How To Automate Social Media Marketing Like A Pro!

Social media marketing is often a topic that marketers either love or hate, although i would bet that a vast majority of those that hate it would agree that it can deliver great results.

So why don't they do it if they know it can deliver results that can drive their projects, campaigns and businesses forward?

The simple answer is lack of knowledge, awareness of the right tools to automate, and people might simply not fancy the learning curve.

This checklist "How To Automate Social Media Marketing Like A Pro!" comes with a full blog post that you can access by clicking here.

With that in mind i will try to keep this as simple, factual and easy to get through as possible whilse maintaining the value on the core information.

Lets keep this really simple, we need to do several tasks to manage social media marketing effectively.

I will list all of these below with sub headlines and keep each task commentary to just what's needed to know, and later on how we can automate it. In short this will be "Un-fluffy" content designed to be short and actionable, instead of long, laborious and daunting to get through. Fair enough? 🙂

Social media marketing starts with our own content first, so even though some of this looks more suited to a content marketing step by step article, we will cover that anyway as some can be automated and outsourced.

Create quality actionable (evergreen) content

We need our own content for credibility, to build authority and to have social proof of building up as an influencer in your own right. Most importantly you need it for leverage.

Leverage grows as you get more followers and social shares, pretty much in the same way as having an email list and promoting someone else's product launch and making hundreds of sales for them, but in a slightly different way that we can send hundreds or thousands of visitors to other peoples content just by recommending it.

With leverage comes reciprocation...But, you really have to have quality content to deserve or ask for reciprocation.

The goal

The goal for your content marketing therefore is NOT to get a pat on the back and social re-shares. That does not equate to profits on its own, but instead you need to focus on the email optin. Your subscriber list is everything and with that comes revenue, repeat traffic that is warmed to your content and with that comes trust and authority.

The secondary goal has to be to have re-targeting pixels set up on your landing pages too, this give you very low cost paid traffic generation too!

Identify and follow influencers while trying to get the attention of their followers

Identifying influencers is kinda obvious i know, but there are several ways to look at this and you need to understand one more thing too that isnt so obvious but coming from my background this one thing has been responsible for massive leverage. Lets start with the obvious and work our way outside the box from there.

Lets take a bullet point look at the types of support you can ask for or expect from an influencer

• As a JV /affiliate where they will promote your products for commissions
• Social Shares
• Solo / Ezine ads
• Website or Newsletter Ad Space
• Webinars

Top Prospect Influencers

These are the big guys that are not too big that they are unlikely to recommend your content, but are big, "A Class" type bloggers and content marketers and have large email lists, but have a track record of sharing quality content, promoting great products and even better if they do webinars regularly too as this is a great opportunity for reciprocal webinars.

Make a list of suitable top prospect influencers, and create an excel form which can be used to add influencers to as well as some basic info about them.

B & C Grade Influencers

This is not meant to be derogatory but these influencers are not quite Class A yet and may well be on the way up but perhaps not quite in the top 20 or so Class A Influencers. Depending on your niche there may be more or less of those.

The opportunity of this level is that they may be more open to selling you some ad space, solo ads or book a webinar. They will have a decent sized email list too. These levels will get hit on less with requests for promotions and its possible to work tightly with a few of them which i will get deeper into at the end of the article in the tools section and in a case study video.

Future Prospects

This strategy has helped me hugely in the past. Where i have recognised a potentially great new product creator, kept tabs on them, reached out to them, helped them get exposure, traffic and sales. If they are decent people they will always appreciate the help given and will return the support no matter how big they become later. I wont mention names here but there are 3 very well known I.M product creators that i have helped on the way up. I can count on their support with every new product and these days they can drive significant sales.

Getting Influencers Followers attention

The simplest and easiest way is getting recommended by the influencer, but what happens when you cannot get that recommendation?

In the tools section i will share an easy way to follow their followers and you do NOT even need to do this from your main twitter account or Facebook account! This way you create a persona that is always cheerleading your main social accounts and content and itv can be automated too!

Find and share relevant content

This is super easy when following influencers and there are tons of tools out there to do this and automated too!

Schedule social posting of your evergreen content

Your older content should get regularly shared too and again this can easily be automated.

Interact, listen & comment

Liking, commenting and resharing content that has relevance and is newsworthy, funny or interesting within your niche will get you noticed.

Try to find sources of content that are not always widely used or known. For this i find forums a great resource as well as YouTube and Facebook pages.

Choose social platforms to work with

The more choice the harder this becomes. The truth is that we can and sometimes should have content syndicated from one platform to another and that's super simple to set up. But the choice of which platforms to use is more than the ability to syndicate to and from.

My preferred platforms are (in order)

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Linkedin

Others love and swear by Google plus, Instagram and Pinterest for example but i cannot claim to really know much about Instagram and Pinterest, while i have always used Google Plus more as an SEO opportunity platform along with YouTube.

I left YouTube out of this as i personally do not use it like a social platform but i do use it to host my videos and for fast SEO benefits and rankings. Video is always included in any content marketing on my blog.

Your email subscribers are your most targeted audience and they are the warmest to your content. This is an asset, having and email list is an asset that should be built and used regularly.

You need to be collecting leads on your website and you should be promoting your content to those leads. This keeps people aware of your content and can drive significant traffic as your subscriber lists grows.

Subscribers will also be teh first to share your content on social media platforms like facebook and twitter. 

I use Aweber set up on an auto RSS feed to automatically email new blog posts out. Most email service providers such mailchimp and Getresponse have this option too.

Identify the correct automation tools to use

Ok so this is the fun part where i share the tools to make social media marketing a whole lot easier, targeted and being able to track your campaigns with analytics and precision to test, tweak and improve.

Please see the mind map below, this will be updated in real time as i find and add more

Social Scheduling Tools

Hootsuite

Post Schedular

Sociocaster

Quilio

Buffer

Social Oomph

Curation Tools:

Scoop.it

Paper.li

list.ly

Premium Tools:

Sociocaster

Postplanner

One Soci

Co Schedule

QuickSprout

Quillio

Posts To WordPress:

Speedblogging

Sccop.it

Content Gems

Several of these help with Fan Page management, Find Influencers and to Interact & Listen to your target audience, niche discussions and influencers as well as giving you a head start to Find Relevant & trending content.

By far my favourite tool to Find Influencers and Get Leads is Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is an all purpose marketing tool

If you're doing any of the following, your life is about to get A LOT easier

• Lead Generation

• Finding Guest Posts

• Content Promotion

• Collecting Contact Info

• Finding Podcast Guests

• Cold Calling

• Content Research

• Blogger Outreach

• Linkbuilding

• Cold Emailing

• Finding Affiliates

• Influencer Marketing

Find Thousands Of Influencers In Your Niche

Type in a keyword and find thousands of bloggers and business leads in seconds for your target keywords in any niche. You can filter by tags like bloggers, influencers, and companies. There are over 4 million websites in our database and growing.

You can get Ninja outreach by clicking here

Lets Take A Closer Look At What Ninja Outreach Can Do...

Target Twitter And Instagram Users

Run searches through our database of Twitter and Instagram influencers including names, descriptions, locations, follower counts and websites. Filter, sort, and add them to lists.

Easily Track All Contacts W/ Your Team

Manage your contacts including dynamic notes, tags, email history, and RSS feed. Import new contacts and collect all of the same information, or export them to a CSV.

Organize Your Clients And Campaigns

Ditch the spreadsheets and expensive CRMs. Segment your lists for each campaign and tag them with specific clients and relevant keywords for easy tracking. Team collaboration allows multiple users to work together!

Get Incredibly Targeted Results!

Drill down on the metrics that matter. Our filter has over 25 metrics including location, SEO, Social, Special Posts, and even contact information availability. Everything's sortable.

Easy To Use Chrome extension for your Browser

Add websites to your lists on the go via our Chrome extension. It also comes with RSS feeds, demographic information, and allows you to email and submit through contact forms!

Quickly Personalize Built In Email Templates!

Create templates with custom fields to send personalized outreach to your contacts. Common contact fields will automatically populate emails and contact forms. Personalized outreach will greatly improve your response rate.

Find & Contact Influencers Through Email

Send emails with custom HTML templates by integrating your email accounts, saving you tons of time. Track sents, not sents, and follow ups for easy outreach management.

You Can Try Ninja Outreach For FREE here!

If you are aggressively working to build a blog and audience, you can consider paying to promote your content.

There are a number of channels you can tap to do this including:
Facebook Ads
Linkedin Ads 
Seed with a StumbleUpon ad 
Twitter Ads
OutBrain
Zemanta
SimpleReach
Taboola
Nstr

Warning!

Before promoting on any of the above channels you should do significant research as to which ones are the best fit for your audience and how the mechanics of each network work.

The links above do not take you directly to the advertising pages; they take you to guides to learn how to advertise on these platforms. Start with one, start slow, track your results, watch your spend! But most importantly, learn (or pay someone who has already learned).