Social media can be a dream come true for small businesses of all shapes and sizes. You can build direct access to your consumer base, can discover new audiences via targeted algorithm-driven marketing, and can communicate to both deliver information and strengthen brand personality across a range of social media formats and platforms. 

While social media offers small businesses a rich plethora of tools to utilise in connecting with and growing their audience, it’s also no small feat to get these tools working to their maximum capacity and move your brand strategy well beyond a rushed tweet every Monday.

With that in mind, today we’re throwing five bite-sized ways to use business automation for small businesses to send your social media capacities sky-rocketing.

 

• Schedule, schedule, schedule. The thing about social media platforms? They’re hungry machines. That carefully considered post yesterday is a thing of the past within 24 hours. Social media strategies can be time-intensive in generating and scheduling content, and scheduling, or posting, day to day requires manual input and a high rate of return to the task at hand. By using social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite, you can schedule weeks, or months, of content in one fell swoop and enjoy a set-and-forget approach to robust, lively social media presences.

• Get to know your audience. Audiences range from platform to platform, with different demographics spending time in different online spaces. Tools like Iconosquare give you personalized information about your social media accounts that can help you to focus your efforts per account, speaking to your audiences with an understanding of who’s on the other side of the screen.

• Stay in the know and on trend. It’s more prevalent than ever for brands to step outside of their single product/service lane and become involved with trending topics or conversations. These can offer great marketing strategies and chances to show off brand personality. A tool like BuzzSumo gives you direct access to trending topics, with results that can be filtered on location or domain for greater insight and accuracy. 

• Know who’s talking about you. In the sea of hashtags and trending topics, following your brand’s mentions can require a lot of trawling. With Mention, you’ll never miss the moment when your brand comes up in a social media conversation, allowing you to remain responsive and proactive in engaging with your consumer base.

• Get more bang for your buck out of your existing content. If you’re creating a rich base of new content for social media and online use every week, don’t let your efforts result in a one-hit-wonder. MeetEdgar is all about using your library of existing content to bring fresh angles to your social media schedules. Automatically scheduling content from your library, it can also write automated post variations to keep fresh and new messaging across every base – how’s that for an automation benefit?

 

Small business automation solutions sit behind every corner in the social media world, and finding the tools that can propel your brand forward will have you spoilt for choice.