How to automate social media marketing

Social media’s increasing popularity over the past 15 years has created many new channels for digital marketing. Since so many people have adopted smartphones and other internet-connected devices over the same time frame, social media and mobile marketing have essentially grown up together. 

Many marketers have turned to social media marketing automation to manage their presence on a variety of social media channels. But because the majority of users access social media via mobile devices, there’s a huge overlap between social media marketing and mobile marketing. 

If you want to be effective at social media marketing, assume that most people will be viewing your social posts on a mobile device. That means it’s best to integrate your social media strategy with other mobile channels, such as SMS, MMS, and email.

In this article, we’ll examine some of the benefits of social media marketing automation, look at the overlap between social media and mobile marketing, give you some tips for successful social media campaigns, and explain how to automate your social media presence. 

Benefits of social media marketing automation for reaching mobile users

Using automated tools to engage with mobile users on social media platforms offers a number of advantages: 

• Access to a large audience. By 2019, 79 percent of Americans had at least one social media profile, and there were 3.5 billion social media users worldwide. Social media marketing automation makes it easier to reach them.
• More direct engagement. You have the ability to connect with your audience in a social space with two-way communication and on personal devices they use all day every day. This allows you to connect on a more personal level.
• Social listening. Social media marketing automation allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand online. Automation tools consolidate brand mentions from across platforms, so you can easily track what everyone’s saying. You can also follow certain keywords, hashtags, or topics to see what’s trending — and come up with ideas for your own social media posts.
• Effective targeting. The user preferences and behavioral data that social platforms gather make it easy to target your message to specific audiences using automated tools.
• Analytics to improve your social media strategy. With automated tools, you can monitor impressions, reach, and engagement across all social platforms so you can see which posts are most successful and what time of day you should  post to get maximum engagement.
• Increased sales. The majority of searches leading to local sales originate on mobile devices.
• Viral possibilities. A catchy campaign might go viral, extending your reach by thousands or millions.
• Easy-to-track results. Because social media platforms can segment social profiles to the granular level, it’s easy to see which messages gain the most traction with specific demographic groups. The analytics features of automated social media marketing tools will sort the data to identify the messages that resonate with each group.

3 good social media marketing automation tools

Among the dozens of available tools for automating social media marketing, these are three of the most popular:

1. HubSpot. You can easily share content from your marketing campaigns with all your social accounts using HubSpot — or you can connect your blog to your accounts to automatically share new content.

2. Hootsuite. In addition to reporting and scheduling features, Hootsuite provides content curation tools and allows you to instantly share content you find online. Hootsuite also helps you find relevant content by creating a social listening stream with keywords or hashtags.

3. BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo’s content discovery, research, and monitoring tools help you generate ideas, create high-performing content, and monitor content performance. 

5 tips for using social media in your mobile marketing strategy

Mobile marketing and social media go together like peanut butter and jelly, but there are a few things you’ll have to do if you want to be successful with your social media campaigns. The following five tips are the most important:

1. Choose the right social platform. If you’re targeting 15-year-olds and trying to reach them on Facebook, you’re barking up the wrong tree. By the same token, if your B2B business is trying to reach new customers on Twitter, you likely won’t be successful there either — because people don’t use Twitter to find business solutions. Choose the platforms your target customers prefer. 

2. Optimize content for social media and mobile devices. Content needs to not only be mobile-friendly (so it displays correctly on mobile devices) but also formatted for the social platform where it will appear. Create all content with mobile users in mind; while Facebook and other platforms may have desktop interfaces, you should assume that your customers will be seeing your content on their mobile devices.
   
   The type and style of content is also important. Generally, mobile users prefer short posts and videos rather than longer-form content. You’ll also want to make sure your content is a good fit for the platform where it will appear — a video for TikTok should have a completely different vibe than one for LinkedIn.

3. Connect with your audience on a personal level. Social media is social — it’s not the place for staid, boring messaging. Look for ways to make your campaign interactive. Consider holding some type of competition where users vote to select the winner and the winner receives a prize. A strategy like this offers multiple touch points with customers and keeps them engaged in an ongoing story.
   
   Ask for customer feedback to enhance the sense of personal connection; this opens up a two-way conversation and communicates that you value your customers’ opinions. You could also deliver a brief survey via RCS (built on a Jotform mobile template) or ask a single question in an SMS message.

4. Use video to increase audience engagement. Video content grabs attention — on social media, people share videos 12 times more often than photos and text combined. If that’s not enough to convince you, consider this: Marketers who use video see their revenue grow 49 percent faster than those who don’t.

5. Create a content calendar and curate ideas in advance. Organizing and drafting your social media messages ahead of time — and deploying them on a consistent schedule using social media marketing automation — will help keep your audience engaged.

If you aren’t using social media channels in your mobile marketing strategy, you’re missing the boat — and if you aren’t using social media marketing automation to manage your social media presence, you’re making your life much harder than it needs to be. 

A comprehensive social media marketing strategy should incorporate tools for automating both social media and mobile marketing to reach customers where they are — and it should treat social media marketing as an integral part of the larger mobile marketing strategy.