Social Media conjures images of personal contact, discussion and sharing. Automation typically makes us think of robotic interactions, autoresponse messages and messaging clutter. But companies can benefit from Marketing Automation for routine tasks, while maintaining the personal touch and transparency of social media.
1. Social Media Automation is NOT a replacement for human interaction.
This is vitally important for successful customer attraction, conversion and retention. Social Media Automation cannot replace your human interaction with existing or potential customers. You're not going to turn the switch one day and have a set of automated emails, videos, print pieces, and podcasts that will magically generate your business. Tactically, each of those are things that can provide value through compelling content, but are not a replacement for human interaction. If people feel like they are communicating with a machine, rather than a person who understands them and provides them with a valuable service, they will ignore your message.
Social Media Automation should eliminate time-consuming tasks that do not benefit your personal interactions with your prospects and customers. For example, it needs to take you out of the process of delivering and publishing content and into the world of automated tracking and reporting of analytics of campaign responses. Currently if you want to publicize a blog post, you will need to login to your Facebook, twitter, email marketing and every other social media site you have a presence on. If you want to track results, you must first create a shortened link, then go to each of those sources and post messages. You should not have someone manually tabulating data. It should eliminate the need for a graphic designer to create repetitive revisions of materials; great designers are expensive. Save time with automation and have an experienced designer or writer create new, attractive content, instead. Examples of tasks that are automatable include scheduled content publication, search engine submission, distribution and sharing of your content, automatic delivery of email content and sales prospect follow up by the automatic deliver of messaging designed to move a prospect through your sales funnel.
2. Myths: "Only the big guys need Social Media Automation because they're doing such large volumes"; "only the big guys can understand how to put that together"; "we don't create large campaigns so I don't need it".
We hear these statements often from small and medium-sized business owners and they are NOT true. Social Media Automation can help you get your message out to a wider audience, to more places than you could if you were manually distributing content. Even if you only have one campaign, the management, reporting, and distribution of content within that campaign are all well worth using Social Media Automation to streamline that process. Let the software take care of the repetitive tools.
3. Social Media Automation is difficult to implement/use because of all these variables that need to go into it. That's definitely NOT true.
Quite the opposite, it makes it easier for marketers to understand the messages that they want to communicate. Social Media Automation tools give them the ability, without having to go back through the creative process, to manipulate and test different messages, and to get fresh content out there in a way that's visually pleasing. It gives marketers much more flexibility and the ability to get things out there. The technology is all web-based, easy to use, and easily trainable especially for graphic designers. It's so easy to set up templates and create collateral within these Social Media Automation systems.
4. Social Media Automation is NOT expensive.
There are many "enterprise, large scale, huge systems" out there that are grossly expensive and are targeted at the global marketing companies. The companies that manufacture them, their business plan is to sell 6 or 7 of these systems a year, and that's it. That's why they are so expensive and take years to implement. That's not really an opportunity for true Social Media Automations. Social Media Automation isn't only for the big guys - Social Media Automation doesn't have to be expensive. With software as service plans, nowadays, and web-based software growing, plenty of software has been replaced on the desktop with web-based systems. There's no need to buy expensive software with large upfront costs and long setup time. Social Media Automation is incredibly economical. The beauty of it is, as it's delivered in a software and service model, you can make sure that the package or the tools that you buy fit within your current budget. If you focus on buying the right tool, you're going to know whether that tool is helping you make money or not, and that's hugely valuable.
5. Social Media Automation is NOT purely email. Many companies out there focus on one tactic and call their system a Social Media Automation system.
Email is only one tactic that a Marketing Automating system should be capable of delivering and measuring. But, email is not solely Social Media Automation. Automated follow ups or auto responders is not Social Media Automation - that's just one tactic. Social Media Automation tools are capable of multiple media channels and handles marketing planning, execution, analysis, and optimization tools all at one place. Email is the most cluttered environment to communicate with people these days. People want to be communicated to less. They want to be communicated high value information. Social Media Automation is not email marketing. Email Marketing is a fine discipline, it's a fine tactic, but it's not Social Media Automation in itself.
Tell me more about what you think Social Media Automation IS or IS NOT. I look forward to seeing your answers in the comments below.