Social Media Automation Tools: Should You Use Them or Not?

We have previously pointed out reasons your business needs social media marketing services, however, many users especially rookies find it challenging to keep up with the engagement and consistency required of them by social media platforms. Your social media presence is pertinent to the success of your brand in a digitally evolving generation like ours. Several social media platforms are springing up regularly so you should be taking advantage of them, especially the popular ones among them to make your brand known to a wider audience.

Due to the misuse of third-party social media automation tools, most platforms have regulated their policies to disfavour these tools, that is why brands are opting out of them rapidly. It has been discovered that some people create fake accounts and unauthentic engagement (likes, follows, and comments) on social media platforms through the use of these tools. As a brand, you might be looking for ways to save time and improve your interactions with your audience, so you opt-in to use social media automation tools but end up getting yourself in a mess by the time your account is suspended.

Best Practices for The Use of Social Media Automation Tools.

If you have to use a social media automation tool, we suggest you use it in the right way that is in line with the privacy and policies of social media platforms. You might not be aware, but these platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc) all use machine language to identify unauthentic activities such as duplication of content, multiple follows, likes, comments and fake accounts. For example, on Twitter, any attempt to automate activities, disseminate spam or get involved in similar behaviour, may result in enforcement action.

When building a social media community for your business page, you shouldn’t just be trying to grow insignificant numbers but aiming at increasing the number of people that are willing to interact with your brand and engage with your page. Like its frequently said, social media popularity doesn’t always equate sales or business success; that is why you should channel your effort towards a relevant audience that can be nurtured with the use of quality content and later converted into customers.

Using automation tools to schedule content is an effective way to be consistent and post content at peak times, however, it significantly drops the level of users engagement. Let’s look at it this way, usually, when you interact with the pages of other users for about 30 minutes before uploading your content, you tend to have an increased number of reach and engagement on your post. Furthermore, if you are solely reliant on the use of social media automation tools to schedule your post, you will miss out on meaningful human interactions and lose your brand personality.

It is only advisable that as a brand on social media, you should avoid signing into a third-party app that requests for you to input your username and password into an API that is not Instagram’s login page. Having said all of this, we recommend that you check your social media accounts to find out what applications are connected to your account. Ensure you log out of any tool that contravenes a social media platform’s policies; you don’t want to watch them ban an account you have invested so much time to build. To remove third-party apps connected to your Instagram account, visit your settings section, click on security then locate ‘Apps and Websites’, click on ‘Active’ to see the connected accounts then click on ‘Remove’ to get disconnected from such tools.

Social media automation tools are created to help organize and document your content series to ensure your consistency. Don’t get lazy and don’t let it take over your job; reap the rewards of growing your page organically.