How To Automate Your Social Media Posting

In today’s world, companies that can best leverage automation to augment their company’s performance, are at a significant advantage compared to companies that aren’t able to leverage these tools effectively. Scale and volume are the name of the game, especially in B2B tech firms.

In this post we’ll break down how you can leverage social media automation tools to augment your social media efforts, increase the reach of your content, get more visibility for your brand, generate more leads, and close more deals.

What Tool We Use

I’ve tried everything from Hootsuite To Buffer To SEMRush and beyond for social media marketing automation, but I’ve settled on Publer. Full disclosure, I am an affiliate and you can sign up at the link below if you’d like:

Social Media Automation Tool, Publer

I’m a big fan of Publer for a few reasons.

1. They have the most expansive capability to distribute video content to multiple platforms. It’s been a while since I’ve shopped the market, but the last time I checked, the ability to publish video content to multiple platforms was limited by other tools.
2. Their recycling feature is fantastic. You can automatically designate publishing schedules and then recycle the same posts over and over at defined intervals. They have one of the most seamless ways to re-post and get more out of your content marketing efforts.
3. I love the ability to scrape RSS feeds. One thing I wanted to do when shopping was scrape RSS feeds for content and publish them as thought leadership content. Specifically I was looking for a way to re-publish articles from SaaStr at the time.

I mention this tool because in this article we’ll look at how to use Publer to augment social media efforts through automation.

The Benefits Of Social Media Automation

For small but growing B2B tech companies, like bootstrapping SaaS companies, MSPs, and Cybersecurity firms, customer acquisition is a top priority. Setting up a defined sales cycle and pushing people through an experience, is a great way to close more deals and stand out from your competition. Social media often plays a key middle funnel role within that experience. Pushing out a set of core content and staying top of mind during the consideration phase of a purchasing journey is something B2B brands can benefit from and help new customers get in the door.

While this is a powerful marketing and sales support tool, it’s an approach that comes with a cost.

The Drawbacks of Automating Your Company’s Social Media Marketing

One of the reasons this approach can have a negative effect is that over time is that your content will become stale and you may not have the brand voice you’re hoping to convey with a more personalized and manual approach. Existing friends of the brand may churn off your company’s social media following and hinder long term growth.

For small companies these drawbacks are typically an acceptable risk for the prospect of shoring up the middle funnel.

How You Can Mitigate These Effects

Continue publishing new original content in addition to your re-posted content and syndicated content. As your repository of content grows, you can modify your posting schedules and posting frequency to better align with long term growth goals and avoid saturating audiences with too much frequency.

Update core content periodically to reflect new information and current trends.

Automating One Post Per Day To Create A Better Social Presence

I try to orient sales processes at Tortoise and Hare Software around a 90 day first contact to close. Because of that, I wanted to make sure that I had daily social media coverage during the week over a 90 day period. I spent time creating one social media post per day and scheduling it in the automation queue with a reposting every 90 days.

Watch the video below for how to configure a Publer account for re-posting, and how to create and re-post or recycle core content for your brand at a regular intervals.

What Sort Of Content To Post

Ok, so now you how to create a post once and re-post it over and over again at specific intervals to get more mileage out of your social media content. But what should you post?

• New blog posts on your website
• Product pages and service description pages
• Your company story
• Core values
• Causes you support
• Any offers your company has, such whitepapers, eBooks, checklists, audits, etc.
• Key team member bios
• New videos
• Tips/Tricks/Educational tidbits
• Case Studies
• Testimonials

For key content, try pitching the same content in a couple of different ways so you can see which pitches work better over time. For instance you might want to talk about price in one post, purchase benefits in another, an anecdote on how it helped someone in another, while sending them to the same landing page.

Scraping RSS Feeds For More Social Media Content

One way to avoid saturating your audience too quickly with the same set of repetitive posts is to mix in content from influential companies in your industry. For instance SaaStr is an influential company in the SaaS space. If the company has an RSS feed for their blog (and they should) you can scrape new content that is published from their blog and re-post it on your social media pages automatically. We us this feature to scrape content from influencer companies in SaaS, IT, and Cybersecurity.

The trick in using this feature is to find a company that publishes with an acceptable frequency and that doesn’t post too many self promotional articles that are going to alienate your companies readers. RSS feeds on blog taxonomy pages, such as category or tag pages in WordPress, are a great way to keep the content focused on a particular type of post.

Watch the video below to see how to scrape an RSS Feed into a repository of post-able content and how to configure Publer to automatically post new RSS feed content.

Final Thoughts On How To Automate Your Social Media Posting

Smaller brands can expand their reach and become more competitive in the market by leveraging social media automation tools to enhance their organic social posting efforts. Companies that can supervise the automation correctly and balance the needs of their audience with the needs of their sales teams, can turn social media into a powerful middle funnel tool that helps nurture prospects, engage an audience, and close more deals.