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How to Automate Social Media Marketing for Agencies

Social media is big business – and small business, and everything in between. Social media marketing has become a key part of agency marketing, whoever your clients are. In today’s blog post, we share some tips for social media marketing automation so you can stay ahead of your competitors.

Get Serious About Scheduling

Hopefully, you’re already using this first step: Scheduling. Scheduling content helps you to manage your time in several ways:

  • Be more efficient. Taking a few hours each week to schedule posts is far more efficient than breaking off from other tasks every ten minutes.
  • See your content laid out. When you have all your social media in the calendar view, it’s much easier to assess your content strategy. Are you posting a regular mix of content? Are you posts at the right times and dates for peak engagement?
  • Build a global presence. Scheduling makes it easy to cope with different time zones. Create content that’s targeted for specific locations, and post on local time.

Different social networks offer different social media marketing tools. For example, you can schedule posts on Instagram, but not Stories, while LinkedIn doesn’t offer native scheduling tools at all. It’s worth using a third-party tool so you have total control over scheduling on all social channels.

Choose a Social Media Marketing Platform That’s Right for You

Agencies face particular challenges when it comes to social media marketing. So it makes sense that they need particular social media tools.

Most social media tools for business have limits on how many profiles they can handle. But if you manage social media for numerous clients, then you need a solution with unlimited profiles. And not just unlimited profiles, but complex analytics as well, so that you can separate results and insights for different accounts.

Have a Strategy to Manage Social Assets

When we talk about social media marketing automation, it’s easy to focus on the “how’s”: How to schedule, how to analyze and so on.

However, it’s important not to lose sight of the “what”. Here are some key points to discuss with your team:

  • Style guide. Everyone with access to your social media accounts should have a clear idea of your brand voice and tone. This mainly applies to written content, but it applies to visual assets as well! Include a list of no-go topics and guidelines for responding to followers.
  • Visual resources. This includes photos, gifs, content illustrations and video content. Where do you source these assets from? Where are they stored? Visual assets should be easy to find and search for efficient posting.
  • Links and urchin tracking modules (UTMs). Use a standardized system for UTMs across all your social media, and regularly check that it’s being used correctly. Even if you use a link-shortening service that stores URLs automatically, you should keep your own “link library” so that your team can find and refer to links quickly.
  • External content. Sharing content from other sources is a valuable part of your content mix. However, you don’t want to share just anything. Encourage your team to collect blog posts, videos and anything else they think could make valuable posts. Keep an up-to-date list of external content, where it’s been posted and whether you’ve made contact with the source.

Integrate Your Content Strategy

We’ve mentioned social media assets. But what about other content sources?

Many businesses now use blogs to support their SEO and content strategies. And social media is a valuable tool to distribute content, for both new and evergreen posts.

You can save a lot of time by integrating your blog and social media marketing platform. Look for inbound marketing services that are designed for integrated marketing.

Score Social Leads and Set Up Workflows

Some marketers act as if social media followers are faceless, unknowable characters. And it’s true that social networks don’t always offer the same detailed analytics as website trackers and email services.

However, social media leads are still leads. You can score them, nurture them and convert them in just the same way – if you have the right social media tools.

Integrate your social media accounts with your CRM so you can add social interactions to your customer profiles. Try to spot potential brand advocates, and reach out to social leads when they seem most active.

Set Up Social Listening and Automatic Replies

Last of all, let’s talk about the “stragglers”. These are leads from social media who haven’t interacted with your brand or client directly – but you suspect they might be interested.

So how do you identify these stragglers? Through social listening.

Once you’ve identified keywords, you can set up social media monitoring to capture any social media posts using those topics and keywords. Then it’s up to you how to respond: with automatic replies, social ads, or a hand-crafted comment here and there.

Use a social media marketing platform that can handle the full volume of your client accounts and keywords, without slowing down or confusing the stream of information. In order to be effective, social media listening has to be real-time and responsive.

Can you think of any more essential social media tools for business? Tell us your social media must-haves in the comments.

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