Why automate my Social Media strategy?

Social Media is a major part of digital marketing and allows brand to be visible, grow and speak to the world. Each Social channel has its own specificity: Twitter requires very frequent posting while LinkedIn works very well with a single post each day.

Overall, maintaining Social Media channels is very time consuming: you constantly need to come up with new quality content to post and engage with your audience. A typical Social Media Manager must manage content creation, design new visuals, make some trends research, look at what competitors do, schedule content, do some copywriting, manage influencers, respond to comments, analyze each channel's evolution and work on reporting, etc. It leaves very little space to improvisation!

Considering this tight schedule and the pressure of creativity and productivity, it is important for Social Media Managers and Community Managers to be equipped with automation tools.

What can I automate?

For your audience to engage with your brand, there needs to be a real human managing your social channels. You simply can't automate everything and hope for the best, but there are things you can (and should!) switch on auto-pilot.

There are two types of content you post on Twitter and LinkedIn - time sensitive and intemporal.

Time Sensitive Social Media Content

Time sensitive content is content that has a short lifespan. It can be hot news, promotion, product release, etc. Such post only makes sense at the time it is posted but would have no more value few days to few weeks later.

This type of content is essential because it is unique and it shows that your social channel is active and of quality.

You cannot automate time sensitive content: this is the soul of your strategy. It has to be genuine and you have to spend a good share of your time developing it.

Intemporal Social Media Content

Intemporal content is content that is valid for a long period of time. Things like statistics, expert quotes, tips, best practice, etc. are things that will still be true if you delay their publication by a few weeks or even months.

This type of content is really important because you can use it as buffer when you have nothing new to tell or when your inspiration is running low.

Intemporal content is also something you can easily automate.

Why should I automate my intemporal content?

The great thing with intemporal content is that it is easy to turn it into series of content people tend to enjoy and expect. Here are a few ideas of regular social media series based on intemporal content:

• Monday Expert Quote
• Tuesday best restaurant in town
• Wednesday Stats
• Thursday Tips
• Friday product highlight
• Saturday weekend idea
• Sunday most beautiful landscape

If you automate such series, you will have some pre-scheduled content you can rely on. If you publish 50 posts a week and set up 10 different series, you reduce your workload by 20%. It means less content creation, less scheduling, less design, and way more time to focus on your other time sensitive posts!

It also means that your audience will be more engaged because they will know precisely what to expect from you, at what frequency.

How to automate my Social Media posting?

The Social Unicorn is a very efficient tool to automate series posting and very easy to use. You can actually set it up and leave it on auto-pilot.

The platform works like a game of lego bricks: you create various bricks of content that the Social Unicorn will assemble to create unique posts. There are 4 major types of bricks in the Social Unicorn:

1. Prefix - this element is usually a title, an introduction (i.e. "Quote of the day", "Tuesday stats" or "Did you know?")
2. Base - the base is the actual content. It could be a quote, a fact, an idea, a suggestion, etc.
3. Suffix - this element is often used for hashtags, mentions or links (i.e. "#quote", "@SocialUnicorn_")
4. Image - this image will be added to the post

The Social Unicorn will pick one brick from each bag to create a unique post. The more bricks you create, the more potential combinations you have.

You can use excel or open office to create your lists and simply copy/paste into the Social Unicorn. Because the whole content comes from you, it is of high quality and aligned to your strategy and editorial guidelines.

Indeed, the Social Unicorn takes some time to setup initially, but this minor time investment will save you much more time in the long run. Oh, and did I tell you it could even generate unique visuals for you?

Give it a try, it's free!