5 Social Media Automation Fails and How to Avoid Them

Social media automation is a great way to market your listings, promote your services, and build your brand, but you still need to actively monitor your posts and engage with people.

In real estate marketing, particularly, time is of the essence. It’s obvious that real estate agents and brokers need to take advantage of any automation that can help them save time and sell more. But, there are right and wrong ways to automate.

As you consider offloading some of your social media marketing tasks to software, be sure you avoid these 5 automation fails.

1. Setting and forgetting

Automation is great; we want to set it and forget it. But we still have to pay attention.

Some real estate professionals are automating, they’re using tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to automatically post their listings and promote their services, but that’s where it ends. They’re just posting. They’re not checking in to see how things are going. They’re not trying to connect with people. They’re throwing messages out there and never seeing where they land or who’s engaging with them.

While it’s good to generate content and share it, it helps to regularly monitor your social media presence. Review your posts and check out how they’re performing. How many followers do you have? How many likes, shares, and retweets are your posts getting? Are those numbers increasing or decreasing? How well did that post perform?

Take notes and make adjustments to the frequency and timing of your posts within your automation schedule.

Tip: As much as possible, make your content (blog posts, videos, ebooks, recorded webinars, infographics, etc.) available on your website. This will give your content a permanent “home” online.

2. Not engaging

Automation can make the process of publishing blogs, sharing listings, and spreading helpful content easier, but avoid the mistake of thinking that posting is the same thing as engaging. Think of social media automation as a helpful tool that can free you up to engage with potential clients.

Here are a few tips to help with engagement:

Turn on notifications within your social media accounts so you know when people are interacting with your posts.
Check in regularly to see what people are saying, liking, or sharing.
Thank them when they share your content and start up a conversation. Are they commenting and asking questions? Great, engage with them and keep the conversation going.
Answer their questions, even if they didn’t ask you!
Offer them more resources to help in the home buying or selling process

3. Text only (No images)

Be sure to post more than just text!

It’s great to communicate through writing–and you should–but another way to take advantage of social media automation is to be sure that a good number of your posts include visuals. Lots of people are talking about the importance of visual content, and probably your own personal experience reveals that you’re more likely to engage with visual content as well. So take the time to vary the kinds of posts you create and distribute and make them visually interesting.

4. Random posting (set a schedule using best practices)

You could have great content, interesting visuals, and every intention to engage in conversation with your followers. You could fill up your content stream, automate your posting schedule, and release your content to the masses and still miss out on impressions and engagement. One tactic to avoid this pitfall is to schedule your posts for times when people are more likely to see them and engage with them. It’s probably not going to do a lot of good to automate your posts if they’re going out at 2:00 AM!

Tip: Check out this article for more information on the best times to schedule your posts.

5. Only automating

Remember that social media automation is a great tool, but it shouldn’t be the only tactic of your social media strategy. Avoid the mistake of feeling like the only times you can post to social media are at the times you scheduled and planned. Be spontaneous, add photos and commentary to social media on-the-fly, and be yourself.

Also, follow the news. As you schedule posts to be published automatically, be aware of trends and local, regional, and national issues. Ensure that your posts are tasteful and modify your content as needed in light of current events. For instance, perhaps you scheduled a neighborhood tour video to go out, but the night before, there was a fire in one of the houses. It doesn’t mean that you can’t still post that tour, but you need to be sensitive and aware of how your content is a part of the larger social media conversation.

Next Steps

Social media automation is a great tool for helping you market your listings, promote your services, and build your brand. Make a plan to review your content and automation schedule as soon as you can, and get more out of your investment in social media by avoiding these pitfalls.