Automat­ing social media for busi­ness­es involves using tools to man­age and stream­line var­i­ous aspects of social media mar­ket­ing. This prac­tice can include sched­ul­ing posts, curat­ing con­tent, respond­ing to cus­tomer inquiries, and analysing engage­ment metrics.

Automa­tion tools allow busi­ness­es to main­tain a con­sis­tent pres­ence on mul­ti­ple plat­forms with­out the need for con­tin­u­ous, man­u­al inter­ven­tion. Busi­ness­es can plan and sched­ule con­tent in advance, ensur­ing that their social media feeds remain active even when staff are not direct­ly man­ag­ing them.

Automa­tion also helps in aggre­gat­ing data on user inter­ac­tions and engage­ment, which can inform future mar­ket­ing strate­gies and improve tar­get­ing. For exam­ple, auto­mat­ed ana­lyt­ics can show peak engage­ment times, audi­ence demo­graph­ics, and con­tent pref­er­ences, enabling busi­ness­es to tai­lor their approach­es to bet­ter meet their audi­ence’s needs.

How­ev­er, there’s a notable risk asso­ci­at­ed with the overuse of automa­tion in social media: los­ing the per­son­al touch.

Social media thrives on human con­nec­tion and per­son­al inter­ac­tions. When com­mu­ni­ca­tion becomes too auto­mat­ed, it can feel imper­son­al and gener­ic to the audi­ence, lead­ing to a lack of gen­uine engage­ment. Con­se­quent­ly, busi­ness­es must bal­ance the oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy of automa­tion with human-led inter­ac­tions to main­tain a tru­ly engag­ing and relat­able social media presence.

This arti­cle will pro­vide guid­ance for automat­ing your social media activ­i­ty in 2024 and also give tips for pre­serv­ing the per­son­al touch of busi­ness-to-cus­tomer interactions:

Automating social media activity in 2024

In the cur­rent social media cli­mate, raw and authen­tic con­tent is best as users are tuned into fake and over­ly pol­ished con­tent. Engage your audi­ence with behind-the-scenes action and human moments of emo­tion or humour to meet them where they are.

Social media in 2024 is also defined by influ­encers and cre­ators (for the same rea­sons as the above). But even if your busi­ness is big or man­aged by cam­era-shy staff, it can still get involved. Instead of cre­at­ing your own reels, you can part­ner with an influ­encer who shares your audience.

Key­word strat­e­gy may be fraught in the search engine world, but it’s still super impor­tant on social media. For many Gen‑Z and mil­len­ni­al users, Insta­gram and Tik­Tok are their main sources of infor­ma­tion and news. As a result, your con­tent must be easy to dis­cov­er – think key­words and hyper-spe­cif­ic content.

Even in 2024 (that seems increas­ing­ly futur­is­tic) social media man­age­ment tools are still con­strained by the lev­el of access allowed by each social net­work. By set­ting spe­cif­ic per­mis­sions, each social media plat­form dic­tates what tools can and can­not do (i.e., how often they can post, the types of data they can access, and the fea­tures they can utilise). This is super rel­e­vant when think­ing about which social media man­age­ment tool to pick for your automations.

The most chal­leng­ing exam­ple of this is X (Twit­ter for those liv­ing under a rock). Before Elon Musk bought it, Twit­ter’s APIs were very per­mis­sive (i.e., busi­ness­es had access to a wide range of fea­tures). How­ev­er, X is dif­fer­ent now. To use fea­tures like social media lis­ten­ing and com­peti­tor mon­i­tor­ing, busi­ness­es will need to pay a pre­mi­um of $42,000 per month.

If you want to use all the fea­tures X offers, you’ll need to choose Hoot­suite – this is one of a few social media man­age­ment tools that ful­ly sup­port it, though it’ll be expensive.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, social media automa­tion tools are an area of tech that is not yet com­plete­ly trans­formed by devel­op­ments in AI. These tools have been using rudi­men­ta­ry AI for a while, and though there are some new con­tent writ­ing and com­peti­tor analy­sis abil­i­ties, new devel­op­ments in AI don’t seem to be chang­ing the field a great deal at the moment.

A guide to social media automation tools

Most social media man­age­ment tools will have the fea­tures you expect, includ­ing automa­tion. Their main dif­fer­ences will be impor­tant depend­ing on your bud­get, team size, activ­i­ty lev­els, and inter­face preferences.

When choos­ing between dif­fer­ent tools, look out for tools that actu­al­ly sup­port the social net­work your busi­ness uses. Plus, it will be use­ful for the tool you pick to be able to analyse the per­for­mance of your posts.

If unsure, most tools offer free tri­als. So, try as many as you like before mak­ing a final decision.

Each of the fol­low­ing tools can auto­mate the sched­ul­ing of posts, but they have vary­ing stand-out fea­tures and qual­i­ties that will be important.

Hoot­suite and Sendible tend to be more com­pre­hen­sive, mak­ing them more suit­able for larg­er organ­i­sa­tions and busi­ness­es need­ing exten­sive integrations.

Com­par­a­tive­ly, Buffer­’s offer­ing focus­es on sim­plic­i­ty and ease of use, which might be per­fect for small­er teams or those new to social media automation.

SocialPi­lot and Loom­ly offer a bal­ance, pro­vid­ing more advanced fea­tures than Buffer but poten­tial­ly less over­whelm­ing than Hoot­suite or Sendible.

Using Zapier to enhance your automations

Social media man­age­ment tools are one thing, but a des­ig­nat­ed automa­tion tool will take your strat­e­gy to the next level.

For exam­ple, a tool like Zapi­er allows you to cre­ate automa­tions that extend beyond the basic sched­ul­ing and post­ing. Whether you’re using Hoot­suite, Buffer, SocialPi­lot, Loom­ly, or Sendible, you can cre­ate auto­mat­ed work­flows across all your busi­ness tools using some­thing like Zapier.

All the tools above inte­grate with Zapi­er, enabling effi­cient work­flows such as:

1. Hoot­suit­e’s inte­gra­tion with Zapi­er allows you to auto­mate work­flows like instant­ly shar­ing Insta­gram posts as Tweets or sav­ing men­tions from Twit­ter direct­ly into a Google Sheet for track­ing and analy­sis. This can stream­line how you mon­i­tor and react to social engagement.
2. With Buffer, inte­grat­ing via Zapi­er can enable you to auto­mat­i­cal­ly share new blog posts across your social net­works as soon as they go live. This helps keep your con­tent fresh and your audi­ence engaged with­out man­u­al intervention.
3. With SocialPi­lot’s inte­gra­tion with Zapi­er, you can set up an automa­tion that con­nects your email mar­ket­ing plat­form, like Mailchimp, with your social media chan­nels. When­ev­er you send out a new email cam­paign, Zapi­er can trig­ger SocialPi­lot to post an update on your social media pro­files about the new content.
4. Loom­ly and Sendible, when used with Zapi­er, allow for cre­ative automa­tions such as send­ing alerts to Slack or Microsoft Teams when­ev­er there’s a need for post approval or feed­back from the team, ensur­ing that com­mu­ni­ca­tion flows swift­ly and no posts go unchecked.

Automa­tions can make a busi­ness’s ecosys­tem more inter­con­nect­ed, effi­cient, and error-free – not to men­tion increas­ing the impact of social media efforts.

10 best practices for automating social media activity

As men­tioned ear­li­er, all this automa­tion and stream­lin­ing can reduce the per­son­al touch of B2C and B2B com­mu­ni­ca­tions. When automat­ing con­tent post­ing and cus­tomer inter­ac­tions, busi­ness­es should be aware of cer­tain best prac­tices that pro­tect against becom­ing gener­ic and impersonal:

1. Be aware of trends and current events

If your brand nev­er indi­cates an aware­ness of cur­rent affairs, it’s going to be real­ly obvi­ous that you’re automat­ing your con­tent. Some con­tent will need to be post­ed spon­ta­neous­ly as things occur in the news (depend­ing on what’s rel­e­vant to your busi­ness, this could be cer­tain gov­ern­ment poli­cies or viral celebri­ty moments, for exam­ple). So, make sure your con­tent pro­duc­tion has the capa­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing and post­ing con­tent on the fly if rel­e­vant cur­rent affairs come up.

2. Schedule your posts strategically

Auto­mate your posts to go live dur­ing peak user activ­i­ty times spe­cif­ic to each social media plat­form. This will max­imise vis­i­bil­i­ty and aim for peak engage­ment, giv­ing you the best advan­tage over disengagement.

3. Maintain variety

There are lots of things you can do to keep your social media feed dynam­ic. Use a mix of con­tent types such as images, videos, quizzes, polls, and text posts. You can also cre­ate a series of con­tent (i.e., releas­ing a post a day for a week under the umbrel­la of a ‘series’) as this can keep users excit­ed for your next post. Make sure to rotate themes and topics.

4. Humanise your brand through content

Occa­sion­al­ly includ­ing behind-the-scenes con­tent, employ­ee sto­ries, or per­son­al mes­sages from the team can make your posts feel real­ly per­son­al. So, while they may be auto­mat­ed, they won’t feel robotic.

5. Reserve automation for routine tasks only

If you’re real­ly wor­ried about the per­son­al touch, you may choose to only use automa­tion for the most repet­i­tive and rou­tine tasks.

You might choose to only auto­mate send­ing thank-you emails after cus­tomer pur­chas­es and alert­ing cus­tomers to upcom­ing events. For more nuanced inter­ac­tions, such as address­ing cus­tomer com­plaints or answer­ing com­plex queries, you might pre­fer a human touch.

6. Set up responsive bots

Chat­bots are becom­ing a lot more advanced. Some are so good that it’s not obvi­ous to cus­tomers that they’re not speak­ing to a human cus­tomer ser­vice assis­tant. This obvi­ous­ly requires a very well-designed bot, but it’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble with all the recent devel­op­ments in AI.

When automat­ing cus­tomer inter­ac­tions, you need to be con­fi­dent that users are get­ting a sat­is­fac­to­ry expe­ri­ence. If you can ensure that with a chat­bot (read our arti­cle for advice), go ahead. But if you can’t, make sure there is human help on hand for com­plex issues.

7. Personalise automated replies

If you choose to set up an auto­mat­ed reply process, it’s a good idea to get some per­son­al­i­sa­tion involved. Cus­tomise auto­mat­ed respons­es with the cus­tomer’s name or ref­er­ence to their spe­cif­ic issue to make their inter­ac­tions feel less gener­ic and more satisfying.

8. Monitor conversations

Though auto­mat­ed cus­tomer inter­ac­tions can be very high-qual­i­ty these days, it’s still a good idea to mon­i­tor them. Reg­u­lar­ly review auto­mat­ed inter­ac­tions to ensure the respons­es are always appro­pri­ate and help­ful. You may need to adjust scripts as need­ed to improve their accu­ra­cy and relevance.

9. Prompt human follow-up when needed

You could ensure that your automa­tion sys­tems are set up to recog­nise signs that a cus­tomer would pre­fer a human inter­ac­tion. You could instruct your sys­tem to notice when a cer­tain cus­tomer response or action occurs and to noti­fy your team to step in instead.

10. Regularly review your approach

As always, it’s super impor­tant that you con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor your strat­e­gy. Maybe sched­ule in a month­ly review to keep on top of this. The data you exam­ine will let you know what is and isn’t work­ing, encour­ag­ing you to devel­op strate­gies that best engage leads.

Final thoughts

Automa­tion is an excit­ing ele­ment of our mod­ern mar­ket­ing cli­mate, pro­vid­ing end­less use cas­es to improve oper­a­tions and cus­tomer engage­ment tac­tics. With all devel­op­ments, though, come new challenges.

It will be impor­tant to stay in touch with your brand val­ues and appeal to cus­tomer pref­er­ences for authen­tic­i­ty. If you keep up to date with cur­rent trends and keep an eye on per­for­mance ana­lyt­ics, your social media automa­tions will enhance your strat­e­gy instead of over­ly mech­a­nis­ing it.