The Best Ways to Use Automation for Social Media and Marketing

Power Automate is an exciting area in the tech world, yet many don’t realize its true power in the marketing industry. Time is often a limitation when working in social media and marketing, so many professionals appreciate the helping hand of power automation!  

Regroove is a cloud focused business in BC, Canada. We regularly undertake a range of automation projects, facilitating time and process efficiency for clients. Although not social media focused, the power automation realm often expands to the social media and marketing sectors, allowing mundane and inefficient tasks to be replaced by an automation. Power automation is a service that allows you to create automated workflows between your favourite apps and services to synchronize files, collect data, and more. 

This blog will take you through Regroove’s Sales and Marketing Consultant’s favourite social media and marketing related automations. 

Social Media Post Automation 

The biggest social media automation out there is the scheduling of social media posts. Sites such as Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout dominate the field; however, Facebook Business Suite and others are taking back the reins. Scheduling posts allows you to decide when posts go live ahead of time, meaning you can bulk schedule and group tasks together rather than continuously uploading social media posts one by one. 

Many find that hours of time are saved from mass creating social media assets and scheduling all in one go, or weekly. This means that you can fill your content calendar and ensure content is regularly going live on your social channels via automation.  

The automations within the social media world are endless. Below, we explore our favourite and most effective social media automations. 

Popular Social Media Automations 

Aside from social media scheduling, there are a range of popular social media automations that will save you a lot of time and effort. Templates exist for social media automations; however, you can get creative to meet your goals and ambitions for social. 

If you are looking to repost content from one social channel to another, this is possible. Saving comments, recording likes, and saving photos to locations such as Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel and OneDrive is a great way of tracking social media efforts and monitoring marketing goals. 

Our top automations for social media are: 

• Saving comments on Instagram posts to Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. 
• Pinning new Instagram posts to Pinterest. 
• Getting push notifications on Tweets with a certain keyword. 
• Notifying a Team when a Tweet with a hashtag is posted. 

• Running sentiment analysis on Tweets and pushing results to Power BI. 

Automation of Client Appointments 

Automating tedious tasks (such as scheduling meetings) saves you time and repetitive manual emails. Triggering an automation such as appointment scheduling, coupled with CRM software, allows you to trigger several actions depending on the desired outcome and funnel.  

Using this automation to book a meeting when someone submits a contact form, signs up to your product, or sends you a message is a great way to communicate and onboard a new lead. 

Online calendar links are the way forward with calendar power automations. At Regroove, we regularly use Calendly to schedule meetings and use for automation of appointment scheduling. With a link, someone can choose an available time and book a video call, with no manual input from yourself.  

Calendly allows a variety of templates to be created via Power Automate. Our favourites are:  

• Creating a Dynamics 365 lead once an event is created in Calendly. 
• Copying a new event in Calendly to an Office 365 Outlook Calendar. 
• Adding an AppsForOps Timeline entry when a Calendly event is canceled. 
• Creation of Dynamics 365 Leads based on Tweets. 

This Power Automate flow can be completed with Google Calendar, Outlook, and Office 365 to automate appointment scheduling. 

10to8 is a popular appointment scheduling app chosen and endorsed by Microsoft. Automations that span from 10to8 can include appointment booking, getting an SMS when a client cancels or reschedules, posting messages to Microsoft Teams when a booking is made or adding a customer to Stripe when a new customer is added to 10to8. The automation opportunities are endless. 

Lead Generation With Well-Timed Emails

With Sales and Marketing focusing on the generation and closing of leads, Power Automate offers a range of automations that could save time and effort for sales and marketing teams. 

Our favourite and most useful lead power automations are: 

• Posting a message to a dedicated Teams channel when a lead is generated. 
• Creating leads from survey responses. 
• Tracking new deals added in Pipedrive in Microsoft Excel. 
• Adding an event to Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook when an activity is added in Pipedrive. 

How to Use Lemlist Automations Effectively

Email marketing and sales emails automations are so advanced that you should be using automations to increase efficiency with email marketing. At Regroove, we use Lemlist for email activity, allowing us to contact new leads and create great marketing campaigns. Lemlist allows us to automate cold emailing with Zapier, meaning that Zapier looks for new email activity and creates leads automatically. This also updates sales pipelines and CRM’s making sales and marketing a streamlined process. 

Lemlist also integrates with Facebook Lead Ads to create leads and send out emails to potential matches from Facebook. This is perfect for when you need relevant leads and can easily import Facebook leads to automated emailing software.  

If you prefer to create spreadsheets for leads via Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, these leads can easily be imported to a Lemlist email campaign via Zapier. When a new row or email address is added to your Google Sheet or Excel document, you can add this to a Lemlist campaign via automation. This allows you to have a great lead tracking spreadsheet as well as an effective outreach campaign. 

Social Media Content Approval 

Within a marketing team, there are often several steps to take before social media content can actually be posted. From content creation through to the post going live, there is a chain of people that must check and approve posts. Rather than manual emails or video calls that simply waste time, why not go through an automated approval process that can streamline your social media approval process? 

Instead of having a meeting to approve your social media assets, simply send via Microsoft Teams Approvals and once approved, this is sent to Buffer. From your Teams Channel or chat, you can create an approval from the app ‘Approvals’. To submit a Teams Approval, name the request, select who needs to approve it, add any additional information and a link to the posts and captions.  

Regroove use this feature for approval of blogs by inserting a Word Web Link to the blog draft or by adding a link to a Canva folder with the month’s social content, with captions stored in the notes. We then add two actions ‘Approve with XXX edits’ or ‘Hold Fire’. This allows the marketing team to implement any edits and correct without any wasted time from either party on a call or via email. 

Automations save a huge amount of time in the social media approval process, and this definitely can improve ROI when looking at marketing hours for social media. Why not implement this with your team or look at a content automation service such as Content Cal for your social media project structuring or Filestage for reviewing and approving content on a single platform? 

How Can Regroove Help Your Business?

At Regroove, we help clients to create more efficient ways of working with cloud-focused processes. Get in touch today to speak to an expert who can help streamline your business.