Social media advertising has seen a prolific rise over the past few years. Between 2016 and 2019, ad spend on social networks more than doubled from USD 15.63 billion  to USD 32.18 billion.

While the opportunities available here are immense, social media advertising can also be a huge time sink.

Companies invest thousands of dollars in building social media collateral – the photos, videos and animations required to launch a successful social media campaign consumes a lot of time and money.

In addition to this, a large part of social media advertising is also engagement-based : you need manpower to interact with people who like and comment on your ads, or hit the chat button on your social media page.

So although social media advertising looks like a low hanging fruit, the costs associated with a successful campaign can easily add up.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. In this article, we will take a look at how you can automate social media advertising and pipeline management.

Use Facebook Messenger Bots

Advertisers love to scale up campaigns that are performing well. But with social media advertising, the challenge is that scaling up also means investing in more resources to engage with the buyer. If you cater to a global audience, this means hiring people to chat with prospects across multiple time-zones.

You can avoid this with the help of Facebook Messenger bots. Check out this helpful document on the Facebook website to know more about how you can implement it for your business.

The platform is quite sophisticated. You can make use of their API to extract details from the customer (like their name, product details, quantity, etc.) and build customized project proposals in real-time – all automatically without human intervention.

For example, if you are an agency, your chatbot could request for project details (design, development, etc.), the number of web pages to design and instantly generate a web design proposal that can be shared with the prospect.

Not only is this process automatic, it offers seamless customer experience. From a buyer’s perspective, they only have to enter details of their requirements and they receive a custom proposal in seconds.

Automate Your Schedule Up To Months In Advance

Automation can work out cheaper than having a human do the work. You may hire a virtual assistant for $6 an hour to do all the scheduling and posting for you. This is however an ongoing expense.

With automation, you might perhaps spend a few hundreds dollars upfront to establish the script. But once done, the process can be repeated without manual intervention.

You may, for instance, prepare a social media calendar that highlights top events for the next several months and build campaigns surrounding each of these events. This can now be integrated with your chatbot so that the entire campaign is on autopilot.

That does not mean this can go unsupervised. Reputation management is a big component of social media marketing and one slip-up could have a cascading effect on how your brand is perceived.

While there are tools that can help you monitor brand reputation, this process of social media marketing cannot and should not be automated.

Create A Pipeline Schema

A pipeline schema is basically a formalized workflow organization of your pipeline. You essentially create a flowchart of where your traffic comes from, what you advertise to them, what actions they can potentially take, how you respond to each of these actions – eventually culminating in a sale.

Once your schema is ready, it is easy to see what components need to be automated, and how that can be automated. For instance, a user who has responded to a post with a like or comment demonstrates high engagement and is likely a potential buyer.

For this user, you may set up remarketing campaigns that automatically continue to nurture this user via a series of campaigns till their lead is captured or they convert.

Setting up such campaigns is a one time job that can be done by a Facebook advertising expert and the automation can carry this through without much manual intervention.

Optimize Curation

As we mentioned earlier in this article, social media marketing can turn expensive really quickly due to the investments you need to make with respect to content production.

However, you do not always need your own content to keep your followers engaged.

Content curation is a big part of social media marketing where you dig out interesting stories from across the internet and share it with your readers. You may also repurpose content that already exists in one form and deliver it a format that your readers will love.

The benefit with this strategy is not only that it saves time, but also that you have a greater chance of success – with content curation, you pick stories that are already popular. They are hence a proven success.

Content curation can take a lot of time as well. This can however be optimized better with the right tools.

A very good example of a content curation tool is Quuu – the app serves as an interface between websites that want to give their content marketing a boost and social media accounts that want a regular stream of high value content for their audience.

If you have in-house staff working on curation, you can consider investing in tools like Planable that can make the process of approval and editing easy and fast.

This can bring about a dramatic improvement in turnaround time for your content curation efforts.

Tweak Frequently

As much as one would love to, automation does not mean you can set it up and forget about it. Despite how far we have come with machine learning and AI, automation still needs human tweaking periodically.

It is important to track user movement along the pipeline to check for leakages and bottlenecks. Users dropping off is never a good sign and it is important to tweak your automation at these points to make sure that the flow along the pipeline is smooth.

Frequent monitoring helps you maximize conversions and is thus an important component of automation.

Do you have experience automating your social media marketing pipeline? What other tips would you suggest for someone who is just starting with this? Share your views in the comments.