Automate Your Social Media Strategy
Programmatically publishing your dynamic social media content, in a way that no GUI allows, can bring your social media strategy to a whole new level.
Do you post content on social media for your business? If so, then you already know the value that social media networks bring. You get improved brand awareness, generate new sales leads, improve your search engine rankings, drive customer engagement, and build a bigger community talking about your business.
Most businesses have a simple process: a creator creates the post content and then manually schedules the post on multiple social media channels using an aggregator service like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social. These are great products and save the creator considerable time when posting to several networks at once, and often this is called automation. However, this process misses an incredible opportunity to have truly automated content creation and publishing.
The Power of Content
Many businesses are realizing that they have a wealth of untapped content to offer for social media distribution. Certain types of posts need to be curated by a human and posted via a GUI. But increasingly, businesses of all sizes have an opportunity to enhance their social media presence by automating the creation and publishing of content.
Programmatically publishing your dynamic social media content, in a way that no GUI allows, can bring your social media strategy to a whole new level. Let’s take a closer look.
Dynamic Content Requires Automated Workflows
If your business creates or aggregates content in a way that is interesting to users, then you can leverage that on social media in an automated way. Here are a few examples that should get you thinking about how you can leverage your own content:
- Leaderboards: If your product has rankings of players or participants, then you can post your top 5 players each day.
- Alerts: If your product tracks some kind of data, and then alerts users when the data hits a threshold, that is a great candidate to automate. Perhaps when a stock or currency hits a certain price, then you want to post some data on that stock. Or perhaps top news headline alerts.
- New Item Announcements: If you have an e-commerce site, then you can announce new products as they are added to your site. Imagine every new product that is added to your inventory automatically posted to all your social media accounts.
- Key Indicators: If you track an important indicator that you want to share with your users, like ‘total customers’ or ‘number of shared objects’ then you can automate that to celebrate important thresholds that you cross.
- Job Posting: If you are a job board, whenever a new job is added, auto-post the listing to you networks. You can even setup a process to have a theme/category a day – Monday is Finance, Tuesday is Tech, etc.
In each of these examples, the posting of dynamically generated content, that by its very nature can’t feasibly be handled manually, has been automated.
Use External Data Sources
There are three types of content you can automatically post: event-driven, internal-generated, and external-generated content.
Event-driven is when something occurs in your system. For example a new product is added to your catalog. Internal-generated is when you create content within your own system. For example, you create daily financial reports of particular companies.
External-generated content is when you bring in content from outside your system. This type of content can be a powerful resource to bolster your social media presence, and easy to implement. For example, say you sell Apple products and your users are interested in the latest headlines about Apple. You should auto-post about any of your new products, but you can also automatically post headlines from Apple news resources like Appleinsider.com or MacRumors.com. Now your social media contains news about about both your products and general Apple news, potentially attracting more followers.
How do you auto-post external-generated news to your social media networks? Easy. Most news organizations have something called an RSS feed. The RSS feed contains all the articles, but in a computer friendly format. There are a few social media scheduling tools, such as Buffer, Sendible, or Ayrshare that take in an RSS feed and will automatically post to your networks.
We’ve even seen news organization use their own website RSS feed to automatically post to all their social media networks.
The Sky’s the Limit
There is no limit to what you can automate in your business. If you have insights, data, or updates, you probably have content your users would love to access but is often too difficult to share. By signing up for Ayrshare, you can start programmatically publishing this untapped content to your social networks and your users.
