With the growing number of social networks and channels, managing your social media channels can devour a lot of time and resources. Social media automation seems to be an easy way out of the hamster wheel. Social media automation tools promise to do all the work for you. The benefits of social media automation are obvious: social media automation tools can save tons of work and time. But there are also pitfalls on the way of automating your social media marketing. Deathtraps, that can turn your social news feeds into lifeless robotic streams.

Let's take a look at the pros and cons of social media automation and how to do it right.




Social Media Automation Pros and Cons

 

The most obvious benefit of social media automation is the convenience and the time-saving effect. There are plenty of social media automation tools that allow you to create and schedule content to be shared at a specific time on multiple social platforms. These tools save time and resources for tedious manual tasks like filling your social channels with fresh content.

Social media automation will also make it much easier to provide a consistent stream of content on multiple social channels. Scheduling your social media posts will allow you to share content even when you are out of office or on holidays. Scheduling will also help you to repeat your posts automatically and re-share your evergreen content in order to extend the lifetime of your posts.
Convenience
With social media automation tools, you can schedule and share your content at a specific time on multiple social platforms. This is a great help if you want to share your content on multiple social network sites or if you need a quick way to post messages to each of your channels at once.
Content Consistency
The social media tools also allow you to ensure a consistent stream of content on your channels without manually having to update your feeds constantly with new content. Consistency in content delivery helps you to keep your followers updated and loyal to your channels. Automation also allows you to deliver more content more often. It also allows you to easily repeat your posts and re-share your evergreen content regularly.
Easy Scheduling
Social media tools enable you to schedule your messages to be posted at a specific time, even during off office hours, holidays and vacations. This allows you to schedule your posts for the best times throughout the day when your content is most likely to make an impact. This is the time when your followers are most active and your content is most likely to be seen and engaged with.
Reaching More People In Less Time
With the convenience of automation, you can save a lot of time for tedious manual work. With sharing your content automatically across multiple social platforms and communities you can reach out to more followers and potential reader in less time. Time, you can better spend on creating and researching valuable content for your audience.
The networks, groups, and communities are different in respect of the following aspects:

Network purpose (private/business)
How to address the communities (formal/informal)
Number of characters for posts or comments.
Size and number of images that can be posted.
Text post, link post or image post formats and what works best.
Activation of emojis to show your emotions, hashtags for keywords or handles to reach out to specific users
Favorite times when social communities are most active.
Posting frequency: the number and frequency of postings that lead to more engagement or annoy the community.

However, the benefit of convenience is also the biggest pitfall with social media automation. Social media automation can turn your social media channels into lifeless, robotic streams of repetitive posts.


Poorly Formatted Posts
Most social media automation tools share the same content in the same format on all social media channels, regardless of their differences. However, poorly formatted posts without personal comments get less visibility and receive engagement.
Each social platform offers different options for presenting your posts and content. And each community reacts differently to specific content and post formats. For instance, hashtags work fine for Twitter and Instagram, but they don't perform on Facebook. And while Google followers prefer longer comments, Facebook fans respond better to short ones.
Losing Track
Automation ensures consistency in content delivery, but this can also backfire on your reputation.

If you don't monitor your automated posts for their impact and response, your social streams can quickly become irrelevant to your audience.
Too many repetitions of the same content can easily annoy and drive away your followers.
If you don't keep track of your automated posts current events can make your scheduled posts look outdated or misplaced.


Don't Become a Robot
Successful social media marketing is all about communication and interaction with your community. Social media automation can save you from tedious manual work. But don't let yourself be carried away by the convenience and lose contact with your audience. Automated posts without personal comments usually don't get much response. So consider very carefully what your followers in each community expect, and don't be tempted by the convenience to push all your content to every social channel in the same way.

 

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