Alright, social media marketers! Raise your hand if you think about post planners each time you hear “social media automation tools”. Now, raise it again if you keep reading about measuring your social KPI but, in reality, you’ve got no idea what’s happening on your channels. Or maybe you do, but you’re clueless what to do with this data.

Let’s look at things practically. Not every startup or small business has the funds to hire a specialized social media marketer. Quite often, someone on the team just picks up these tasks.  Does it mean you can’t rock the social media game?

Absolutely not.

What prevents you from winning is that 40% of social media marketers have no idea if what they do actually works.

And that’s exactly why social media automation tools save your day.

If you’re still discovering social automation or you’re looking for a tool that will answer your needs – stay with us. Today, you’ll learn all about the benefits of social media automation and you’ll find the perfect tool for your business.

Benefits of social media automation

Believe us. Benefits of using social media automation tools go much, much further than just comfort of having motivational quotes planned for the month.

Create a strategy

Once you enter the world of social media marketing, you won’t stop hearing about strategy. You’ll eat it, breathe it and dream it. Day in, day out. But social automation makes strategy planning so much easier.

It’s like buying a DIY tool kit. When you look inside of it, you know whether you can build a tree house or you can only revamp your granny’s old chair.

Use social media automation tools to outline your social strategy:

• decide to what extent you want to use your tool
• set your goals based on what your tool can do
• work on your weak points and underline your strengths

Stay consistent

Not even the best social media strategy will work if you don’t stick with it. No consistency, no results. Period.

If you’ve got issues sticking to your plan then social media automation tools will solve it for you.

Want to regularly recycle your best performing content? Thanks to social automation, you can make it happen. And it will happen without you doing practically anything.

Maybe besides setting it up. Once.

Use social media automation tools to stay consistent with your actions:

• fill your social feed with smart set-and-forget messages
• plan your content in advance (no more deadlines nibbling your heels!)
• rely on your social automation to complete certain parts of your content publishing strategy – even if you forget about them!

Save time

You will be surprised at how efficient you get with your social content management when you don’t sit to it every single day.

You see, anybody who ever worked with social media had these thoughts at some point:

I don’t know what to publish!

Do I have something to publish today?

Nothing appeared on our feed today, what do I do?!

Thanks to social automation, you’ll never waste time answering these worries again.

Use social media automation tools to save time:

• only work on your content when your schedule tells you to
• spend less time wondering whether you’ve got enough content for your feeds
• let the tool publish things for you when you’re doing other things

Focus on what matters most

Social media marketing is so much more than just publishing high-quality content. It looks like everybody knows that. But in reality, marketers still spend too much time trying to fill their feeds. All the while they should be focusing on different aspects of their social media strategy!

Testing what content works best, engaging with the audience, establishing valuable connections – this is but a tip of an iceberg of what you should be doing online.

“Your job is to cultivate [your] community, growing it into a valuable tool that represents the image and vision of your organization”, says Pierre de Braux on Social Media Examiner.

Don’t let posting pictures clog your daily schedule.

Use social media automation tools to focus on important things:

• spend time creating your online presence while the posts are automatically published
• concentrate your efforts on building a community around your business, not filling your feed with messages
• optimize your brand message instead of working on your post count

Get the data

Today’s social marketers struggle with the overload of data. Don’t let people tell you that you need it all. You don’t! You only need the metrics that directly refer to your social media activities.

No wonder a marketer’s hair goes white at the sight of the Google Analytics panel. It’s big and intimidating. It’s an all-in-one tool that gives you simply… too much.

Meanwhile, social media automation tools give you the right data on the right things. No more noise!

Use social media automation tools to track the metrics that really matter to you:

• focus on KPI that reflects your efforts
• get the social-specific data in the social-specific context
• keep the laser-focus on the metrics that you want to improve

Feeling convinced yet? That’s exactly how social automation can change your business.

And if you feel like asking: “but what’s the right tool for me?!”, we’re about to tell you.

Social media automation tools – which one is for you?

Name your social automation dream and we’ll find a tool to make it happen. There’s a solution to everything you’ll ever worry about.

But it doesn’t mean every platform is for you.

Don’t worry, though. Here are some good picks for you to consider.

GetSocial (if you want to get serious)

You probably saw that coming but it’s true – GetSocial is about to solve all your social automation pains.

Smart scheduling. Easy content recycling. Clear analytics. Alerts signalising your content has gone viral. That’s but a taste of what our tool can do for you.

Scheduled a blog post? Set up an automation that will send it to Facebook as soon as your article is out. But there’s more: with GetSocial you can create detailed conditions that will automatically trigger the content distribution processes.

Example: if an article from the fashion section of your blog has more than 50 shares, it will automatically be published to the fashion Facebook page of the publisher! Easy, right?

Here’s the kicker: not every single social share happens publicly. Yup, you got it right – there’s so much sharing happening behind the scenes.

We call it Dark Social [play dramatic music here].

Direct messages on social platforms. E-mails. Messenger apps. It’s all there – traffic that seems impossible to track. But it does belong to your share metrics. It does make up for your overall marketing performance, conversions and sales.

And GetSocial helps you track all of it, 100% of the social shares that happen off stage.

How cool is that?

Want to learn more about it? Sign up for your free whitepaper and learn how dark social can change your business.

Hootsuite (if you need a general tool)

But if you don’t care about accurate metrics and Dark Social, you can always focus on just planning your content.

If your goal is to just keep your channels busy – Hootsuite will work just fine. It allows you to schedule to multiple platforms simultaneously. And while doing so, it tells you what’s happening there. Shares and retweets from your channels show in your Hootsuite feed without leaving the platform.

And they’ve got some metric too. If the number of likes, shares and link clicks is all you need, then Hootsuite is probably the right tool for you.

Later (if you mainly work with Instagram)

According to Statista, marketers continuously increase their use of Instagram as a social media marketing tool. It’s insanely popular, especially among the younger audience.

And Later is a platform that mastered the art of Instagram scheduling. Not only do they teach you about Instagram marketing, but they also give you the best tools so you can create outstanding content. That includes an in-built picture editor and analytics of your link in bio.

Not that they don’t allow scheduling to other platforms. They do have Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. But Later is your way to go if you focus on Instagram marketing.

Feedly (if you want to curate content easily)

Last but not least, you should definitely check out Feedly. While it’s neither a planner nor an analytics platform, it will save you a huge load of time.

Once you add a social channel or website to Feedly, it will make their latest posts show in your feed. Thanks to that, you no longer need to visit your favourite sites one by one. If you search for good content to curate, you can just save your sources to Feedly.

And once you like something, you can share it instantly to your social channels or schedule it in Hootsuite.

Final Thoughts on Social Media Automation Tools

There you go! Now you know what benefits there are in using social automation for your business. You’re ready to pick up your next social media automation tool and set things in motion.

Can I keep doing all these things manually, though?, you might ask. Sure! Nobody’s stopping you. But would you give away the chance of turning your business around with good social automation?

Give it a try today. You can start with free GetSocial trial account to discover the comfort of setting things on autopilot!

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