A range of ideas of how you can automate various parts of your social media marketing strategy. If you are time poor like I am, you need to prioritise your workload and juggle a lot of tasks at once. These ideas are just the tip of the iceberg, but I highly recommend you check out Zapier and IFTTT for the large range of things they can both do.

1. Social Media Automation
By Michael Jones

2. About Me

3. 12 years of search engine marketing experience,
worked with many large organisations in Australia
(both in-house and agency side), in a broad range
of industries including: shopping, classifieds and
service websites.
Specialising in SEO, but have experience in:
- SEM - Analytics - Social
- Local - Reputation Management
- Email Marketing
A network of 8 travel websites; managing everything from:
- Search Engine Optimisation - Social Media Marketing
- Video & Image Creation - Content Editing
- Web Programming - Website Building
- Affiliate Marketing - AdSense
- Web Analytics - Keyword Research
SEO Manager – Suncorp Insurance
Head of Onsite / Technical SEO
Major projects have included:
- Technical Audits - Keyword Research
- Link Profile Audit & Removal Campaign
- SEO Strategy

4. Social Automation – Existing Platforms

5. Existing Built-in Social Automation
A lot of social media websites already have built-in sharing / automation tools, but as
they are lack control and are quite limited with their customisation, it is worth looking
at other tools & platforms in order improve this process.
Example of an automatic share from YouTube
Do you really want a tweet appearing on Facebook?

6. Social Automation - HootSuite

7. HootSuite - Hootlet
The Hootlet is a browser add-on that automatically takes the content you want to
share on a web page and opens a popup compose box (No need to leave the web
page)
Features of the Hootlet include:
- Share updates to numerous social accounts at once
- Easily schedule messages to be sent out later
- Shortened URLs automatically

8. HootSuite - Apps
The HootSuite App Directory is a collection of extensions and applications that
HootSuite users can add to their dashboard to create a customised experience.
These Apps allow you to monitor your streams, measure your engagement and
share your different types of posts across your social networks.

9. • Share other assets
• Promote Social Profiles
• Upcoming Events
• Past Articles
• Weekly Messages
• Public Holidays
HootSuite – Bulk Schedule
The HootSuite Bulk Scheduling Tool allows you
to easy schedule up to 350 messages at once,
via a simple CSV file import.
This allows you to automate a regular sharing of
your content across your different social
accounts. Some ideas of content to share are:

10. HootSuite – RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are a great way to save time and automatically share content from your
own websites, as well as your favourite blogs / news websites.
Once you set up an RSS feed in HootSuite, you have the ability to take an RSS feed
from any site and update it to your social network accounts automatically. Not only
will this save you time and effort, but it will also make your social network accounts
active for when you don‟t have time to scour the web for the latest news.

11. Social Automation – Your Own Website

12. Social Media Widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-widget/
Website – Linking to Profiles
With the amount of time, effort and resources that are put into social media these
days, it is surprising that many opportunities within your own website are overlooked.
The first opportunity is to link to your social profiles from different parts of your
website. Not only is this great for reputation management (i.e. your social accounts
will rank for branded terms), but your users have already explored your website and
will be more likely to engage with you on social media.

13. GetSocial
http://www.riyaz.net/getsocial/
Website – Sharing Buttons
The second opportunity is to implement social sharing buttons on the different pages
of your website (usually pages which would actually want to be shared by users).
Common practice dictates placing small sharing buttons at the top of the page and
larger buttons at the bottom, but another great option is to use a sliding social bar
which automatically moves down the page as a user scrolls.

14. RA-FB Like Box
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ra-fb-like-box/installation/
Website – Thank You Page
Another great opportunity is to implement the various social sharing boxes on your
website‟s “Thank You” page (the page that is displayed after a user has completed
an action).
Since the user has already just engaged and built rapport with your brand,
presenting these 1-click follow buttons allows users to follow your brand in the
easiest way possible.

15. CommentLuv Premium
http://www.commentluv.com/
Website – Commenting
Additional to tweaking the thank you page of my websites, I also use the
CommentLuv Wordpress plugin to attract followers.
Using this plug-in, when a user submits a comment on one of my websites for the
first time, they receive an automatic email confirmation of their message, as well as a
friendly message asking them to follow me.
Additional to this, they also receive an email when I have answered their question,
linking them back to the original page they asked the question.

16. Social Automation – Other Platforms

17. Zapier
https://zapier.com/
Zapier
Zapier allows you to automate tasks between a large range of online services, with
over one hundred other web applications; including popular CRMs, social media
platforms, email marketing software, project management tools and more.
Automating repetitious tasks
Syncing data between multiple web
apps
Getting rid of duplicate data entry
Automating notifications
Data Integration

18. Zapier – RSS to Twitter
Although Zapier has so many uses, the main task I automate is sharing a range of
the latest travel news across my Twitter and Facebook channels; originating from
numerous RSS feeds from other websites.
Initial setup is extremely easy…

19. Zapier – RSS to Twitter
So after these easily to follow steps are followed, Zapier automatically monitors the
RSS feeds for any new stories and will automatically create a post based on the
story content and your post template.

20. IFTTT
https://ifttt.com/
IFTTT
Similar to Zapier, IFTTT is another platform that allows you to automate tasks
between a large range of online tools.
Although IFTTT doesn‟t have some of the flexibility of Zapier, it does fill the gaps of
some of the platforms Zapier doesn‟t support.

21. IFTTT – Instagram to Facebook Page
Currently, I use IFTTT to synchronise blog posts across my different web 2.0 blog
accounts, but here is a very quick example of how you could possibly share your
Instagram photos to a Faceook page.

22. IFTTT – Instagram to Facebook Page
So after these simple steps have been followed, any image you have uploaded to
Instagram are now uploaded as images to your Facebook page.

23. Pingraphy
http://www.pingraphy.com/
Pingraphy
Pingraphy is a Pinterest management tool that helps users schedule pins, manage
their profile, engage with followers and track different metrics.
As pinning images is quite a manual process (even with using the Pinlet), Pingraphy
allows you to bulk upload and schedule pins in advance.

24. Pingraphy – Scheduling Pins
As with pinning images with the Pinterest Pinlet, using Pingraphy is just as easy to
use.
Open the page the image sits on
Click the Pingraphy button and select the
images you wish to upload
Select your board and create your
descriptions
Set your start date and posting interval

25. Social Automation – A Few Examples

26. Reddit & Pingraphy
The example I have provided here is using a combination of Reddit, the Reddit
Enhancement Suite and Pingraphy to automatically share the most popular memes
(or any images) from the last month via an automated schedule.
Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/
Reddit Enhancement Suite - http://redditenhancementsuite.com/
Open your favourite subreddit
Click the top tab, select from this month,
and then click the view images tab

27. Reddit & Pingraphy
Once all the images expand and you have scrolled down the page (this will add more to
the selection screen), click the Pingraphy button.
Browse through the
list and select the
images you wish to
Pin.

28. Reddit & Pingraphy
Now that you have selected the images you wish to share, go through each
and select what board you want to pin them to, create a description and then
set the start time and posting interval.

29. Screaming Frog & HootSuite
Screaming Frog
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
A bit more advanced, the next example I have provided is using a combination of
Screaming Frog SEO Spider and HootSuite‟s Bulk Schedule function to
automatically share a number of stories in advance.
Insert the website URL of there you would like to harvest the stories / assets from.
After clicking start, let the spider
crawl the website and collect the
desired information.
Once complete, click the export
button and save the file as a CSV
file.

30. Screaming Frog & HootSuite
Open the HootSuite Bulk Schedule
tool and take note of the required
format.
Using this information, open the
exported CSV file and remove all the
unneeded columns from the
spreadsheet.
In doing this, you should now only be left with the post information in column B
and the story URL in column C.
From here, use column A to dictate your posting schedule. Save the file.

31. Screaming Frog & HootSuite
Now all you have to do is set your
date format and which social
accounts you want to share.
The stories should now appear in
your schedule view.
HootSuite also auto-shortens your URLs
and populates all the link fields for
Facebook and Google Plus.

32. Social Automation – Buying Social

33. Buying Social
As tempting as it is to buy cheap followers from places like Fiverr, I highly
recommend against such practice.
Not only can it compromise the quality of your accounts and your reputation online, a
lot of these „followers‟ are fake, bots and located in regions outside your target
demographic (mostly originate India, Pakistan and the UK)

34. Buying Social
A high number of fans does not equal social engagement!
So what is point of inflating your social follow numbers if
you‟re not going to get any value from them?

35. Thank You – Any Questions?

36. Follow Me
• https://www.facebook.com/HolidayPointAU
• https://twitter.com/HolidayPointAU
• https://plus.google.com/b/115301116369925284396/
• http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-jones/14/5ab/272
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/holidaypointau/
• http://pinterest.com/holidaypointau/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/HolidayPoint/

37. Resources
Social Management Platforms
HootSuite - http://hootsuite.com/
Wordpress Plugins
Social Media Widget - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-widget/
GetSocial - http://www.riyaz.net/getsocial/
RA-FB Like Box - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ra-fb-like-box/installation
CommentLuv Premium - http://www.commentluv.com/
Social Integration
Facebook - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/
Google Plus - https://developers.google.com/+/web/badge/
Twitter - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/follow-button
Pinterest - http://business.pinterest.com/widget-builder/#do_pin_it_button
YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/t/creators_downloads
Social Automation Platforms
Zapier - https://zapier.com/
IFTTT - https://ifttt.com/
Pingraphy - http://www.pingraphy.com/
Misc:
Screaming Frog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/
Reddit Enhancement Suite - http://redditenhancementsuite.com/
Holiday Point - http://www.holidaypoint.com.au/