If you are a small business owner you are probably looking for ways to make social media easier. You want to build a presence, not sure what to do, but feel it can be easier if you had some tools to help you along the way. You may be wondering how to automate your social media.
Finding time for social media can seem stressful, and might be something you need to work on. The priority to tweet or post on Facebook can get buried beneath actually running your small business. An awesome way to get around that is by using automation for your social media accounts. You can automate multiple ways. There are sites that you pay to help you schedule and maintain your accounts, you can set up your accounts to link, or you can use the social media platforms themselves to help you be more efficient in your tweets. There are tons of platforms to use, but I have some great tips for what I use to automate my own social media.
Hootsuite is a site that can help you publish, monitor, and maintain your social media accounts. From the interface you can schedule your posts on Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook – yes,the site will then post it all for you on the schedule you choose. This keeps all of your accounts active. The site also tracks and analyzes your engagement numbers. It also helps you to find more people to follow, maintain your business’s branding, and help you launch new campaigns across all platforms. It can be great for a small business because each member of your staff can be given different amounts of access.
You can also use a Twitter list to help automate your tweets to some degree. You probably follow lots of users that you followed simply to gain more engagement on your own profile. But you are probably only engaging with a fraction of the people you follow. You can rack up tweets you are actually interested in that relate to your small business. Create a private list of the users you find share these tweets and content most relevant to your small business. Then when you log onto your account will have a bank of tweets ready to share, reply, and favorite.
And, you can even import that Twitter list into your Hootsuite and manage it all in one place.
A great way to automate with out even thinking is to connect your Facebook and LinkedIn to your Twitter. Every time you post on Facebook or LinkedIn, it will send out a tweet linking back to the original post. Twitter is constantly updating so it is an easy way to keep your tweets consistent and flowing. However, be warned do not link your accounts the opposite way. If you are sharing your tweets on Facebook and LinkedIn, you will look ridiculous. Those platforms aren’t meant for the quick and constant updates that Twitter was built to promote.
There is one more automation trick – and that is sharing information from sources around the web – as you read them – randomly throughout the day. While the linking to Facebook and LinkedIn is great, nothing will enhance your social media strategy like some good old fashion random sharing. So as you are online to pick-up your kids or waiting for a client, make sure to have a very simple way to share. You can sign-up for an account on a website you frequent often…Huff Po, Forbes, Entrepreneur – and when you see an interesting piece of content you wan to share you can right from your phone. See an article you want to read later? Share it to Pocket – an app on your phone that will store the URL for you so you can easily retrieve it later an share it.
I have found so many little ways to automate myself on social media. The trick is to make it look authentic. You want to seem like you are sharing all of your content, but you also want to make it easy on yourself. Plan out how you are automating, so that your authenticity stays in tack but you are not chained to your computer or smart phone.
Don’t forget – get out there and have fun. Taking the time to automate certain tasks will free up more time for your business and ultimately give you a bit more time to breath so you can interact on social yourself. Who knows, you just might find it fun!
Looking forward to connecting with you and seeing you build your amazing social media presence.
