Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links
Last Friday I presented at the Tulsa Tech Festival. This one-day technology conference focuses on educating attendees about various topics in technology. These topics vary from general IT to information security, computer programming, game development, social media, entrepreneurship and more.
Automate Your Social Media
I spoke on the social media track, the title of my presentation was Save Time Automate Your Social Media.
Below is the PowerPoint Presentation which I went over during my presentation.
Presentation Overview
The PowerPoint alone doesn’t say a whole lot. Therefore I thought I’d feature a full post on what I went over during the presentation itself.
Why Business Should Use Social Media
If you are reading this you probably already are using social media or plan to. According to a 2016 survey of 352 small business by Clutch showed 73% planned to use social media in 2016. In fact having a social media presence came ahead of a company’s website.
Having a social media presence is important not just to business but also for personal branding as well.
Top reasons for having a social media presence includes:
- Customers: according to Forbes 78% of consumers say that posts by companies they follow on social media impact their purchases.
- Exposure: there are currently 1 billion daily Facebook users and 75 million Instagram users, to name a few. Using social media gives you the ability to seek out and engage with your target market.
- Lead nurturing and high conversion rate: people rarely purchase on first exposure, however, social media can help to develop a rapport with potential customers. Conversion rate refers to those interactions that lead to customer purchase.
- Competitors: your competitors are already on social media and if you are not taking advantage of this you are missing out on potential business.
What Networks to Use
There are so many social networks today it can be overwhelming.
The Snyder Group has a great infographic that gives an overview of each of the top social networks their demographics, purpose, pros and cons.
Know Your Target Audience
It is important to have a clear understanding of your audience in order to choose the right social network. This is why creating detailed customer profiles/persons is so helpful when getting started.
The Whole Brain Group offers a great social media checklist that can help get you started in defining your target audience and moving on from there.
Social Media Best Practices
In today’s marketing environment there is no longer a push mentality, where the business pushes a promotion or product to the customer. Instead, markets have turned the tables allowing customers to pull information that directs them to a purchase.
This is achieved by:
- Creating an Experience your customers want to be apart of
- Identifying an audience with shared values (business goals that overlap with customers goals)
Frequency and Timing
In order to create the best experience, it is important to be present on social media. In fact, studies have shown that it is far more damaging to have a non-active social media account than to not have one at all.
With that said there are countless infographics and blog posts that discuss the frequency to post to each network along with the best times to post.
Social Media Automation
Given the best practices regarding frequency and timing of social media posts, you are probably thinking who has time for all of this?
This is why social media automation is so helpful. Using various tools you schedule weeks to a month out of posts, reuse and cross promote posts, all while freeing up your time to do other important things.
Automation Tools
There are several tools for automation, however, for this presentation, I went over a handful which I have used extensively.
- Viraltag : This is by far my favorite and overs scheduling to several networks including Pinterest and Instagram. They have a widget tool and built-in photo editor, the only downside is that it doesn’t really offer analytics of any kind. (See my 5 Reasons You Should be Using Viraltag post)
- Buffer : One of the first to allow for Google + connectivity and recently added Instagram posting.
- Hootsuite : Has a very similar interface to Buffer and offers many of the same features. It also allows for you to set up feeds much like Tweetdeck.
- Later : Allows you to schedule Instagram posts only. While it doesn’t seem useful compared to the other tools. You can schedule these posts from your phone, the others you have to use a computer.
- IFTTT : Is a free service that allows you to connect other services together. It has endless uses, for example, you can keep a record of all your tweets, by setting up an IFTTT recipe where ever Tweet you make is automatically saved to a google spreadsheet.
- WordPress Plugins : WordPress is typically for blogging but there are some content scheduling tools such as the Editorial Calendar plugin that can keep your posts organized in a schedule.
More Resources
Since I was limited to 45 minutes for my presentation there was only so much I could cover. However, there are countless other resources when it comes to social media.
In fact, I have a Pinterest board full of social media resources that I would like to share with you.
Try Viraltag
As I mentioned earlier I am in love with Viraltag. I’ve been using it for over 6 months now and pretty much use that along with some quick IFTTT recipes.
I was so fond of Viraltag I became a Viraltag affiliate and when I told them I was going to feature them in a presentation they provided me with a special promotional code to share with you guys.
This 2-month free subscription is for a limited time only so be sure to visit the link below and use the coupon code at checkout.
I hope that this has been helpful to you and your social media ventures. Also, if you find you would like me to write a more step-by-step review of any of the tools I mentioned in this post, please let me know.
Looking for a Speaker?
If you are looking for a speaker for your next event please feel free to contact me. Learn more by visiting my Orate Speaker Profile
What an awesome idea! Somehow it never occurred to me that anything like this existed, but it sounds really handy. There are some times of day when I’ve got plenty of time on my hands for posting, and other times when I’m at work or travelling and can’t do it. I actually just checked out Later, I think I’m going to give them a whirl. Thank you for such an informative post!
Jessica, I’m glad you found it useful. I’m so busy there is no way I could keep up with social media, if it wasn’t for these tools. Anyways I’m glad you learned something new. Love to hear what you thought of Later 😉
Congratulations on getting a chance to present at this event. Your presentation and this post are excellent. Thank you for going so in-depth and for sharing your wealth of knowledge on social media with us (I especially like the graphic that shows how many users each of those huge social media sites currently has). Great stuff across the board, my friend!
xoxo ♥ Jessica
Thanks Miss Jessica, I am always happy to share my knowledge with others 😉