VD 19: How to Automate Social Media

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As an e-commerce business you have to be constantly providing relevant and engaging content to your audience. But let’s face it, there just aren’t enough hours in the day for you to do it all. This is why most businesses today use some forms of automation, especially for their social media.

Here are a few tips on how to automate social media:

1. Push your content – you need to send out your photos, podcasts, blog posts, videos, or your latest products, to all of your social channels. Using an app like Zapier can free up some of your time in this area. With Zapier, you can link apps and create simple rules to automatically post to your social networks when you add a new post or product to your site.

2. Evergreen Content – your evergreen content is content that stays relevant and doesn’t go out of date. This content can be recycled and sent out to your social channels again and again. Apps like Buffer and Hootsuite are great creating a queue or schedule of your current, curated, and evergreen content.

Another tool I recommend is MeetEdgar, which randomly selects your old posts and shares them to your social channels based on a schedule that you create.

3. Thank your followers – Using an app like SumAll can help you to acknowledge followers that interacted with you on Twitter. SumAll will go through your top mentions and retweets from the week and send out a thank you tweet on Friday’s.

Note: You have to be sensitive when you automate your social media in case of a local or global tragedy, and be ready to turn it off. You don’t want to be the jerk who’s still promoting while everyone else is grieving.