Social Media Marketing Automation is GOOD

Many social media marketing “experts” will tell you that social media marketing automation is wrong. They are wrong – and in this episode of Marketing in Minutes you will learn why.

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In this episode of Marketing in Minutes you will learn:

Why social media marketing automation is good
How social media marketing automation can grow your business
How you should automate your social media marketing activities

All in under 10 minutes.

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Here is the interview with Guy Kawasaki with the quote from the episode.

Transcript

Below you can find the transcript of this episode of Marketing in Minutes.

Episode 14: Social Media Marketing Automation is Good

Marketers love to automate.

That’s true for many different areas of marketing – email marketing, advertising, and even social media marketing.

And that’s a good thing – as long as it is done with a little bit of care.

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One of the worst pieces of social media marketing advice is that you should never automate.

You can and you should…

I’m Jonathan Gebauer and you are listening to Marketing in Minutes.

This is Marketing in Minutes by The Social Ms – the marketing podcast that focuses on one marketing topic in every episode in under 10 minutes.

I’m your host Jonathan Gebauer and today, let’s talk about social media marketing automation.

One of the best quotes about social media marketing is by Guy Kawasaki.

If you don’t know who that is, he’s the marketing influencer who coined the term evangelist marketing.

He was also involved with marketing the first Apple Macintosh and one of the first influencers who saw the true potential of social media marketing.

The quote goes like this:

If You’re Using Social Media Right, You Will Piss Some People Off.

I’ll link to the quote in the shownotes.

This quote is great because it’s true on all levels of social media marketing.

It’s true when you are talking to your audience. Social media is about being personal – and not everyone will like your personality.

But the bond you forge with those who do like what you say will be even bigger.

But the quote is also true when you talk about social media marketing to so-called experts. Marketing is about doing what works best for you.

And some experts will be offended by your actions because they don’t like the way you market. But you shouldn’t care about what the experts say as long as what you do gets you the results you need.

And one thing many social media experts say is that automation is bad.

When I was marketing my first business using social media, I tried to listen to all the advice I could get.

I shouldn’t have. The advice I got was mainly: Never post more than once a day, never automate, and every interaction needs to be manual.

And the same people told me that if I wouldn’t follow this advice, the damage could never be repaired.

I tried to follow that advice. And after being on Twitter for almost 2 years, I had around 80 followers.

Something clearly wasn’t working. In desperation, I started to follow other advice and other people. And the people I started to follow at the time are all very successful marketers today.

They told me a different story. They showed me how I could get results with social media marketing automation.

Slowly I became an automation expert. Whenever a new automation tool comes out, I look at it in detail and think about the magic I can do with it.

And when I started doing that, I started to get results.

That’s how I found out that Automation is a good thing. Automation is good because it allows you to scale your activity. Because you can stay in touch with more people. Because you can be active when you are asleep.

Becoming a successful social media marketer without automation was hard when social media was new. Today it’s impossible – and no successful marketer will ever tell you not to automate.

But why are many so-called social media experts still promoting the idea of not using automation?

The answer is simpler then you think: They are protecting their own jobs.

By teaching people that automation is bad, they ensure that they will have clients in the future. Clients for whom they can do their social media management.

And believe it or not, that pays well.

I’m not going to tell you that you can automate everything. That’s not the case. Some automation can really hurt your business, other automation tactics won’t help you and are simply unnecessary.

But what should you automate?

There is no easy answer I can give you.

In general, you should look at what actions that you perform manually and that give you the best results can be automated to be performed more often or with a bigger impact.

Or in other words, you need to find out which automation can be used to scale your marketing results.

I’ll give you an example.

When Susanna and I were marketing the content marketing platform exploreB2B, we used Twitter a lot.

We found out that we could send direct messages to our followers and invite them to our platform and 25% would take us up on the offer.

What we needed were new followers and a way to invite them. These followers needed to be from our target audience and we needed a way to send them messages.

Back in the days, Twitter tolerated the use of automatic direct messages to new followers and there were a lot of tools that allowed us to do that.

It’s not that easy anymore today. But back then it was – and that’s what we did.

To get new followers, we selected influencers from our niche and followed their followers. We knew that a certain percentage of them would follow us back. That strategy for growing followers still works today – you can use a tool like ManageFlitter for that. But be careful when you are doing it because if you overdo it you will get banned.

I’ll put a link to ManageFlitter and more information on that strategy in the shownotes.

With this strategy, we were able to grow our platform to 80.000 registered users and 500.000 pageviews per month.

Many social media experts will tell you that this is the wrong way to do this.

We didn’t care, it got us the results we needed.

Intermission 3

That doesn’t mean that you should be careless. You should keep a close watch on what each social platform you use tolerates and what it doesn’t tolerate.

Twitter has now made the use of automated direct messages a lot harder. There are still tolerated ways of doing it, but it’s not as simple anymore.

When you go for a strategy like this, you should follow the rules and guidelines of each platform. Otherwise, your account is at risk.

But in reality, every form of online marketing will allow for some form of automation – and when you can use it to your benefit, you should.

Social media marketing in that sense is no different than email marketing. If you are sending newsletters and someone would tell you that you needed to send every email manually, you wouldn’t listen either.

There are ways to automate your activities on almost any social platform. You can use Tailwind to automate your Pinterest activity. You can use Buffer to schedule posts on Twitter, and you can use Manageflitter to grow your audience.

On Facebook, you can make your fanpage more interesting with PostPlanner. Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts on almost any social media platform.

As an entrepreneur, you should always use the tools that can help you achieve your goals. And if it can help you achieve your goals and it doesn’t hurt anybody it’s not wrong to do it.

That was all I wanted to talk about today!

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Marketing in Minutes.

For more information on how to grow your business with social media marketing automation, take a look at the shownotes. You can find them at blog.thesocialms.com/MiM-14. I will link a lot of automation tools in there.

And if you want to learn how to use Twitter Automation tools to grow your business on a massive scale, check out our book, Grow Your Twitter Account Like A Pro.

Let me know what you think about this podcast – and please share and subscribe if you like it!

And if you can, leave a review in your favorite podcast app – it really helps us to build an audience!

As always, please return for the next episode. I’m Jonathan Gebauer and you’ve been listening to Marketing in Minutes.

That’s it for today, take care, bye!