As marketers, there are a lot of tasks to juggle in a day. Here’s how you can stop wasting time on repetitive tasks and save hours of work by automating your social media efforts.
Social media takes a long time to manage, varying anywhere between 6 to 45 hours a week. In most cases it’s a full-time job. With such long hours, it’s no surprise that social media coordinators are always looking for affordable, time-saving hacks to help with their workload. As mentioned on Sprout Social, “Social media automation software is used to automate or semi-automate the process of sharing posts and content on social media channels.”
In this article, we will discuss how you can easily automate your social media tasks for free with IFTTT.
So how does it work? All automation recipes start with a trigger. When a trigger happens, a result follows. For example, Sally wants the same content posted on Facebook to Twitter as well. She will initially share the content on Facebook (trigger), then same post will automatically display on Twitter (result). To learn more about using IFTTT, we recommend checking out these tutorials.
We’ll be breaking this guide to 3 different automation types:
Coordination – automate repetitive daily social tasks
Content – automatically queue up content that is ready to be shared
Data – automatically listing each social posts for tracking and data
Coordination
Image by IFTTT
Are you sharing the same content across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Instagram? With these formulas, you can schedule content across any social network in a matter of seconds. Here are some of the best methods to help:
Automatically share your YouTube videos to Facebook
Post Instagram photos to a Facebook page
Tweet your Instagram posts as native photos on Twitter
Auto post from Facebook to Twitter
Post your Instagram photos to Facebook & Twitter
Save new Instagram posts to Dropbox
Content
Image by IFTTT
Finding content is one of the most time-consuming tasks there is. Would you like to post quality content as soon as soon as it publishes or even adds them to your queue to schedule for later? Here are some of the best automation techniques to gather content:
Automatically share your new WordPress articles to a Facebook page as soon as it’s published
Automatically add articles you favorite in Pocket to your Buffer queue
When an RSS article publishes, automatically creates a bit.ly link
Post RSS feed to Facebook page & Twitter
Automatically buffer the articles you save for later in Feedly
Share popular articles from the New York Times with your LinkedIn followers
Data
Image by IFTTT
Lastly, don’t forget to track the data from your posts. The data will help you gather insights as to what works and what doesn’t when your social media evaluation comes. Here are some of the best automation recipes:
Back up your bit.ly links in Google Sheets
Archive every link you tweet to Google Drive
Save tweeted links to google sheets
A Google spreadsheet that tracks every post made in Buffer
Save Feedly saved articles to Google Sheets
Track all of your pins in Google Sheets
Top image via emojoez.
For more social media tips, check out:
6 quick social media tips and tricks that actually work
How to get started with social media for small business
How to develop a social media marketing calendar
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