You’ve probably heard of social media automation tools.
You know, those tools that does all the heavy lifting for you by automating your social media campaigns.
I’m talking about a hands-free tool that creates images, overlays inspirational quotes, and posts them regularly to your social media accounts for you.
In the process of testing it out, it got me thinking… is social media marketing really worth the effort? Is automating your social media marketing ethical? And most importantly, does automated social media marketing really work?
Today I’ll answer those questions one by one…
Is social media marketing really worth the effort?
Well, it all depends on your perspective. From a business standpoint, you can’t argue with these facts…
Nearly every large company has an established social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and even Pinterest. That’s no accident. These companies know the value of social media when it comes to online marketing.
- Social media builds their brand.
- Social media gets them website traffic.
- Social media gets them more subscribers and customers.
- Social media gets them better search engine ranking.
- I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Social media increases business.
But what about automating the process? Is it ethical?
Well, let’s look at how most of those big businesses handle social media.
They hire social media consultants and managers to run their campaigns. Some employ large staffs of social media workers to get their message out daily.
Many companies spend thousands of dollars a DAY building their social media presence.
That in and of itself is a form of automation, wouldn’t you agree?
But as a small or home business owner, you probably cannot afford to hire social media consultants and managers. So that leaves you with a choice… You can do it all yourself, spending literally hours a day trying to compete with companies that have deep pockets.
Or you can use little to no social media marketing in your business. However, you must realize that if you have virtually no social media presence then you are missing out on a lot of potential income.
That leaves you with using technology to fill the gap.
Automation.
This week I found this new social media automation tool and I have been testing it out. It is the first social media automation tool that actually delivers traffic lie the big sites get.
But is this ethical? Well, if I spam the crap out of my accounts probably not. But if I use it responsibly, how is it different than hiring a bunch of interns or social media managers?
I mean, they would be sitting at a computer creating images, finding inspiration quotes, overlaying them onto the images, then posting them to my social media accounts. Everything that MultiSociFit is doing but without the hefty costs.
Which leads me to the final question, does social media automation work?
Well, probably not as well as hiring a team of consultants and social media managers. But it DOES work.
Just don’t go overboard and be sure to manually look at post before it goes live, and weed out any that are not on target with my audience.
Hundreds of people are seeing my posts daily now, compared to a few dozen a week before.
In fact, I’ll admit that before MultiSociFit I was pretty much a social media failure. My accounts pretty much sat dormant other than the weekly posts that automatically posted via my blog. I’ll even go out on a limb and say that without social media automation I would have virtually no social media presence at all.
So yes, from my small, home business perspective, social media marketing is worth it, automation is ethical and it works. Of course, you’ll have to try it yourself to see if it would work in your business or niche. But my guess would be yes. In fact, I can’t think of a single niche where this wouldn’t help.
Which leads you to choose from one of the following three options…
- Handle all your social media yourself by posting to multiple accounts daily
- Hire a social media consultant or manager to handle it
- Use an automation tool such as MultiSociFit
Whichever road you choose, just be sure you don’t skip social media marketing altogether. It’s a lesson I learned along the way, as one of the slower marketers to adapt to this medium.
We go back a long ways and it has taken me a lot of years to get off my duff.
I have bought a lot of packages from you but the reason they did not work was because I didn’t.
However I never understood why I paid for and never received what I asked for in web pages.I always went through Fiverr
I amazes me that it took me this long to find someone who was familiar with wordpress that could help me get a web page up and running. I finally found someone who told me wordpress was all he used in building websites.
We shall see.
Thanks for all the encouargement trhru the yea
We seem to have something in common – confusion
about if and how to use social media. Yep, I’m still
basically a holdout, dragging my feet, but will certainly
consider Socimattic after reading your information.
You have the knack of making the complicated seem
so simple. Thanks for a helpful post.
Awesome post Jim! This definitely helps a lot for small business owners like me who is still starting. But I was wondering, is Socimattic free?
Thanks Emmmerey, sociamattic is $29.95 currently but I expect the price to be rising soon. It’s a great tool for automating your social media campaigns, my favorite in fact.
Thanks Jim for the reply 🙂 Will check it out!
Great article Jim. I completely agree that social media marketing automation is no different from hiring interns or outsourcing – and with the benefit that it doesn’t turn in sick, or forget what you asked, and it always does exactly what it’s told!
Used intelligently, automation can be very effective in social media marketing, and for many people it’s the only possible way to do it. It’s a huge amount to stay on top of manually, and the return is often not enough to justify the cost of employing people to do it.