How To Automate Social Networks Intelligently

How To Automate Social Networks Intelligently

For many years, social media have become essential for communication and marketing strategy. There are some social media for all needs: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and many others.

Each of these media is an acquisition channel for your marketing strategy and you should not deprive yourself of it! There is however a major problem: sharing content on all these social networks is very time-consuming. As a project leader, your most valuable resource is time, and your goal is to save as much as possible to devote to activities that are more useful to the project.

Buffer is a tool that we use at Crux to alleviate this problem, and we would like to present it to you in this article. More than a simple tool presentation, we will explain the social media automation strategy we apply at Crux.

5 reasons to automate your social networks

As we said in the introduction, automating your social media saves a lot of time. But automation also has many other advantages.

Here they are:

1. Consistency

Automation also means liberation. Once the configuration is complete, you won’t have to think about anything else. No more weekly reminders to share a new article about your networks. It sounds “silly” like that, but we assure you it’s liberating when everything works automatically.

Once your strategy is in place, you are sure to be consistent in your social sharing. You can’t forget a network or forget to share new content. You will be constant as long as you produce new content on your different media.

2. Coherence

If your automation is well thought out and your tool allows it, you can integrate intelligence and consistency into your sharing. In particular, you can contextualize your automatic publications according to several indicators.

3. Employee advocacy

If you have employees, franchisees or even partners, be aware that they also use social media frequently. Chances are some are interested in sharing the content from your project.

By automating this strategy, people who want to will never forget to share and promote your new content. And, as you probably know, the more commitment a social network publication has, the more it will be seen.

4. The commitment criteria are more or less the same according to the social media:

• The number of views
• The number of likes
• The number of shares
• The number of comments

If you can automate publications intelligently and their sharing then you will gain a lot in terms of visibility. What we mean by “intelligently” is that it must remain natural in the eyes of social media.

In this case, what we really liked about Buffer is the possibility of adding delays. These are times in minutes that make sharing more human. With most tools, all sharing would be done instantly, while with this one it is possible to wait 10 minutes for one collaborator, then 15 minutes for another, etc.

5. Curation of content

To have authority in your market, one of the best known practices is content curation. It consists in sharing the content related to your theme.

Thanks to Buffer, it is possible to automatically share certain articles, videos or social publications in an intelligent way. It would be counterproductive to share all the contents of a certain data source again; they should be filtered intelligently and automatically if possible.

Social media automation strategy at Crux

As we said at the beginning of this article, we have integrated Buffer into our digital strategy.

We will present you this strategy in 2 steps:

• The functional specifications we wanted to have.
• The way we implemented them with Buffer.

Functional specifications of our social media strategy

Before we got into the tool, we started by imagining what we ideally wanted about social media, and here is the specification we wrote.

When a new blog article is published

• It is published on the LinkedIn company page from Crux
• It is shared on the Facebook page of Crux
• It is twittered on the Twitter account of Crux
• It is published on the profile pages of employees who so wish
• The Facebook publication is shared on the page/profiles of the collaborators who wish it
• The tweet is retweeted to the Twitter accounts of employees who so wish

When a new video is published on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn

• It’s tweeted on the Twitter account of Crux
• The tweet is retweeted to the Twitter accounts of employees who so wish
• Facebook publication is shared on Twitter accounts of collaborators who want it

When an image is published on Instagram

• It is shared on Twitter with a call to action to our Instagram account
• The tweet is retweeted to the Twitter accounts of employees who so wish

Implementation of social media strategy with Buffer

The Buffer interface is very similar to ActiveCampaign, if you know it. It is based on a process represented as a graph, some nodes being actions or conditions.

We find this presentation very clever and very practical. However, it requires a logical mind used to this kind of formalism. Allow half a day to master the tool and understand the different concepts.

Because Buffer is not just a stupid and mean republication tool. It defines a language, a universe and operating rules, and so much the better. Once the various concepts have been mastered, the operation becomes intuitive and the automation possibilities almost infinite. You define what you want to do and then implement it in the tool.