Social media – the words are enough to strike terror into the hearts of many Small Business owners.
Experts say we should be posting multiple times a day on social media, depending on the platform. That is if we want optimal results and good engagement.
Three times a day on Twitter, five times a day on Pinterest and twice a day on Facebook. That doesn’t include posting on Instagram and LinkedIn.How’s a Small Business supposed to cope?
By cheating, that’s how. And you cheat by automating at least some of your social media activities.
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There’s no substitute for being online and engaging with your audience, but you don’t have to be there for every post.
Here’s how to automate your social media activity.
Distribute Your Blog Like Magic
Send your blog posts out to social media automatically, the moment they go live. You can use a plugin if you use WordPress, or a tool like Zapier (more on that later).
Different plugins have different features and abilities so it’s worth taking a moment to check out what you’re after.
If your blog has lots of images, and you’re on Pinterest, the Pinterest Automatic Pin WordPress Plugin is essential. Whilst the plugin only does one thing, it does it well.
When your post goes live all the images are automatically pinned to your Pinterest account.
If you have a lot of evergreen content on your site Revive Old Post is indispensable.
Resharing old content boosts social engagement and ensures your audience sees your work, as they often miss it the first time around.
Revive Old Post sends new posts out to your social media accounts automatically, the moment the post goes live. But it also allows you to set up a schedule to share your old posts.
Use One Platform to Feed Another
Tools like Zapier and IFTTT (which stands for If This Then That) connect apps. Basically, an action in one place can result in an action in another place.
Let me give you an example.Say you’re posting on Instagram two or three times a day. You can use either of Zapier or IFTTT to automatically share your Instagram pictures as native Twitter photos at the same time.
Or to put your Instagram photos on a Pinterest board, or to share them on Facebook.Both tools have a bunch of ‘Zaps’ or ‘recipes’ and it’s a simple matter of choosing the ones you want and following the prompts.
Load Things Up In Advance
Load up all your social media activity once a week – or once a month – using a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.
You can load up almost anything – articles, links, photos or videos – or just type in a comment.
Each tool has different features, so you may prefer one over the other but they both allow you to pre-load and schedule your social media posts.
They also allow you to choose your own times, create a schedule or let the system decide the best time for the content to go out.
Find and Post Popular Content
Post Planner is a tool that’s a little bit like Buffer and Hootsuite, but it has one major difference.
It helps you find content that is ‘scientifically proven’ to boost engagement, skyrocket reach and drive more traffic to your site.
It shows you the top performing content for your niche or topic and ranks it by virality, and allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
You can also add content from Instagram although – like many social media automation tools – you can’t post to Instagram using Post Planner.
Save Time on Social Media
So now you know how to cheat at social media you can be everywhere at once without lifting a finger.It’s how the big guys do it, and you can do it too.
So get out there and get automating.You’ll save yourself hours and boost your social engagement. What are you waiting for?
This article first appeared on Smallville.
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