Social Media Automation: Definition, Benefits and Best Tools for 2024

An active social media presence is one of the best ways to stay connected with your customers, build authority, generate leads, and enhance your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. However, scheduling social media posts is also one of the most time-consuming tasks. Still, it’s a necessary part of consistent social media management and is a major factor in building trust and brand authority. Unfortunately, with so many daily tasks and priorities, nurturing customer relationships on social media can easily fall through the cracks.

Implementing social media tools that automate scheduling social media posts can save time without sacrificing the quality of your content.

Automation tools ensure all customer touchpoints offer an equally engaging experience for your followers—and help your business generate high-quality leads who are more likely to convert to customers with high customer lifetime value (CLV) scores. Additionally, with automation, your marketing team has more bandwidth to focus on high-priority marketing campaigns instead of always staying on top of replying to comments or posting schedules.

Here’s more on social media automation software, its impact on how your business generates leads, top social media management automation tools, and social media management best practices that help increase the chances of social media success.

Understanding Social Media Automation

Social media automation AI is a process in which you use automation tools to optimize communications and social media management. These tools reduce or eliminate the need to schedule social media posts. Examples of these tools include Sprout Social, Socialooph, Later, and Podium.

Automation tools include chatbots that automatically respond to comments or direct messages. Many are now so intuitive that these social media tools can generate complex responses based on keywords entered by the prospect.

Social media automation tools can drastically improve productivity by:

• Assisting in content idea generation and content creation with generative AI
• Publishing social media posts consistently at the times best suited for your industry and audience
• Engaging with posts automatically, helping broaden your connection with social media influencers or partnerships with similar brands
• Responding quickly and intuitively to comments and direct messages, which ensures prospects enjoy the best possible customer experience
• Generating captions, hashtags, and alt-text to reach the most ideal audience
• Centralizing all communications into a single social media management platform and offering analytics tools that enable your team to track metrics and adjust your social media strategies based on the data you collect

Identifying clear key performance indicators (KPIs) for social media automation software and choosing the right automation tools for the job allows your social media platforms to become lead-generation machines that:

• Lower customer acquisition costs (CAC)
• Establish brand authority
• Build strong and enduring customer relationships
• Publish consistently engaging and high-quality social media posts
• Boost customer loyalty

Remember, the best strategies get stronger when you choose the right automation tools for your industry, goals, and audience.

8 Best Social Media Automation Tools

There are a lot of social media post automation tools to choose from. Several entries on this list are well-established social media management platforms. Others may lack as much renown but stand out as strong contenders for businesses seeking to optimize their social media marketing with automation.

The following list shares some of the best automation software tools, their notable features, and pricing insights. With this short list of effective social media management tools as a reference, you’ll have a clearer picture of exactly what your business needs out of automation.

Podium

Developed to help businesses master lead generation and enhance customer communication, Podium strategically blends AI and automation to unify your customer communication process. By centralizing all of your inbound communications into one inbox, your team—or Podium’s intuitive AI Employee—can quickly and easily provide fast, high-quality customer service to your customers and prospects.

Whether it’s helping improve your Google and Facebook ranking with better reviews or ensuring customer correspondence never falls through the cracks, Podium automation tools can drastically enhance your customer experience.

Podium plans start at $399 per month, but Podium offers custom pricing based on your operational needs.

Sendible

Great for small teams—or those managing multiple clients simultaneously—Sendible is a social network management tool that helps keep posting on schedule. It lets users schedule social media posts up to a month in advance, offers easy collaboration features, and makes it simple to track performance metrics on the posts that are generating the most clicks via your click-through rate (CTR).

While it lacks a forever free plan, Sendible offers a two-week trial and plans starting at $29 per month.

Hootsuite

From AI content creation and analytics to automated scheduling tools and A/B social media advertising features, Hootsuite is a comprehensive social management tool you can use to centralize the social media marketing process.

Hootsuite offers a free plan, and the price for premium subscription plans starts at $99 per month.

Sprout Social

Developed for enterprise-level teams, one of Sprout Social’s biggest strengths is organic social media management. With intuitive chatbots and a single inbox where all of your incoming communications are stored, your team is better equipped to provide great customer experiences.

Sprout Social targets enterprise-level companies, and pricing starts at $249 per month.

Buffer

Buffer optimizes your content creation process from content ideation to follow-up communication. With features like landing page creation and quick navigation through social media post communications, Buffer is great for small teams or those just starting to dip their toes into social media management tools.

They offer free plans for up to three social media channels, while higher-tier plans start at just $5.

Later

Including social media management tools for scheduling and conversion, Later takes it a step further with creative media tools for cropping, adding text, and adding filters. While currently lacking RSS feed support, it comes with user-friendly analytics and scheduling tools that help identify top social media posts and the social networks yielding the best ROI.

With options for both individuals and enterprise-level teams, all plans offer a two-week free trial. Regular pricing starts at $16.67 per month.

Socialoomph

This tool offers comprehensive scheduling and posting features for RSS feeds, WordPress blogs, self-destructing posts, and beyond. Socialoomph is an especially beloved tool for X (formally Twitter), thanks to the bulk-scheduling feature. This feature lets users enter all tweets into a single text file, which is then uploaded to the platform for scheduling purposes.

Developed for teams of all sizes, Socialoomph offers a free plan. Paid plans start at $15 per month.

Meta Business Suite

For those looking to optimize scheduling, manage media, and track analytics for Facebook and Instagram social media marketing, Meta Business Suite is a great option. Its one drawback is that it is only available for Facebook and Instagram, so those wishing to manage other social networks will need a third-party tool.

While exclusive for Meta marketers, this social media posts and management tool comes on a completely free plan.

8 Useful Tips on How To Automate Social Media

With a list of reliable social media management automation tools to consider, the following tips can enhance the efficacy of your social media marketing regardless of which social media automation tools you implement.

Maintain a Human Touch

Automation tools are just that: tools. In this case, managing social media becomes easier because your team can:

• Consolidate to handle social media platforms and communications more effectively
• Develop high-quality social media content on all of your social networks
• Use comprehensive analytics tools to see how content ideas perform on your social media platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, a WordPress blog, Instagram, etc.

Lowering reliance on manual processing helps your team focus on creativity and customer relationships, but automation shouldn’t go unattended. Podium’s AI Employee is an excellent and intuitive supporting agent that enables you to make social media a powerful tool for connection.

Avoid Cross-Posting

It may be a time-saving temptation to publish the same social media post across multiple platforms. It seems like cross-posting would build your social media presence through higher posting rates, but it can actually trigger the opposite effect. If content isn’t curated to the specific platform—be it through aspect ratios, hashtags, media type, and so on—it can diminish your content’s visibility, making it harder to grow your audience.

Curate and Repurpose Content

While automation tools help you manage social media posts and content creation, don’t forget to repurpose content you’ve already published. Whether it’s on your WordPress blog or social media platforms like LinkedIn or TikTok, audit older posts to see if they can be updated for relevance. Repurposing content breathes new life into older posts and saves time because you’re not always trying to create content from scratch.

Prioritize Human Oversight

Automation management tools need to be monitored as a part of social media management for quality control purposes. Checking for Instagram scheduling errors, ensuring any AI responses to social media posts are helpful, and tracking performance analytics on your hashtags helps you ensure your optimization efforts aren’t causing unforeseen obstacles.

Understand Each Platform’s Requirements

Automation tools are only as effective as their ability to adapt to the social media platform’s compliance requirements, limitations, and algorithms. Make sure the person responsible for your social media management stays up-to-date on changes in the social media platforms you use.

Put The UX (User Experiences) First

One of the main benefits of automation management tools is the user experience (UX) improvements for your followers and your teams. By centralizing communications on one user-friendly platform, your team can more easily and effectively respond to customers.

Doing this improves the UX for your audience because audience members feel more valued and engaged with a business that makes responding to its social media post comments and DMs a priority.

Publish Content That Provides Value To The Reader

No amount of automation can improve a social media presence if the content isn’t interesting or relevant to the audience. Excellent quality is the bare minimum when it comes to content creation, especially when the audience is flooded with content from every direction. When you create social media content that provides value to your target audience, it’s more likely to engage. This demand-generation content helps build authority and strengthens trust in your brand.

Ensure Consistent Tone and Quality Across All Channels

Part of high-quality social media content—and thus a memorable and effective social media presence—is consistency. Your tone, your customer experience, and the quality of your content must feel harmonious. If you choose to build a social media presence on multiple platforms, you must commit equal effort on all fronts.

Without a consistent tone, your brand identity will feel disjointed and unprofessional. Without consistent customer experience, your reputation will suffer. And, without consistently great content, your social media posts won’t perform to their full potential—no matter how many hashtags you add.

Consistency is key to building a social media following, fostering loyalty, staying top-of-mind, and driving higher conversion rates.

Automate Your Social Media With Podium’s AI Employee

Your business doesn’t have to stop at social media automation tools. Podium’s AI Employee and Instagram in Podium offer intuitive and user-friendly User Interface (UI) and automation tools that ensure no customer communication is overlooked.

Instagram is a pillar of social media marketing. Podium makes Instagram scheduling easier because you can see and respond to comments on your social media posts, story replies, and direct messages right from the Podium Inbox. By centralizing Instagram communication in one place, your entire team has instant access, making social media management easier and more engaging.

Especially helpful for small to medium-sized businesses, Podium’s AI Employee is an enhanced automation tool that single-handedly provides instantaneous and engaging correspondence that make customers feel like they’re talking with a real person.

If you’d like to improve engagement on your social media posts and see more results with your social media marketing, watch a demo today to learn more about Instagram in Podium and Podium’s AI Employee.