Author name: Chris Makara

Roughly 80% of B2B marketers utilize a content marketing strategy, and as an entrepreneur you know it should be a priority for your marketing efforts. There are a number of ways you can promote your content. Some of the most common methods are: Influencer outreach Paid promotion Email marketing Social media But are any of them able to be scaled? Influencer outreach is not exactly scalable. Sure, you can do a few things to scale certain parts of it but it does take quite a bit of time to do it right. And when you use this approach you should definitely be involved with it as much as you can and minimize automated techniques.

As an entrepreneur, you are squeezed for time everyday. Chances are that you wear many hats and are bootstrapping on a budget. So how can you save time when it comes to social media? Easy. You implement time-saving hacks and approaches that get the job done quicker so you can get back to focusing on your product.

While Twitter might be the channel with the most social media automation opportunities, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look for ways to automate other social media channels. In this case, Pinterest. Look, Pinterest has over 100 million active users. That’s a lot of people. And those aren’t just people who signed up to create an account, but people who are using the site. Depending on your business, it might make sense to utilize Pinterest as a channel to promote your content.

Using automation on Twitter to find and follow users is a technique used by many to grow their Twitter accounts. If you are not familiar with using automation for Twitter followers, I have gone into great detail on how to do this. However, when mass following users on Twitter many people use one of these approaches: Follow someone else’s followers Follow the people someone else is following Follow users that use a specific hashtag While all of these approaches can work very well, there is one approach that I find performs better than the rest. In this post, I’ll detail what I call the “Social Poach Approach” and why it works better than the three common approaches I listed above.

One of the biggest misconceptions of social media automation is that if you use it, you are not engaging with your audience. The fact is, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Did you know that you can actually use social media automation to help increase your engagement? Of course, your definition of social engagement might be different from what someone else defines it as. However, a common acceptance of engagement is simply any sort of interaction that occurs from your social media update. This can be a “like”, click on your URL, a share, or a comment. So how can you use social media automation to help increase engagement? Let’s take a look.

I feel that social media automation gets a bad rap from many. Sometimes it is warranted (like when it is abused), and other times it just gets labeled as something you shouldn’t do. But to those who say it’s something you shouldn’t do, what is their reasoning?

When it comes to sharing something on social media, your first inclination is to probably share your own content. And rightfully so. You have spent countless hours crafting each blog post, creating kick-ass social media images as well as doing your SEO research. Being aware that you should spend 20% of your time creating content and the other 80% promoting it, there’s no way your not going to blast it out to all your social media channels. But when is it too much self-promotion on social media?

I was recently posed an interesting question by one of my newsletter subscribers around their social media profiles after their death.

Look, I am all about using social media tools that help make my life easier. However, if you are just starting out with social media it can be difficult to pay for a handful of tools each month that get the job done. It starts off with one tool that does one thing and then you find a tool that does another. Next thing you know, you are shelling out $100+ a month or more on tools. Do you need ALL these social media tools? Maybe. Or Maybe not. To me, if a tool can automate tasks I have no interest in doing for a reasonable price. I’m sold.