Social media automation for e-commerce is a strategy involving the use of social media tools to facilitate the process of managing your business. It involves planning, building, and running marketing campaigns on social media sites.
It also involves using different tools to make the entire process easier to handle. Social media automation for e-commerce is important because it helps streamline your social media presence, boosts engagement with your audience, and ultimately leads to an increase in sales which are crucial for the survival of any business.
Social media automation consists of three layers: human interaction, copy posting & scheduling, automation based on user profiles, i.e., individuals or known influencers. Each layer requires a different set of skills acquired through experience or training programs specifically meant for them, which will be discussed later in this article.
The objective behind automating your social media content is to use your time efficiently to take care of other aspects like increasing your product catalog, growing social media engagement, and finally, focusing on scaling the business.
Do I need Social Media Automation for E-commerce?
Social media automation brings you benefits like improved customer engagement, increased brand awareness, and an effective way to communicate with your audience. If these are not what you want for your business, then there’s no need for social media automation.
However, if these are on top of your checklist, then it might be a good idea to consider social media automation for your e-commerce business. Here are a few more reasons why you should use social media automation:
- Increases productivity with accurate and relevant information posted at designated times, creating a steady flow of content.
- Centralizes all your social accounts into one place so that there’s no need for logging in and out of different accounts, thus saving up time.
- Social media automation helps you keep track of conversations happening across different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. You can also make sure that you reply immediately as fast as possible to every message.
When to use Social Media Automation for E-commerce?
Social media automation can handle many tasks at once, thus freeing up your time so that you can focus on other aspects of running your e-commerce business effectively. However, this comes at a cost, and it’s important that only the activities that need automation are automated because sometimes automating an activity can backfire or even damage your brand’s reputation if posted in public accounts.
For example, automatic sharing of product promotions on Facebook would result in your product being shared on public accounts of your customers, which may only damage their reputation instead of upholding the brand image. If you’re using social media automation for e-commerce, then here are some golden rules that you must follow:
1. Choose the right Social Media Platforms
Social media automation can be done on any platform, but it’s important that you make sure to find the right one for your business. Before automating activities, take a good look at all the available options and choose as per your requirement- either standalone or as part of an integrated campaign.
When choosing a social media platform to use, it is imperative that you base your decision on what value the platform can bring to your brand and not the number of people using the platform. Real quick, here are five questions that you may use to guide your selection for the right social media platforms;
- What is the voice of my company/brand? Do you have a formal voice or a casual one? This will enable you to find out which social media platforms would be right for your brand.
- What kind of audience do I hope to attract? Some studies point out that Pinterest is popular with the female audience with Statista estimating that 71 percent of the people using the platform as of July 2021 are women. So if you are targeting women mostly, Pinterest may be a good place to start with. If you haven’t identified an audience, it would help if you prioritize doing that if you wish to get maximum engagement and of course conversions. Once this is done, it’ll be easy for you to devise a strategy and choose which platform would be best suited for your business.
- Where do my potential customers hang around? Most businesses these days pay more attention to Facebook and Twitter because they’ve proved themselves as effective networking sites where many e-commerce businesses make their first sale from their regular customers. The latter want to connect with them online. However, if your target market is on Pinterest or Google+, then there’s no harm in automating activities on these platforms as well.
- What kind of activities do I need to automate? It’s necessary to conduct thorough research on your target market and find out what type of messaging, images, and videos they like so that you can come up with the best-suited content for your audience. If it helps, hire a social media manager who will help you determine the right type of activity required on each platform.
- How much time and resources do I have? Automating activities does take time and resources, but it all depends on how intense you want your presence to be online. Make sure that automation is used only for crucial tasks rather than spending time on trivial activities which aren’t really required at this point. For e-commerce businesses, automation is best used for social listening, moderating comments, posting content/ product images, and scheduling posts in advance.
2. Understand your Audience
Understanding the audience will play an important role when automating activities online. When hiring a social media manager or buying an automated service already available in the market, it is crucial that you inform them about who your target market is to share your content in the right way on the chosen platform.
This information must also be made available to companies providing e-commerce tracking services like Google Analytics. If you’re targeting moms on Pinterest, then you’ll need different types of messages than if you were targeting teenagers on Instagram.
Once all this information has been submitted to these third-party providers, you’ll be able to get more accurate reports which will help you track your ROI. If you’re like most entrepreneurs who begin business journeys while still studying, understanding your audience can be an uphill battle.
You do not have to sacrifice the quality of your papers or social media posts because of academic commitment now that you can get assignment help online at Topbritishessays. Ensure the company providing the dissertation writing service is reputed if you’re considering hiring a writer to help with the heavy lifting.
3. Know How to Schedule Your Content
Social media automation is only beneficial if it’s used for the right purpose. You can use automation for scheduling posts in advance, which would make it easy for you to avoid the last-minute rush while posting content on social media platforms.
Automation can also be used to schedule posts of multiple images and videos at an interval of time. More people are reached out with your branding message without spending too much time creating new content. Not to forget, it is an easy way out when you want to share specific content for a limited period of time.
4. Know How to Manage Your Brand’s Reputation Automatically
Most e-commerce businesses are always on the lookout for new customers who could potentially become their regular buyers online. However, they often do not realize that existing customers can be developed into brand ambassadors by making them happy and satisfied with their service so that it becomes easier for these customers to recommend the business’ products and services to an acquaintance.
These recommendations usually result in more sales, so it’s important for e-commerce merchants to know how and where to use automation tools efficiently to manage their reputation automatically without spending too much or money on manual activities. It might also be a good idea to start from the online channels where you receive the most amount of traffic and slowly move on to other platforms.
5. Know How to Measure Your ROI
Measuring your ROI is easy if you know how to get the right kind of analytics reports. Ecommerce marketing automation can help businesses make better decisions by tracking which content works well for their target audience and what doesn’t.
The more data you collect about your user’s engagement levels, product reviews, demographic information, location, etc., the easier it will be for you to create custom strategies that could yield great results in online revenue generation. Therefore, it would be advisable for e-commerce merchants to invest in an automated social media marketing service provider instead of trying to handle the entire process alone to guarantee a good ROI in the long run.
6. Know How Not To Be Overwhelmed With Information
Social media automation can be a great way for e-commerce merchants to share relevant information with their audience without spending too much time on creating new content. However, it’s important that businesses do not end up sharing irrelevant information just because they have access to free online tools that automatically post updates on social media profiles.
Spending too much time online can sometimes lead people with many followers and influence to lose touch with their target audiences because they forget about the importance of personal interactions and fail to make human connections even when engaging with potential customers on social media platforms. If your online reputation has already been tarnished, then it becomes even more important for you to know how to manage your online presence in order not to hurt your business’ reputation further.
7. Know How Not To Be Unreliable in Terms of Delivering Promised Results
Automation tools can also be used in e-commerce businesses in order to improve their customer service activities by tracking the time spent on solving individual queries and channeling resources where they are needed most. However, this often ends up hurting a brand’s reputation if customers notice that their complaints aren’t solved quickly enough or the person responsible cannot provide satisfactory answers because they are unaware of what is going on.
It would therefore be advisable for e-commerce merchants to allow automation tools such as chatbots to solve simple customer issues so that they can spend more time on resolving complicated issues while simultaneously making sure that these chatbots are programmed to handle the most common types of queries in a manner which is efficient and ensures customer satisfaction.
How do I automate my Posts?
Now that you know the golden rules of social media automation for e-commerce let’s take a look at how you can create automated content that engages your audience. An effective way to generate high-quality social media updates is to use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer, which allows users to share regular updates with their followers without having to worry about sending individual messages from a third-party app.
You can also automate your product recommendations by connecting popular marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay directly to the software so that they automatically feed relevant information into your social media profiles’ shopping carts. This will keep customers up-to-date with new offers even when they are not online and could potentially increase revenue if potential customers purchase previously recommended items on their news feeds.
You shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to automate your entire social media strategy because this will only cause you to lose the interest of your audience. Instead, it would help if you focused on automating as much as possible while ensuring that all automated content is relevant and engaging enough to encourage consumers to share it with their friends and family.
Also, it would help if you do not try to do everything on your own. Ideally, your company should have at least two groups; an influencer and social media manager who are working together and scheduling updates across different social media profiles.
This way, you will stay relevant and be able to avoid repetitive content while making sure that all relevant information is shared on popular channels such as Facebook and Twitter. If you are not sure where to start, then you can try creating a content calendar that lists all your updates for the week so that you never miss an opportunity to engage with your audience. If you are able, you should try connecting other productivity tools such as Google Analytics and Hubspot CRM to make it even easier for your business to track the success of its various marketing activities.
The Bottom Line
Social media automation can be a blessing for e-commerce brands if used correctly. Using social media tools that allow you to schedule posts, track statistics, and automated product recommendations are great ways to boost your brand’s online presence without compromising quality. However, it is important to remember that no matter how useful these tools might be, they will not work unless you have mastered the art of creating engaging content and understand how and when these tools should be used.
About the author:
Tiffany Harper is a training guru who’s been working in the corporate sector as a technology expert for several years now. She is a management graduate and loves to share her experience through blogs and expert articles with assignment writing services. For her love of writing, she provided online consultations for cheap essay writing services while working with essayontime.co.uk. Please do not hesitate to contact her on LinkedIn.
Additional Reading:
Leverage Employees To Drive Social Media Growth For Your Agency
PROS AND CONS OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA IN 2021
When And Why Your Behavioral Health Agency Could Really Use Social Media