Social media marketing comes with many challenges, and one of them is content distribution. Some believe that content creation is the key to social media success. It does help the growth, though. But there is more to focus on to see the full picture.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes our social media posts get pending because of other commitments? Family dinners, birthday parties, and friends’ weddings often put off some of the stuff on your to-do list. Social media posting is one of those things that get disturbed during such occasions.
Now that you’ve understood the idea of content automation. Let’s move forward to the reasons why content automation takes your social media marketing to the next level. Here are five reasons:
When your content automation is in full swing, meaning, you don’t have to worry about your social media posts or blog post publishing, this means you do more stuff. One of the essential things you should be doing is building connections with the influencers in your industry. It doesn’t mean you have to email every influencer to say hi or to befriend with them. There are so many ways to build connections with others. Here are a few popular ones:
Social media marketing comes with many challenges, and one of them is content distribution. Some believe that content creation is the key to social media success. It does help the growth, though. But there is more to focus on to see the full picture.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes our social media posts get pending because of other commitments? Family dinners, birthday parties, and friends’ weddings often put off some of the stuff on your to-do list. Social media posting is one of those things that get disturbed during such occasions.
Now that you’ve understood the idea of content automation. Let’s move forward to the reasons why content automation takes your social media marketing to the next level. Here are five reasons:
When your content automation is in full swing, meaning, you don’t have to worry about your social media posts or blog post publishing, this means you do more stuff. One of the essential things you should be doing is building connections with the influencers in your industry. It doesn’t mean you have to email every influencer to say hi or to befriend with them. There are so many ways to build connections with others. Here are a few popular ones:
Social media marketing comes with many challenges, and one of them is content distribution. Some believe that content creation is the key to social media success. It does help the growth, though. But there is more to focus on to see the full picture.
Content creation fills up half the equation; the next half is the distribution of content. This is where content automation comes in. For those who don’t have any idea what content automation is, buckle up because you’re about to find out things in detail.
The idea of writing about content automation didn’t come up because we’re a social media management tool that schedules social media posts and content. Rather, the idea flourished based on the results that surfaced after starting content automation.
Before we dig deeper into the importance of content automation, especially how it helps any social media marketing campaign, let’s define content automation for those who aren’t sure about it.
Content automation is a process of creating, managing, and distributing the content through certain tools so that the delivery of content could become more effective, faster, and results-driven.
However, the content automation is incomplete without a wide array of strategies, for example, it requires:
Why is Content Automation Important?
Content automation is a strategy of streamlining your content alongside your social media marketing needs so it performs on autopilot and you could focus on other tasks such as research, customer care, sales and promotions and so on.
Indeed, content automation does put your content on a pedestal because of the availability of the content to the audience. It’s a well-known fact that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter don’t have the same organic reach that they used to have a few years ago. So this situation created a vacuum for social media and content management tools to provide scheduling features for better distribution of the content.
Hence, if content automation doesn’t impact the delivery of content to the audience, then there is no point in putting efforts into automation.
Here are a few reasons why content automation is important:
It extends your social media reach
It’s a tried-and-tested reality that when you schedule your social media posts, you get better social media reach. You might have heard people complaining about the organic reach of social media platforms. Well, to compensate for that problem, you can do content automation to fill that gap up. It may not bring similar results that we used to see back in 2012-13, but you can still make a lot of difference.
It’s also true that we often forget to share our content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Let’s admit whether you publish once a week or twice a day, it’s difficult that you keep up with the social media standards. You have to have a system that helps you without grabbing your phone or laptop three times a day. Once you start content automation, not only do you publish more often, but you also increase your social media reach. The reason is simple; the more your content would appear, the more eyeballs it would get.
You can make time for research
When you know that your content is being published on autopilot and your social media posts have already been scheduled. It creates a room for other stuff, for instance, you can do research on your next topics to cover. Additionally, who doesn’t like scrolling through Instagram and Facebook feeds? I’d highly recommend using your time productively to come up with great ideas for your content. Use the Pocket tool to bookmark the sites and blog posts during your research.
Being away from work won’t be an issue
Have you ever noticed that sometimes our social media posts get pending because of other commitments? Family dinners, birthday parties, and friends’ weddings often put off some of the stuff on your to-do list. Social media posting is one of those things that get disturbed during such occasions.
How many times have you realized around 11.30 pm that you didn’t share your content on social media? Then, we think that it won’t matter now because apparently, half the world is asleep at the moment. So we plan to share that content the next day. What this means is that we didn’t share any content that day or we didn’t show up on social media at all.
Once you have a content automation system place, being away from work or home won’t matter much because you would have scheduled the content already.
You can analyze the content performance
When you’re publishing and sharing content at scale, you would have this opportunity to analyze the performance of your content on social media and otherwise. There are social media analytics tools such as ContentStudio and Buzzsumo, and that helps you analyze your content performance as well as social media statistics.
Moreover, you should also look at the pageviews of your blog posts, the number of comments, and total shares on social media. These parameters also explain content performance. Go through your web analytics through Google Analytics account to see which content is doing well. Alternatively, you can try out the StatCounter or ExtremeTracking tools for this.
Types of Content Automation
Content automation could be done in various shapes and forms. The basic idea is the same; you pre-set the content to be delivered in the future. Let’s take a look at the types of content automation that you can do:
Social media scheduling is a popular type of content automation. What it does is that it saves you time, and you can focus on other important tasks once the social media posts have been scheduled. It comes in handy if you have a full-time job and you have a side hustle too. You can schedule the social media posts of your passion-project before going to work, and spend your day stress-free. Make sure that once you’re back, check out the social media accounts and respond to the likes, comments, and messages.
A default social media scheduling feature isn’t available on the social media platforms except for Facebook pages. You would have to rely on third-party social media tools for that. Use a social media management tool like ContentStudio to schedule your social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Drip marketing is an email marketing term that represents an email autoresponder system that marketers and bloggers use to send out a series of emails to the subscribers.
It’s a type of content automation as you create all those emails, meaning, you build a funnel, and then you pre-define all the settings. Once a subscriber subscribes to the email list, he or she starts getting the emails on a pre-set schedule.
Article publication is also a type of content automation. WordPress allows you to publish blog posts in the future. It works pretty much like any social media management tool; you can define time and date when you want your blog post to be published.
Moreover, ContentStudio also provides a facility to publish content on WordPress.com, Medium, and Tumblr.
Content Automation Elevates Social Media Marketing: Here’s Why
Now that you’ve understood the idea of content automation. Let’s move forward to the reasons why content automation takes your social media marketing to the next level. Here are five reasons:
It’s a tried-and-tested strategy that if you share your content more frequently, you’ll get more visitors and pageviews. It’s understandable that when you put out content on social media more often and it attracts more people. The reason is that people don’t stare at their Facebook and Twitter feeds all the time, chances are, the majority of your followers won’t see your post if you post once.
CoSchedule has discussed the content sharing frequency in a blog post. Plus, they gathered 14 references which tell you that sharing more on social media could lead to more attention and engagement.
The idea is to put out your content in front of the audience by sharing your content multiple times a day. But it doesn’t work out without having a proper plan. A social media marketing tool would be a huge help, though. The core part of the strategy is figuring out the following things:
So these were a list of things that you have to go through while sharing content more often on social media. Make sure that you aren’t annoying your followers by bombarding them with 20 tweets in 2 minutes. It quickly leads to unfollowing.
The ideal way is to not push too hard on your social media. Instead, post your content or tweets with a proper gap, let’s say, a two-hour break between each scheduled post. This way, you won’t be annoying your followers and you’d also be able to share your content more frequently.
There is something very important about frequent content sharing on social media that you should know before you join the bandwagon and start damaging your brand position.
It’s a double-edged sword, in reality. Let me explain this: you have to understand your niche, audience, and content type for posting more frequently.
For example, if you publish five random 3-minute video blogs on YouTube on the same day, it might not attract much audience or your subscribers may feel confused about what to do. They might be okay with one video that could have all those stories/videos in it.
But if the four videos are being posted by a popular TV show on YouTube, people would react to it differently. The reason is the branding and the following of the show. Let’s take a look at the screenshot of Late Night with Seth Meyers YouTube channel:
You can see that four videos were posted, give or take, in an hour.
The reason I gave you this example is that you have to understand your position. You can’t copy a TV show just because they also have a YouTube channel. If you start posting your educational videos five times a day, it might destroy your relationship with your audience who expects two in-depth videos a week.
At the end of the day, you know your audience and the industry better than anyone else. You must decide the frequency of social media posts after testing for a while.
One of the perks of content automation is that it gives you more time and space for doing other stuff. When you don’t have to worry about sharing or posting on social media three times a day, you have a better chance to come up with other things.
If you don’t use any social media management tool yet, ask yourself that what’s like to post on social media. Do you keep up with your plans to post a few times a day?
It’s hard to open your laptop to write a few lines, take a unique image, and copy the link to finally post on different social media platforms, let alone three times a day. That’s why we all have been ignoring or forgetting to post on social media more frequently.
Pre-scheduling means how you schedule your content in advance and do other stuff stress-free. Once you stop worrying about your social media posting, you can do the following things instead:
Share others’ content on social media
I’m not entirely sure whether or not someone told you about this but sharing others’ content is a fantastic strategy to build relationships with other professionals, bloggers, and small businesses. Find and share content on your social media that could benefit your audience. Not only will you be helping your followers, but you’ll also be getting attention from other bloggers and brands.
Build connections with influencers
When your content automation is in full swing, meaning, you don’t have to worry about your social media posts or blog post publishing, this means you do more stuff. One of the essential things you should be doing is building connections with the influencers in your industry. It doesn’t mean you have to email every influencer to say hi or to befriend with them. There are so many ways to build connections with others. Here are a few popular ones:
You don’t have to do all these things just because you want their attention or you’d like them to check out your stuff. Instead, you should be doing all those things because you admire their work, learn from them, and genuinely inspired by their work. Your true respect, dedication, and loyalty may lead to building a connection with your favorite influencer.
Now, remember that you don’t have to do all this at the cost of your work, hustle, and hard work. Outreaching is a small part of the social media marketing campaign so don’t put so much hope into this.
Write guest posts on others’ blogs
When you don’t have anything else to do for your blog content or social media posts because you’ve done all that, then you can write guest posts for other blogs. Not only does it give you exposure, but it also develops a connection with other players in the industry. Every blog out there might not accept guest posts, but you can always reach out to them via email to find out.
So don’t underestimate the benefits of pre-scheduling. Moreover, make the most of the time you get when the content automation is at work.
Believe it or not, content automation does impact your social media engagement. It’s understandable that the more you show up on social media, the more likely people are going to respond to you. More importantly, the increased engagement through content automation is half the equation, whereas, the next half is about shaping your content strategy. It means when people respond to your content, it tells you what they want to know or what they’re interested in.
Have you ever noticed that you publish a few blog posts and no one really comment on them?
Then, you randomly publish another blog post, and Facebook fans and blog subscribers come rushing. You get comments, likes, and shares on that blog post more than other blog posts. Have you had such an experience?
The reason why everyone responded to your last blog post so well is that it resonated with them better than previous ones. So you must try to figure out the following things:
So you must ponder on these things and try to understand what just happened there.
This article from SocialMediaToday was published in 2018. It tells about the change in the Facebook algorithm that would much more likely to value person-to-person engagement over person-to-page engagement. Meaning, the social media giant may consider peer-to-peer connectivity more important than brands’ pages sharing content for traction.
Another reference validates my point: SproutSocial published an article about social media content strategy and emphasized the importance of social media content strategy to better understand what type of content is popular among the audience. So that you could focus in on the areas that your audience is interested in more than others.
So you better pay attention to the following things:
What type of content your audience is liking more?
Once you get to know what’s getting more traction, you can double-down your efforts in that particular area and increase the engagement. For most bloggers and brands, it’s difficult to figure out what their audience is liking. Always get signals from organic traffic keywords, popular blog posts, and social media shares so that you could understand what your audience is liking.
What are they asking about in the comments and DMs?
Direct Messages is a great communication tool. Not only does it connect you with your audience, but it also provides you with a channel to read your audience’s mind. Closely analyze the questions they’re asking in the comments and DMs. You can alter your content strategy based on the feedback and questions you’re getting from the audience.
What specific type of content is being shared more than others?
Another useful metric to catch up on is the content that is being shared. Pay attention to the social media shares; analyze what kind of content your readers and subscribers are sharing on social media. Once you understand this, hone in on your skills to create similar content for more attraction.
So engagement does have a huge role in carving out your content strategy.
A lot of people don’t know this, which is why they don’t make the most of their engagement.
But you can take your social media marketing to the next level if you take input from your audience engagement and translate the crux into the content.
Content automation isn’t limited to the social media channels, but instead, it could also be applied to the blog content. A blog is an important platform to put out content, you can post articles, videos, audio, and photos on your blog.
What content automation does is that it saves time for promotion. For instance, if you have written four blog posts for a month. It might take half an hour or more every time you sit down to edit and publish your blog post. What you can do is set a couple of hours for scheduling your blog post and automate your blog content for a month.
This means you don’t have to stress out every week about posting your blog posts. After that, you’d be able to fully dedicate your time to the content promotion.
Blog post publishing might not seem a difficult thing to pull off on the outside because for most people writing a blog post is the real hurdle. But once you start to publish on a regular basis, it does look like a time-consuming part.
One of the biggest perks of content automation is that it allows content distribution to happen as your focus shifts from publishing to promotion.
Marketing Insider Group writes in their article, “The bottom line is that content marketing automation helps you to save time, money and effort. It provides a way to streamline those content marketing processes that do not require human intervention. It allows you to spend your valuable time measuring, optimizing and testing new ideas in order to improve your content marketing outcomes. It even lets you ride the current trends in content marketing. All this frees up your time to focus on improvements that will move the needle.”
An article on Business2Community says, “Automation is not going away, so it’s smart to embrace. You can begin by automating tasks like proofreading, scheduling, reporting, and email marketing. By automating these, you save time that you can use on your engagement and content production. The combination of these efforts should increase the success of your overall content marketing.”
Another article published on MarketingProfs says, “Content marketing automation takes traditional content marketing tasks and automates them to save you time and money.”
So the above-mentioned references validate our point-of-view on time-saving through content automation. It’s understandable that content automation does have its importance in the content marketing world. And, surely ignoring it won’t be a wise decision to make.
A reposting feature is a facility some major social media management tools provide, which gives you an option to repost the same social media post multiple times on social media. What it does is that gets you more eyeballs and attention because sometimes your audience and fans don’t get to see your social media posts.
Many social media scheduling tools come with reposting feature, which allows you to republish your posts on various social media platforms.
ContentStudio offers a reposting feature tool as well, but it doesn’t repost on Twitter due to some changes in the terms and conditions. However, it works perfectly on Facebook.
Reposting feature has been phenomenal for us as well because it puts the content in front of the audience that might have missed it otherwise. Let’s admit that organic reach on social media isn’t the same as it used to be. One of the challenges of posting content on social media is that it never gets seen by the majority of your followers unless you have a deep connection with the audience and raving fans can’t wait to see your posts.
Moreover, you’d find many top bloggers and social media gurus talk about social media tools. Darren Rowse once talked about Edgar in his podcast and specifically mentioned that this reposting feature gets him more traffic from social media and how it helps his blogging.
There is no doubt about the fact that reposting the content on social media is helping brands and influencers in getting more attention on social media. When the goal is to use content automation to elevate your social media marketing, then reposting content seems like a great value proposition.
What’s the takeaway?
There is no rocket science in understanding the idea that the more you put out content on social media, the better engagement and results you’d see.
However, the emphasis of this piece of content was on the power of content automation. The way automation has been helping brands and bloggers is simply fantastic. We live in a world full of distractions, but social media requires a lot of effort and time to make you pop up.
Therefore, we shared five reasons to convince you that you must pay attention to content automation. This means spending money on a social media management tool, creating content in bulk, and sitting down to schedule your content. It may seem a lot to do in the beginning, but it’s all worth it. The results would be astonishing.
We genuinely believe that content creation isn’t enough. You also need to put in the work to promote that content on social media so that it reaches to the maximum people. What you could take away from this article is that content automation makes your content reach more people. Isn’t it? We shared five reasons why it happens.
What else would you like to add to this topic?
Share your views on content automation in the comments below.
