3 Crucial Social Media Automation Tips

Automating your social media can be one of the most powerful ways to grow your following and audience. There is a myriad of tools available to automate your sharing and they really come down to a few types of sharing:

1. Evergreen content – Picks an ‘evergreen’ (or still relevant) post or content from your existing work and shares it again.
2. Scheduling – Often used to share links to relevant content in your field of expertise or content that’s time sensitive.
3. Auto-posting – Used to share your content directly to your social media services, like Post Promoter Pro.

All of these are great tools, when used properly. So what are a few things we should avoid with our automated social.

Curate Evergreen content Carefully

The concept of “Evergreen Content” is that it’s still relevant when you share it. Depending on your focus, you can write content and have it remain relevant for years. In other industries, it may only stay relevant for 6 months. In others, it may never need to be re-shared at a later date. The key here is, knowing that you cannot just simply set your Evergreen system to keep sharing.

Recently I saw a social media coach share a discount and advertisement for a sale that had ended 2 weeks earlier. I’ve also seen someone share a blog post about a ‘recent’ release, that was 3 years old. Both of these people are completely competent social media users, but they forgot one rule: Automated social media is not set it and forget it.

Automated Social Media is not 'Set it and forget it'. Click To Tweet

Evergreen tip: Go through your list of ‘evergreen’ content twice a month, and make sure it’s still relevant. Either update content that’s out of date, or remove it from your list of content to share. Never set content announcing a ‘release’ or ‘date’ as evergreen.

Scheduling Content at the “Best Time”

You’ve probably read all the blog posts about “The best times to share on each social network“. Don’t believe them one bit. At All. The best time to share is when YOUR audience interacts and engages with you. Not when a generic algorithm says so. Tools like Buffer can analyze your content, how well it performs and offer you an ideal time for your account.

If you start keeping track of your scheduled content, you’ll start to notice trends on the type and time that your shares perform well. One thing that automation can do is turn you into a ‘drone’ or ‘sheep’ just following the heard of sharing content at will. By scheduling in a very strategic fashion, you can avoid that appearance and really engage your audience, driving more followers and relationships.

There are few tools you can use to help determine these times for your specific accounts, and I’ve used quite a few of them with pretty measurable results, but my favorite so far is built by Buffer.

Buffer provides an “Optimal Timing Tool” which uses your performance and number of times to share a day to determine when it would be best to send your buffered content. This can be a great insight into your user activity. It can be accessed for each individually connected account in Schedule and click the link at the bottom to Try our optimal timing tool.

Auto-Posting your Content

From day one, Post Promoter Pro has been about getting your WordPress blog posts shared to your audience. More importantly it’s purpose was to give you the ability to have insights and metrics into how well those shares were working for you. No matter what platform you use to share your content via an auto-posting tool, there are a few key principals that are key to success.

Be mindful of your other activities. Do you take part in the weekly Social Media Chat Q&A that happens on Twitter every week? It might be a good ideal to not schedule anything to auto-post during that timeframe. This allows you to drive a more focused conversation.

Different networks convert with different messaging. Don’t just share your post title as the text to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Each of those has a very different audience, and should be treated that way by generating unique content for each network, tuned to the user base.