How Automating Social Media Marketing Makes Life Easier

Understandably, the concept of social media automation makes some marketers slightly uneasy. They’re afraid of losing control, looking lazy or even offending their followers. When done right, however, a little bit of automation can save you time, strengthen your brand and make life easier.

Where Automation Shines

It saves time — Prescheduling several blog posts and social media updates at once allows you to better manage your time and get the most out of each piece of content. Marketers who’ve embraced this practice say it increases efficiency, conversions and lead generation.

It helps you stay relevant — With an automated publication schedule, you can better plan your content strategy with consideration to specific dates, holidays, events and promotions. If you stay flexible and make changes when needed, it’s a smart way to stay in front of your followers.

Where Automation Goes Awry

Bot behavior — Trying to replace human interaction with automation is usually a bad idea. Instagram bots, for example, can handle likes, comments and follows on your behalf. While this can increase your social presence, these bots have the potential to do more harm than good by commenting inappropriately and generally seeming inauthentic.

Note: These Instagram bots shouldn’t be confused with Facebook Messenger Bots, which are chatbots designed to handle a variety of customer service tasks.

Direct messages — This same logic holds true for automatic direct messages (DMs). Autoresponders may be useful for answering common questions with one-size-fits-all answers, but they can’t take the place of genuine human engagement.

Social media automation is perfect for helping with smart scheduling and keeping a consistent presence online, and it may be useful in other areas depending on your business goals and audience. Have you given automation a try yet?