The Definitive Guide To Automating Facebook For Business

Facebook is not just a place to catch up with friends or share memes, and that has been the case for a few years now. It has become a powerful tool for businesses to establish friendly touch-points with your customers. Many social media agencies and across the world have taken up brands on social media from scratch and have transformed them into not only a great touch-point with the customer but a source of revenue as well.

Since the social media marketing platform is a revenue source, efficient management including automation is really the need of the hour. Facebook automation software helps you clear the cutter and tedious maintenance of your profiles, and help you focus on delivering content to your fans.

However, it is very easy to want to automate your tasks without thinking of backlashes/ pitfalls. Yes, there are pitfalls to automation and it should be done responsibly keeping in mind a whole host of factors. In this piece, we’re going to discuss ways to successfully automate Facebook for your business and make it work for you!  Some things we will go over in this article:

• What is bad facebook automation?
• Good Facebook Automation
• Automation Tools for saving time.

Bad Facebook Automation

Bad automation generally makes you look spammy, like as if you’re doing forced marketing. This can have serious repercussions for brands in being banned by users and worse yet, being banned by the platform itself.

Facebook has strict advertising and privacy guidelines set in motion, and bad automation might just make your brand jump over these lines and get your account in trouble. Let’s look at some bad automation strategies:

Buying Followers

A recent exposé revealed that many Instagram and Facebook accounts were loaded with bought followers or fake profiles. So much so, many celebrity social media handles were exposed as having what we call ‘fake followers’.

Facebook auditing tools have become very adept at catching such malicious activity. The fact of the matter is that having bought followers/fake profiles in your accounts following is a straight violation of Facebook’s policies of terms of service. 

Facebook has an aim that is translating friendships from offline to online. So keeping that parallel in mind, you would always earn your friends not buy them right? It is a good rule of thumb to never load up your accounts with fake followers.

Crossposting Automated Posts

Every Social Media platform in itself is unique and so should be the content strategy for each. It is understandable that you might have the urge to have uniform communication across your channels and that is fine.

However, what is not fine is reposting posts from other sources onto your Facebook page without seeing how it will reflect on the platform. Badly cropped images, inappropriate amount of hashtags, this makes you look a lot more spam and inauthentic than anything.

Automating Post Likes, Comments, and Messages 

This is an activity which again gives an inauthentic vibe around your brand. It makes people feel like you are not genuinely concerned about engaging with them. It is a lazy and thoughtless way of running a  brand. Automatically liking something your brand is 

mentioned is good up until the point someone is slandering the brand.

Similarly, automated comments also point to your brand being unsympathetic and can lead to consumers losing trust in your brand. Some things in Social Media are better left to be more of a hands-on job.

In the same way, automated likes and comments are bad, so is automating messages. Automated messages speak to your brand’s inability to personalize the touchpoint and experience for every customer’s needs.

Good Facebook Automation

The whole purpose of letting automation seep into your brand’s workflow is to help you focus more on creating engaging content for fans who are eager to hear from you. Every digital marketing agency and personal brands alike, make use of automation tools in order to clear the cutter of priorities. Here are some good automation practices on Facebook:

Scheduling Timeline Posts

If you like to keep content and marketing plans mapped out ahead of time, automating posts according to the best posting times for your target audience can save you a lot of posting time and free you up for other content research activities. Facebook has a built-in app ‘Creator Studio’ in order to help you execute and schedule your content calendars well in advance also additionally providing the option to ‘boost’ posts.

Saving replies for FAQs

Market research will always reveal what are the most pressing queries for your customers. Setting up answers/replies for the most frequently asked questions of your consumers will save a lot of repetitive work and free up your schedule to focus on a positive brand image.

Using search streams for finding content ideas

Search streams are essentially news feed stories in your niche, hashtag, or in things your brand needs to comment on or talk about via timeline posts/stories. Set up alerts for posts of your competitors, relevant topics, users, and content in order to stay ahead of the curve (or at least with the curve) with topical and relevant content.

Repurposing posts from other platforms

We know it can be confusing wherein one point we say, do not post from other platforms and here we are, telling you to ‘repurpose’ posts. Repurpose does not equal crossposting and that should be clear from the get-go. Repurpose means taking the posts which are performing better than expected on other platforms and making it so that it appeals to the Facebook audiences as well.

Setting up a chatbot for Initial conversations.

You must be aware of what types of services you can offer to your customers. In lieu of the same, most of the initial conversations with customers will follow the same flow. Setting up automated messages for initial conversations will save you the hassle of repeating those conversations again and again.

Tools for Automation:

• Hootsuite
• AdEspresso
• Facebook Business Manager
• Chatfuel
• Mentionlytics
• Brandfort
• Magneto
• IFTTT

Used responsibly, social media automation can help you make the most of Facebook. Used irresponsibly, you’re treading into dangerous spammer territory. So go forth, and be the brand you wish to see in the world.