
As with the perfect Christmas gift, it takes time and attention to choose the right social media automation tool. There are so many products available; we’d recommend tinkering with a number of them to see which one works best for your business. Most of them are free, each offers something unique and they all have their fans and detractors. Social Ooomph offers many free and preminum services to help you manage your twitter account. This includes scheduling tweets, sending automatic messages to those who follow you and following all of your followers automatically for free. Hootsuite, a longstanding favourite at Branching Out, will also automate your tweets. But it’s most useful feature is a dashboard that juggles multiple social media accounts including Twitter, Facbook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress Blog, MySpace and FourSquare. It’s so integrated that you can write one update that goes to any and all of those social media timelines/pages.
Sprout Social deserves a mention (not just as it allows us to include a picture of sprouts in this festive blog) but because it’s been leaving quite a mark on the social media management scene lately. All encompassing, it features a managing dashboard as well as stats about your sites. There is a monthly fee but you can enjoy a free 30 day trial period which should give you a good chance to check it out before you commit.
If you really just want to schedule a few tweets and posts over Christmas, these third-party monitoring tools might seem like the proverbial sledgehammer to your social media nut. In that case, try Twitter and Facebook’s own scheduling options; download Tweetdeck from http://tweetdeck.com or schedule facebook posts and messages from your pages sharing tool.
3. Go Easy
We all know (without necessarily behaving accordingly) that the key to a successful Christmas is moderation. And when it comes to social media automation, too much is most definitely a bad thing. Make sure that you find the right balance of updates for each of the social networks you’re participating in. Whilst it’s perfectly acceptable to publish say, 8 tweets a day, your Facebook and LinkedIn audiences may be fairly brassed off if you’re automatically ramming that many posts down their throats every day. Automating doesn’t mean bombarding!
4. Check on the turkey!
So, you’ve decided to schedule and automate your social media updates to enable you to take your face out of the laptop for at least some of the Christmas holidays, but this doesn’t mean you’re entirely off the hook. In the same way that you wouldn’t lovingly prepare your turkey then whack it in the oven without so much as a peek until the timer rings, you need to check on your content. You’re still responsible for monitoring and participating in any conversations happening around your posts, answering your fans’ and followers’ questions. In short,engaging. This is where your smartphone or ipad can be a life-saver.
5. Sound like you mean it
It may be that you’d rather sit alone in front of the TV with a tin of Quality Street, but at Christmas even the most anti-social of us are called upon to demonstrate our love for mankind and force a smile. So it is with your automated social media. Just because you’re scheduling automated updates, you can’t get away with robotic sounding posts and tweets. We all know that authenticity is key when it comes to social media, so take the time to prepare natural-sounding content; infuse some personality – even humour – into your updates. ‘Tis the season after all….
If you’d like advice or training on social media automation please call Branching Out on 07808222630
