How to Automate Your Social Media Marketing: My #1 Tip for Saving Valuable Time Online

Recently I was asked what is my number one tip for saving time with online marketing. After a few quick beats, it hit me right away.

Facebook Google+ Twitter — Figuring out the social media puzzle

My number one tip for saving time with online marketing is to use automation in your social media marketing. Following the 80/20 rule of focusing most of your time in your business on things that directly increase your bottom line (like driving traffic to products you create or affiliate offers and building a relationship with your list), the idea here is to massively improve your efficiency.

Social media marketing is one aspect of marketing yourself online that involves spreading your message and building awareness of your brand or business on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ Pinterest, Instagram and so on.

You could spend literally an entire day from morning to night logging into each of those platforms posting new content, adding images, following up with fans, and things like that. Now you should be actively monitoring your social media and check it once a day to respond or interact with people but you can save a lot of time by using automation.

So, what tools do I use to automate social media marketing? Read on to find 5 ways that I personally automate my social media marketing plus one new tool that promises to do everything in one!

What's Inside

1 JetPack
2 If This Then That
3 Paid WordPress Plugins (WP Fan Machine and WP Social Traffic)
4 Built-In Automation
5 Commercial Solutions
6 One Last Thing – A New Tool (BluePagePro)!

JetPack

Number one if you use WordPress then go ahead and create a free account at wordpress.com. Then inside your self-hosted WordPress go to plugins and search for and install the free Jetpack plugin. It comes with a lot of great things such as cloud-based storage and optimization of your site’s images, related posts features, built-in security and so forth.

But, the number one thing it has built-in is the ability to automatically send posts you publish on your self-hosted WordPress site to other social platforms such as Facebook and Google+ Twitter and a few other platforms without having to create or install an app or deal with APIs, etc.

Doing this one thing will go a long way to saving time and allowing you to focus on the core of your business.

There are other really useful tools that I use for super powering my social media marketing automation. I’ll develop tutorials if there is a demand for it, but for now I’ll just name the tools and briefly describe what they do. Keep reading for more!

If This Then That

With this platform (there’s actually a thing as IFTTT SEO – Google it to learn more) you can use, say a Tumblr or Twitter account and automatically blast content out to all of your social media. IFTTT connects APIs from dozens if not hundreds of online social media and bookmarking platforms in a simple recipe-based interface. Lots of recipes are built in (e.g. get an email when content of a certain type is published, or a weather alert each day, etc.)

Paid WordPress Plugins (WP Fan Machine and WP Social Traffic)

Two additional (paid) automation tools I would highly recommend are plugins for WordPress called WP Fan Machine and WP Social Traffic by Ankur Shukla and sold on JV Zoo. The author makes great WordPress plugins in general and has others, but these are two I use regularly to power up fans for sites. They do two different things. One creates the ability to post from your blog to Facebook in a way that encourages people to visit your website. The other one is useful for building up fan pages by automatically posting friendly messages to active fan pages in your niche.

Built-In Automation

No matter what type of automation you still should check into your social media accounts manually once a day just to see if you need to reply or respond or otherwise interact with new followers. Some of the platforms also have integrated automation to help with this.

In Facebook, you can set your message box to automatically reply to messages, thanking them and letting people know you’ll respond to them shortly. (If you don’t really spend time online or are getting lots of spam in your Facebook message box, you can also turn off messaging altogether. Problem solved!)

social media empire — Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Have to Overwhelm

There is a 3rd party service integrated with Twitter called Round Team (RoundTeam.co – that’s not a typo!) . You log in by logging first into your Twitter account, then create your account on the service. It does a ton of stuff and has paid features, but I for now only use the free tools. What I use it for is to retweet content from my niche to my Twitter feed 24/7. It does this by using your curated Twitter Lists (which can be set to private or public). Lists in Twitter are a fantastic way to keep your pulse on your niche market. Using RoundTeam means you have automatic content for your social media Empire going all day long.

Now, combine that with IFTTT and you see how far you can take this automation thing. It’s pretty wild and the results so far have been great, in terms of fans and traffic and list sign ups on sites where I haven’t started to backlink and that are nowhere near page 1 in Google search results.

Commercial Solutions

To streamline the process of your daily social media check-ins even further, you can use tools like HootSuite, Buffer or Edgar to log in to all of your accounts and reply from a dashboard without even leaving. You can also schedule all of your social media posts into the future and more.

One Last Thing – A New Tool (BluePagePro)!

There is a new tool that just came out on JV Zoo that promises complete social media marketing automation. It’s called BleuPage Pro.

It comes with one-click social media publishing, content fetching, complete scheduling automation, and WordPress integration. You can pay monthly, annually or a super inexpensive lifetime license. I haven’t picked it up yet, but when I do, I’ll post my review here.

In the meantime, if you are reading this and have purchased Bleupage Pro, post your experiences with it below. I’m personally curious and am sure others would find it valuable to know what this new software is like.

I hope this tip on doing everything you can to automate your social media and the tools above that I use will also help you scale your online marketing efficiently!