Social media is inherently both expressive and competitive. On one hand, it’s an opportunity for individuals and groups to communicate their ideas and to adopt new ones.

On the other hand, it’s a chance to fabricate a brand regardless of your intention, product, background, and more.

Legitimacy is secondary to attention and a following, when it comes to social media marketing.

For this reason, there is a constant innovative community producing tools and strategies that can be used to enhance the social media capability for everyone from big companies to small businesses and one man teams.

Marketing using social media is part science, part art form. It requires careful attention to details and analytics as well as structure for consistent results.

At the same time, interests, aesthetics, and trends are constantly shifting and it takes a special type of marketer to tap into and capitalize from new opportunities for their personal benefit in a timely manner.

Every tool can make a difference.

Whether your industry is entertainment, construction or staffing services, having a social media presence is important.

Using entertainment as an example, the ability to capture more attention by appearing in your target audiences feed based on your content, events or releases is predicated on being both interesting as well as easy to share.

Social media automation tools, for example, are used to do anything from automating graphic image or text based posts.

Using tools such as Hootsuite or a variety of WordPress plugins to make your content easier to spread can increase your reach and the overall strength of your message.

Automation’s whole point is to free up time usually used for mundane tasks. For simplicity’s sake, it’s akin to using robot to take repetitive action so that decision making is the greatest focus.

Consistency + Timing Is Key

Part of riding trends, as many are opting to for their particular industries, relies on being both consistent and having a good sense of timing.

A myriad of software provides analytic data and RSS feeds of breaking news or social media activity based on hashtags within their niche.

This keeps them both up to date and prepared to either re-post or create organic content that will be inline with the what their audience is interested in.

Some WordPress plugins and other software are able to directly syndicate this information onto their site and through their social pages.

For Instagram, it’s a bit more calculated, while on other text based social networks it’s easy to re-post relevant content, the accuracy of an image can’t be picked up off hashtags alone.

Riding social media trends on networks such as Instagram are harder to totally automate.

There is an opportunity to re-post based on hashtags, but the risk of sharing something that isn’t suited to the audience can be high depending on the niche. Not to mention, reach is in part reliant on the timing that posts are released as well as how they are received.

When events happen, many marketers attempt to haphazardly capitalize on them without taking consideration to their ability to do so. They assume by saying something they is relevant that they will successfully be able to do so.

Social media events are a perpetually emerging story, and trends are the lifeblood that keep it stimulated and growing.

For smaller teams, combing through every post that’s relevant to their niche won’t be easy, no matter how much its outsourced or automated.

It’s a gamble, and one that for some brands pays off and for others makes them pay.

Many digital marketing trends have a short window.  It’s not easy to pick out what will perform, and the problem lies in the shifting audience that social media marketing is reliant on.

To automate is to tame, and most firms overestimate their capability to do this. WordPress solutions are inherently content connected. Content for the social media sphere is fluid and it shows in the way that stories develop.

Reactions are important as the original story itself to shape the impact of what happens.  There is one moment that connects to another and most social media automation tools without an apt hand at the helm fall short in creating cohesion.

With an apt hand behind the wheel? The difference is staggering.

The best sites are ahead of the curve by picking out stories not only from larger pages in their niche, but by also isolating chatter with distinct keyword similarities in the smaller niches.

Key points to consider when thinking of beating a trend with a trend is:

1. Look at the players involved.
2. Understand what interests or selling point bonds the demographic has.
3. What brands they follow and why.
4. How they spend their time off.
5. What they do for work or study.

Trends & Trend Setting

Riding trends is an act of reaction. The best brands are adaptive. Whilst they are perfectly prepared to take on any new challenge and adapt to whatever the trend is, there is a need for being able to act as a taste-maker for what will come.

This means looking to what matters. The best and most flexible brands are the ones that can isolate and build upon successes.

An example, whilst many major food brands have blogs and social media pages that syndicate their content to let customers be aware of deals, unless its an explosive, it goes under the radar.

The ones that really succeed are the ones that know how to make the most out of what is happening around them. Automation for many brands that deftly handle the game that is social media marketing is but a foundation.

It’s the day to day content that keeps them and their reach on timelines and news feeds across social media due to their budget and brand reach.  The ones that are the best however know how to turn seemingly trend separate posts into social events.

Big Trends Vs. Little Trends

Businesses need short term profits. Short term attention calls to mind the tactics of such presenters as Evel Knievel and PT Barnum. Marketers that profited purely from curiosity and attention.

The reality is that for each creativity in expanding their brand, they couldn’t sell much more than widespread creativity.

Many try and go for viral attention opposed to channeled attention. It comes from a lack of understanding of their market beyond the fact that people may or may not buy their product.

Businesses that try and attack to build brand on social media sphere with a wide eyed interest in the magic attention of global eyes often find themselves stuck with little attention and much money wasted.

Why?

They try and jump on smaller trends. It goes back to an earlier mention of how many brands haphazardly re-post content or shoot out content based on a hashtag that gets a lot of traffic instead of what is inline with what their company message is.

Riding big trends constantly and getting better at it via automation is possible and pays longer dividends. Arby’s use of gamer, anime, and greater popular culture as a basis for their social media posts is an example of premier attention to detail and growth.

Their posts that regularly syndicate stylized impressions of specific popular anecdotes from films, games, and TV shows wins over the hearts of their target audience via art. Beyond that, because it connects to their message, it makes them into evangelists.

There’s a reason that many brands have adapted the easiest version of social media automation, by pre-setting roasts and other forms of aggressive marketing on their otherwise professional and pristine channels.

They lack the creativity to use trends to their advantage, and for this reason are doomed to look like an old person slapping their television telling Netflix to work.

To Reiterate

If you’re a business leader that wants nothing more than to focus on your company’s future, you probably haven’t been having such a great time in the social media age.

As if running an entire business wasn’t enough, now you have to pay attention to a whole set of operations that didn’t exist a couple of decades ago.

Sure, it’s an excellent way to promote business, but it can take focus away from building the business itself, especially if you aren’t an expert.

If you’ve related a little too closely to some of what I’ve said, there’s only one word you need to know: automation.

For small & medium business owners especially, this can be a lifesaver; if you ask Articulate Marketing, it’s essential for them. More than a quarter gain revenue from trying it, and more than three quarters end up seeing higher conversion rates.

They aren’t alone in their praise, either. A writer for the site of famed marketer Jeff Bullas speaks at length about how an automated strategy puts the organizational reigns in your hands.

With many of the top programs, you can do anything from scheduling post frequency, to organizing what posts go up where, and a range of other activities, all with the same service.

As social media expands, beyond the scope of what platforms currently exists, there will be a need for more niche specific platforms to fill in the gaps. More often than not, smaller platforms fail because they don’t understand their target demographic.

That’s where large platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram begin to thrive. Because they are able to appeal to multiple social groups at once, they are able to survive longer than smaller platforms. Having more engagement in social media platforms is a must, and these companies have done it with no problem.

Reliability

One of the main benefits of automation is reliability. Having automated posts is more efficient, and it allows you to have better control over your social media presence.

For example, let’s say that you have to schedule 10 posts on your Facebook page. While you could rely on someone to do so, having an automated system will make it easier for you to plug in and forget it. This allows you to work on more high-end projects, while keeping your social media presence more appealing to your audience.

Improved Marketing Strategies

Social media automation tools give you more control over your social media accounts. This allows you to post more content, allowing your fans to engage with the persona you’re presenting online fully.

Depending on what tool you use, you’ll have control over the site content that’s shared, the frequency of the posting, and the time that the content is posted on social media.

Plus, when you can manage the control of the engagement your platform is receiving, you’ll be able to modify your strategy to improve your brand and get more likes, retweets, and shares.

Since social media tools allow you to obtain more insight into the extent and the nature of the relationship with audience, you’ll be able to share more content in a precise, more targeted manner.

In fact, automation allows you to work with more value; it will allow you to post more frequently, on more accounts, allowing you to have control over your brand.

Frees up Your Time

One of the biggest benefits of automation is that it saves up time.

Rather than wasting hours of finding content that will have a possibility of being shared, and give the site a few visitors, use tools to discover relevant content and identify trending topics.

With a centralized dashboard to manage and schedule the content in advance instead of taking time to post in content manually on each profile.

Remember, the main objectives of building a social media brand are to make your presence more relatable. This goal will only be achieved if you’re able to connect to your audience.

Conclusion

In essence, social media automation is the best tool to use in social media marketing.

Not only is it more efficient, but it allows you to deliver a unique persona to your audience, without the hassle of manual error. So think on using social media automation tools the next time you’re on a social media marketing campaign.

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