Big data has forced marketers to take a harder look at their campaigns, which has created a need for marketing automation tools.

When I first started out, social media marketing was a very ad hoc profession. This has changed over the past few years. Big data has forced marketers to take a harder look at their campaigns, which has created a need for marketing automation tools.

Here are some ways that marketing automation can improve your social media marketing strategies.

Sync Your Blog with Your Other Web Properties in Real-Time

Your website is the focal point of your social media strategy. Marketers that manage a blog regularly will generate 67% more leads than brands without one. Brands that merge social media content with their blog will generate at least twice as many leads.

Using social sharing plugins is still important, but newer marketing automation tools let you take a more proactive approach. You can use tools like CoSchedule and Blog2Social to syndicate your blog posts to social media at a future data. These tools eliminate the need to manually schedule social media posts pertaining to your blogs and make sure they are syndicated as timely as possible. You also don’t need to search for your shortened URL’s before scheduling social media posts.

In addition, tools like ClicktoTweet allow your readers to share your content or an excerpt from it to their audiences dynamically. Take your most actionable information and create Click to Tweet images that are embedded throughout your content to allow readers to engage and share.

Use Suggested Content Features to Curate Content

Social media shouldn’t be used as your personal soapbox. You need to be engaged with other people in your network and actively promote other influencers’ content. Unfortunately, it is easy to forget about this when you are relying on social media marketing automation tools.

Some tools allow you to automatically retweet content that contains certain keywords, but I would advise against using them. You may unwittingly share offensive or irrelevant content that has your target keywords or hashtags.

Instead, you should use your marketing automation software to identify relevant content to share with your users. Rather than sharing these posts as is, you should add some value to them and make them your own. Curating content is a great way to build a rapport with your users and other influencers. Tools like HubSpot’s suggested content features are great for this.

Create Authentic Auto-Replies

One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation software, like GetResponse, is that you can create autoresponders and direct messages, which can be sent to customers when they follow you or fill out a form. These types of marketing automation tools can also be used to create dynamic email workflows that send emails based on how an individual recipient engaged with the email content.

For example, let’s say you’re a B2B marketing SaaS company and new subscribers receive a Welcome email when they sign up to receive your blog content. The Welcome email includes links to several blog posts on different topics. If the recipient clicks on a blog link about Instagram marketing, your automation tool can dynamically send them future emails with content on the same subject. The recipient’s engagement with future emails can also dictate how they are moved through the sales funnel.

However, you need to use automated replies carefully when applied to social media engagement. According to Sprout Social, over 40% of social media users unfollow brands for posting spammy or offensive content, compared to 8% that unfollow brands for being unresponsive.

The lesson here is to really put time into your auto-replies and make sure they are triggered at the right times. It is a good idea to avoid sharing automated messages when customers contact you with specific keywords in their message. Your marketing automation tool may send them an inappropriate auto-reply, which could be more damaging than not replying at all.

A number of brands have come under fire for this. American Air used an automated “thank you” tweet, which sent a thank you reply to a customer that insulted their service.

Your automated messages should be shared when customers follow you, fill out a form or take another action. They aren’t ideal for responses to direct messages or public posts.

Some actions can’t be automated. When it comes to social media and content, a mix of both provide the best results. Automation is excellent at identifying the right content to share but when a personal touch is needed make sure a human being is there to engage.

Recycle Your Evergreen Content

Some content will never lose its relevance. If you need to fill some slots in your social media schedule, marketing automation tools let you fill the gaps by sharing evergreen content. You might as well get some traction to posts that will always be valuable to your followers!

Article written by: Ryan Kh