Update: We're down to six as one of the originally featured options is no longer as good as it used to be.
In the marketing world, automation is treated as the blue-eyed boy. It makes everything easy for brands. It reduces spending, eliminates mistakes, hastens the delivery of the work. Business automation signifies the blend between business intelligence and software mechanization.
Social media has formerly been outside the realm of automation, but not anymore. The digital landscape is bursting at seams with social media and email automation tools. As with everything in this world, there’s a craze for eliminating human involvement.
Social media automation
Website maintenance automation and email automation have been here for a while, but social media automation is quite new. That's because many social media marketing areas used to require specialized attention from professionals.
But with the growing use of automation and usability tools, the need for manual work is minimized. Everything can now be monitored from a unique dashboard.
The tools
I have compiled a list of seven automation tools that every social media marketer should be using for better ROI. If you haven’t automated your social media works yet, now is the time to start using these tools.
Here they are:
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another marvelous tool. It offers a consolidated view of individual social media accounts from a single dashboard. Over 10 million people use Hootsuite, making it one of the most popular social media automation tools.
Below, you can see the Hootsuite dashboard:
What I like best about Hootsuite is it distributes social conversations across several categories. The categories can be keywords, hashtags, social mention or brand profile. The dashboard allows you to see what users are discussing about your brand, what keywords they are using, etc.
Hootsuite supports 35 social media APIs including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter. It also supports Google Analytics API. See the Hootsuite dashboard for Google Analytics below:
I put my thumb up for Hootsuite because it is the right mix of social listening and social activism. Social listening is monitoring the campaigns across digital channels. A process that Hootsuite dashboard eases up. As for social activism, Hootsuite integrates with your RSS feed and blog so that you can post your content across various channels.
Hootsuite doesn’t need a certificate from anyone. Still, I can’t resist myself from adding my 0.2 cents. It’ an amazing tool and it gave me outstanding visibility on social media. Thanks to Hootsuite, some of my posts went viral.
2. Quuu
Marketers have realized content curation is as powerful as creating original content. Today, over 80% marketers view content curation as an integral part of content marketing and use social media as a curation platform.
The majority of content curation tools have limited functionality. These tools can only collect and share content from others. In this regard, Quuu is far ahead of other tools. Its state of the art algorithm can scour the web and find hand-curated content that matches the theme of your campaigns.
See a screenshot of Quuu dashboard below:
The tool lets you select interest categories. Once you select the categories that resonate your brand’s essence, Quuu finds hand-curated content from those categories. It then sends the content to your Buffer.com account.
Put simply, with Quuu, you don’t have to manually curate content anymore. I used this tool, and it offered me an escape hatch from the daily chores of a blogger. I rest assured knowing Quuu will find the right content for my audiences and I won’t have to take the toil.
3. GoAnimate
Multimedia content challenges the monopoly of text-based content. The challenge is hard for the latter to accept because the former entertains users and triggers engagement unlike the latter. Automation in multimedia content creation is gradually becoming more of a vogue.
GoAnimate is a tool that automates animated video creation process. We know animated GIFs and videos sell like hotcakes on social media – GoAnimate allows you to take full advantage of that. GoAnimate review shows the tool has a simple drag-and-drop interface and plenty of customizable templates for making a video. GoAnimate eliminates the need to separately hire a voiceover artist. It has built-in sound effect and music libraries and many pre-animated characters to choose from.
Below you can see a pre-animated GoAnimate character highlighted:
Animated videos can boost branding. Snapchat alone reports 10 billion video views a day. GoAnimate automates the process of creating multimedia content for social media. If you want to automate social media using dazzling multimedia content and drive traffic from there, GoAnimate is up your alley.
My experience with GoAnimate has been thoroughly positive. I add a lot of multimedia content to my blog posts. One can use stock images and animated GIFs, but that’s bad for one’s reputation. GoAnimate offered me an alternative – I create videos with ease, just like a pro.
4. SumAll
SumAll is a remarkable tool. It can seamlessly integrate with the digital channels that marketers leverage. Such channels include Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics and 39 others. You get to see your campaign’s performance across all these networks from a unique dashboard.
Here’s a view of SumAll dashboard:
Unless you understand your social media audiences, you can never identify the ones who are likely to buy from you. SumAll provides you with audience data and the engagement metrics so that you can pinpoint your target audiences.
Less than 4% people fall into the overlapping area between followers and consumers. To identify them, you need a micro view into the engagement around the campaign. SumAll’s data-driven interface gives you a holistic view. And it also provides analytics reports from individual networks where your campaigns are running.
As a blogger, I can certify this tool because it helped me immensely in finding the right audiences. Social media benefits bloggers, but only when the reach extends to the right users. Identifying them would be a herculean task unless you use SumAll.
5. Socedo
The fiftth one in this list is Socedo. This tool does an amazing job. It generates qualified leads from social media. The right strategy is connecting with the right people and in the right way. For all digital marketers who lose their sleep figuring out how, Socedo is the answer, because it automates this process.
See the user-friendly dashboard of Socedo below:
The interface is as smooth as it gets. All you need to do is set the criteria of people whom you want to connect on social media. Socedo will then wade through user-profiles across social networks. It finds the profiles that meet your criteria and even helps you engage with them.
I didn’t use this tool myself but got positive feedback about it from a lot of people, whom I worked with. If the content on your site is for lead generation, then Socedo is recommended.
6. SocialFlow
SocialFlow tracks real-time conversation and gathers insights. Based on those insights, it suggests the best time to publish content so that the peak attention from the target audiences can be captured.
Here’s a view of SocialFlow dashboard:
Source
Among the top-rated publishing platforms that use SocialFlow are Mashable, The Washington Post, and National Geographic.
Below are the additional benefits of using SocialFlow:
- It analyzes social signals and based on the findings, points out the paid marketing sweet spot.
- It makes paid campaigns more efficient by increasing the revenue for each customer.
- It eases content curation and helps high-quality content go viral.
What’s the best time to post on social media? There’s no consensus over this. According to The Huffington Post, Facebook use increases 10% on Fridays. Yet, Buffer has observed engagement rate to escalate 18% on Thursdays and Fridays.
Clearly, it’s difficult to figure out the best time for posting. Only a data science expert can come up with an answer – That too, after mugging up large clusters of data. But with SocialFlow, you don’t need any such expert as the tool automates and uncomplicates the whole process.
Once again, a great tool to use and I am telling this from my own experience. SocialFlow gave me micro-information about every deep pit of social media. There’s a big difference between creating content with actionable insights and with them. SocialFlow delivers you all the social insight you need. Thereby, it makes your task of creating and curating informative content easy.
Automation Guarantees Productivity
A social media campaign is like a complex machine, made of different parts. For the machine to function smoothly, all these individual parts need to be up and running.
Content curation is critical to social media success. Another equally critical aspect is identifying the right audiences. Yet another aspect is monitoring individual campaigns from a single platform.
The tools discussed in this article are goal-oriented and make the individual layers more efficient. This in turn benefits the whole campaign. The tools also increase the productivity of an enterprise by reducing the workload from its employees.
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Photo credit: Visual Hunt