4 Social Media Tools to Automate Your Marketing

This is episode 14 of Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Welcome to Author Audience where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. Today I'm rolling out the red carpet and inviting you to join me as I share all about four different tools you can use to automate your social media. My name is Shelley Hitz. I'm the owner of Author Audience Academy where my members are successfully publishing new books almost every day. And some have even become number one Amazon best selling authors in their categories within days of publishing their books. So simply by following my proven system, I believe each one of you has a God given message to share with the world. And it's my passion to help you reach your audience with your message. One way to do that is through social media marketing and that's what we're talking about today. It's time for this week's Center Stage Spotlight training. This is where I share training and strategies to help you grow your business or ministry through writing and publishing books, marketing online and creating products and services to sell on the back end. I'm not just about books, but so much more. I'm here to help you connect with your audience in the best way possible. And so today's episode is about social media marketing. It's episode 414 titled 4 Social Media Tools to automate your marketing. I know this is going to bring you one more step closer to getting your message to more people. Be prepared to shine. So first off, I want to talk about what to consider when automating social media posts. Now there are definitely times that you do not want to automate your social media. You need to be engaging, you need to be replying and connecting with your audience in a way that is authentic. And if you're automating everything, it will come off as a robot. People will be able to sniff that out and they will tune you out eventually. But if you're authentic in the way that you're doing your social media marketing, then it can be powerful to automate certain things. So you can automate evergreen post, post like post back to your blog posts that are evergreen and information that's really valuable, things that lead back to your opt ins for free gifts, free trainings, things that your target audience will want and they'll give their email address in exchange, quotes, reviews, things like that. They can be automated. However, you never want to automate your replies to people. And one mistake I've seen people doing is they will have their Twitter automatically posted on Facebook that will include all of their applies. And that looks really, really unprofessional because it's not referring to anyone on Facebook and yet it's posting on Facebook and we're left out of the conversation and it just doesn't make sense. So you really need to use common sense when automating social media and you definitely do not want to automate everything.

So I'm going to share today 4 tools to consider using to automate your social media posts. There are a ton more and I'm actually going to cover even more in my Take Action workshop in Author Audience Academy this month. You can join us@authoraudienceacademy.com and get access to this training on automating your social media marketing. But I'm going to actually cover four of the tools that you can consider today. And these are four tools that kind of come up on top for me regarding social media port posting and automating your posts. The first one is Post Planner. Now I've personally used Post Planner. I have primarily used it up to this point for getting content ideas. They have a great section. I love it. I've been in there so much lately the last few months, getting ideas of questions to ask, conversation starters, things like that. And I love using that. It's also really good to see what content is going viral on online. You can actually look at your competitors and other pages related to your niche and see what content that they're using is really popular. And then that will give you an idea. Obviously you do not want to copy, but it will give you an idea of the type of content your target audience is responding to. I love that. But Post Planner also lets you schedule repeating posts. This is so helpful when you're wanting to automate your marketing. You can do this for your blog posts. Like I said, opt ins different quotes and reviews or things like that. Obviously you'll want to use strategy with how often you repeat these posts. On Twitter you can repeat them more often than on Facebook. And right now Post Planner is just for Facebook and Twitter and it's actually really reasonable to get started. Currently at the time of recording this podcast, you can get started for as low as $7 a month and they have even some coupons going around that you can actually get started at $5 a month if you find those. And so it's actually really, really reasonable to get started and you can not only get tons of really great content ideas, but then you can also schedule recurring posts. And the other thing I like is you can set up a schedule so you can actually set up the times that you want your post to go out. And you can just fill all, you can fill that account with like a, like it's a bucket with a ton of different post ideas. And so you can say at 9am I want an image to go out. At 11am, I want text to go out. At this, you know, at 2pm I want a link to go out. And then you just fill your bucket, you fill your content with all those different types of posts and Post Planner will just rotate posting the different types of posts that you have filled in there. So that's a really cool, cool option as well. Like I said, I personally haven't used all the other features on Post Planner, but I'm in the process of getting a better system going for my brand author audience. And I want to start automating certain things. And so I definitely am going to consider Post Planner since I already have an account. The second tool I want to share with you is hootsuite. I have used hootsuite for years. You can get started with hootsuite for free. You can import three different social media profiles for free and you can use it. You can schedule easily through their calendars. And the thing with hootsuite is they don't currently have an easy way to schedule recurring tweets or recurring posts, but you can use a bulk upload. So let's say you have a bulk upload and you have these recurring posts that you want to go out, then you just have to change the dates and all of that. It's a little bit complicated to figure out with the Excel spreadsheet and all that, but. But that is possible and that's probably the best way to do recurring post through hootsuite. Hootsuite offers more social media platforms than any of the other tools I was researching. They have Twitter, Facebook, Google pages, LinkedIn, and now they just recently added Instagram. So there's a lot of, a lot of options with hootsuite as far as where to post your content. And yet there's some limitations too with actually automating it to recur on an ongoing basis. The third tool I wanted to mention is Buffer Buffer. You can actually choose to rebuffer different posts that you've posted in the past, or they now have an advanced scheduler that you can, when you put A tweet in or you put a post in, you can schedule multiple times to have it go out. And so it's not ongoing forever like Post Planner might be. But it definitely gives you some options for reusing those tweets and posts more often than even hootsuite. You can start with Buffer for free with one profile per social media platform. They currently do Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. And then they have, right now their next account would be about $10 a month. And then you can have 10 profiles per social media platform and it includes Pinterest, as far as I could tell in my research. Now, all of this is subject to change. You know, this is at the time of my recording this podcast, but I just want to give you an idea and a comparison of some places that you know you might want to check out for your automation. So Buffer is a great one also to get started with. You can use it for free and see how you like it and then upgrade if you would like later. A new tool that a lot of people have been talking about is Meet Egger. And Meet Egger allows you to actually recycle posts in different categories. So you can have an inspirational category, a humorous category, a teaching category, and all kinds of different categories, and then you can recycle the posts in those categories at specified times. Very powerful. And all the feedback I've gotten is that it's just a really great tool. They currently support Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but this is a little more expensive investment. Right now they start at $49 a month for 10 accounts. And so it is going to be a little more expensive to get started. But if you do a lot of heavy scheduling and this can free up a lot of your time, then it may be worth it. Right now I really think that Post Planner is one of the best options to get started with because it has not only the content ideas and gives you a lot of great ideas that way, but there's also the ability to schedule. However, it's limited to Facebook and Twitter. So if you're wanting to post to Google pages or LinkedIn or Instagram, then Hootsuite would be probably a better option for you. If you need to start with a free account, then I recommend start looking at either hootsuite or Buffer. And so those are just a few initial ideas from the research that I did on automation tools. Like I said, I'm going to be going into this even deeper in our Take Action workshop for Author Audience Academy and wanted to at least share with you these four tools to kind of get you started to thinking of how can I automate my social media marketing and free up some of my time. Now the key thing to remember when scheduling your social media marketing is you need to think about your target audience. Think about your customer, think about the person on the other side. Yes, automation frees us up. Yes, automation is good for us. But what is best for our target audience? I want you to think about that because that is the key thing to remember when you're scheduling your social media. You don't want to automate relationships. Social media is all about relationships marketing. The foundation of marketing is about relationships. So in the end, you really need to be thinking about your target audience, your customer, and think about that as if you were in their place. How it would feel to be getting all these automated tweets and posts again with the content that you post. My recommendation is 80% be content related and 20% promotional. So that's something else to keep in mind when you're scheduling and automating your social media posts. Lights, Camera. Action. Are you ready for this week's Take action tip? So I want you to think about the four different tools that I gave you to automate social media and I want you to do a little bit of research on your own and decide on one to start using. You can get all of the details with the links and all of my recommendations in the show notes for Today's episode@authoraudience.com for.

That'S the number 14 authoraudience.com 14. And when you get that, then you'll have the links. You'll have everything right there in a handy dandy list so that you can look again and compare them. And then I want you to choose one tool. I want you to choose one tool and start trying it out this next week. See how you like it. If you decide you don't want to use it, try another one of the tools I suggested and find out if there's a way that you can start taking some of this social media posting off of your daily schedule and scheduling and automating some of it. It is powerful when you do this. Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this week's Godly Gains segment, which is all about keeping Christ at the center of all we do. In the end, it's not about us, it's about him if we're followers of Christ. And so the scripture I want to share this week is a very simple scripture, and it's a phrase that's often talked about in our culture, even outside of the Christian circles. The verse comes from Luke 6:31 and it says, do to others as you would like them to do to you. It's the Golden Rule. It's what we hear often do unto others as you would like them to do unto you. And I want you to think about this Scripture as you're scheduling and automating your social media posts. You want to treat your customers and your target audience in the same way that you would want to be treated. You would not want a relationship to be 100% automated. And so I don't recommend that you automate 100% of your social media. You want to be social, you want to interact, but there are definitely things that you can automate and there are definitely evergreen posts and tweets that you can schedule. If you missed last week's episode, make sure to listen in on that because talk about how to create an evergreen tweet document to help you with this process. But again, think about others and how they would want to be treated and proceeded. Succeed in your marketing in that light. It's my hope and my goal that these episodes are bringing you one step closer to being able to shine and reach more people with your message. I'm so excited to see the results you get when you start automating a percentage of your social media marketing and free up some of your time so you can do the things you love, whether it's writing, spending time with family, traveling, or even other goals that you have or things that you love to do.

If you've been getting value from this podcast and feel the urge to leave a review on itunes, I have a gift for you. Simply post a review on itunes and send me a screenshot and I'll give you my $47 course procrastination to publication for free. Simply send me an email@contactellehits.com and and I'll make sure to send you this gift right away. Remember to tune in for my next episode, which we'll be continuing to talk about social media marketing and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, we grab Shelly's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.