Automating your social media accounts can be tricky thing to master but when you get it right, it can be an effective way of growing your community and driving traffic to your site. To help you get started, we created a best practice guide for any partners who are considering using this as part of their social media strategy.
Don’t just automate
Automated tweets should only form part of your social media presence. Supplement automated posts with fresh and timely posts each day to give your brand a personality and avoid looking like a robot.
Use a variety of media
When you automate posts, include a variety of media such as links, video, quotes, blog posts and images to add richness to your feed and prevent it from feeling stale.
Scheduling for maximum impact
Many social media sites enable you to review followers’ behaviours, such as their most active days and times. Broadly speaking, Facebook and Instagram traffic increases as the weekend approaches. You’ll see peak traffic on these sites during Thursday and Friday evenings. Twitter is more varied, with lots of user groups connected at different times, posts to the site should be more frequent. Use Twitter and Facebook’s own analytics tools to dive deeper into the behaviour of your own communities.
Plan ahead
Maximise the benefits of using automated posts by scheduling content at least one week ahead. You can then rest safe in the knowledge that other distractions won’t prevent you from engaging with followers. You should read through your scheduled posts every other day, or in response to any major events, to check they remain relevant and do not contradict, or are unsympathetic to, any recent news. To enable you to respond to any incoming messages from your followers, make sure you still receive and monitor social alerts.
Recycle good content
If you’ve created posts that have generated positive engagement results, recycle them! Include old posts in your schedule for a few months’ time, just make sure they’re still relevant when scheduled.
Using an RSS feed
If you write a blog, or highly regard a dating blogger, you can set up an RSS feed to automatically tweet when new content is published. This will post to your social media account using a pre-determined prefix which you can update occasionally.
Using reputable automation tools
Depending on your budget and requirements there are numerous free and paid-for automation tools available. Some providers, such as HootSuite, offer useful features, like scheduling in bulk. This enables you to input all your tweets on a spreadsheet before uploading to their site.
Following official rules
Whilst some social media tools offer to grow followers on your behalf; we recommend you avoid overly aggressive following tactics. Similarly, if you achieve a disproportionate number of followers Twitter may investigate your account for any wrongdoing.
If you have any questions about automating your social media presence, please get in touch with the Partner Team today.
Sebastian Hall, Partner Manager at White Label Dating®