8 Useful Social Media Automation Tools for eCommerce Marketers

Written by Chintan Zalani, Content Marketing Specialist at The Ecom Academy

The top traffic referrers of the internet are increasingly turning hostile towards links to external websites.

Yet, for Ecommerce businesses, social media remains a great avenue to:

• generate brand awareness,

• connect and build relationships with your audience,

• provide quick customer service.

Indeed, for the biggest Ecommerce retailer, Amazon, social is still a decent source of direct traffic at 5.81% (as per SimilarWeb).

While social media offers undeniable benefits to your brand, it can also quickly turn into a time suck.

In today’s article, we’ll look at eight tools you can use to automate a few tedious and repetitive aspects of social media. They will save you time and resources. However, before we begin, here’s a quick note on the purpose that these tools will serve.

The ONE key element of stellar social media automation

Are you planning to completely let go of social media in a hands-off mode by using automation tools?

Then, you might get disappointed.

See, social media platforms facilitate conversation. While it’s great to have the convenience offered by automation tools, there’s no substitute to engage with your community regularly.

You can take your customers behind-the-scenes of your company. You can ask them questions. Else, you can even entertain your audience with weekly comedy sketches.

If you are not authentic on social, then your efforts will flounder.

Humanize your social media marketing, and you will earn raving brand advocates that might turn into your loyal customers!

Of course, you can still automate parts of your marketing. Let me show you around a few tools for the same.

1. Agorapulse

If you have a large team for managing your social media marketing, then Agorapulse offers a one-stop dashboard. Here are the six critical aspects provided by the tool.

If you use multiple social platforms, you can tailor a social media post for six different platforms from a single place.

It even has handy keyboard shortcuts to manage the influx of customer interaction on social media and save you multiple hours every week. Indeed, Agora has users managing as many as 3,000 messages every day.

You also get detailed insights into ‘the person behind the query’ that facilitates better customer service.

Want to perform actions on your inbox basis the keywords used by your audience?

You can create moderation rules, and its powerful inbox assistant can trigger such behaviors.

And if you regularly run into the same questions from your users (think shipping inquiries or feature requests), then you can use ‘saved replies.’

Overall, Agora is an affordable social media management suite at $39/month (billed annually) for one user with three social profiles.

Alternative: Planable

With Planable, you can create social media posts, preview exactly how they look like, exchange feedback, get approval, and schedule posts directly to social media. It is a social media content collaboration platform that works well for agencies, freelancers, and in-house marketing teams alike.

2. Zapier

How can we possibly talk about automation without mentioning the leading automation suite for workflows? It works on the following mechanism (supporting over 1,300 apps).

For social media, you can choose from the list of following zaps. It contains automation options across scheduling content, promoting your events, cross-posting your content, and monitoring your online brand mentions.

Kevin Stecko, the founder of 80sTees, uses Zapier to tweet about their new Shopify products and even publish posts on Tumblr from their blog. Even with an automated “set it and forget it” Twitter strategy, 80sTees found new markets simply because they shared their new products on Twitter.

If you want to explore other zaps on turning your orders into tasks, sending personal emails to your customers, and the like, then you can refer the Zapier post on Ecommerce automation.

Alternative: If this then that (IFTTT)

While not as powerful as Zapier, IFTTT offers similar automation in the form of “recipes.” You can explore relevant social media automation from the following list of 15 IFTTT recipes for Ecommerce.

3. Quuu Promote

If you’re pursuing content marketing for your Ecommerce store, you need a targeted distribution strategy for your content to ensure it cuts through the noise on social media. Indeed, Buzzsumo found that only 5% of content now gets more than 343 shares.

By submitting your content to the Quuu community, you ensure that it gets a decent number of shares on autopilot. That too at an affordable rate of up to $40 per post for 60 days of promotion.

While sending a URL for their review, you need to submit the accompanying short and long text for different social media. Then, choose a category for the content piece (as visible in the screenshot below).

Once your piece is approved, you get a dashboard with insights on the social media shares, clicks, and expiry date of your promotion.

Quuu analytics isn’t the most reliable (setup your own UTM parameters). They are also bad at customer support as I have seen my emails receive a delayed response by weeks.

However, it’s a great way for quick and automated social media promotion of educational, high-quality content. You can refer the detailed Quuu promotion guidelines to get started.

4. Tailwind

If you don’t know already, then the female dominant social network Pinterest is a terrific source of commerce.

Indeed, the wandering RV have relied on Pinterest to drive 12,814 pageviews in a single month and over $18,000 in sales.

Once you have a few high-quality images ready for your products, you can find a relevant Pinterest board for them. While you can do it manually, Tailwind can schedule pins at peak times for you (by using Smart Queue).

In the beginning, aim for ten pins/day (if you feel ambitious, then shoot for thirty!)

If you want to create a Pinterest marketing strategy using Tailwind analytics, then watch the tutorial by Breaking The One Percent below.

Once you’ve found your top performing pins, you can use the Smartloop feature inside Tailwind to keep re-sharing your best pins at the best times to optimize your engagement.

5. Chatfuel

Customer support is critical to generating more sales for your store, and chatbots can cut down on your customer service costs by 30%.

As Facebook Messenger has the largest user base among chat apps, it makes sense to launch your first conversational bot on it. Introducing Chatfuel. It’s a massive community of over 75,000 bot marketers. With a simple drag and drop interface, it facilitates building your first bot in under 15 minutes.

In the tutorial below, Dana Tran from ThinkTuitive guides you how to build your first bot.

With Chatfuel, you can set up automated workflows and direct your website visitors to the chatbot. Here is the welcome message I am greeted with by T-mobile.

When I tell T-Mobile bot that I’m not an existing customer, it offers me to look at ‘great deals’ by on their phones and plans. If I don’t want to explore the deals, I can also choose to ‘chat with human,’ ‘find store,’ and talk to a ‘product advisor.’

Bots offer personalization at scale. You can even persuade your customers to buy your products with discount coupons. And send follow-up messages to users that have purchased a product from your store. Read the five case studies of Ecommerce chatbots for inspiration to create your first profitable bot.

Alternative: Botsify

Another option to create a Facebook messenger bot without complicated programming is Botsify. You can even hire them to do the customer service for you.

6. Bonjoro

In their Marketing Automation Survey, Ascend2 found “delivering personalized content” as the top challenge to marketing automation success.

If you’re a niche Ecommerce product seller, then it’s all about finding your 1,000 true fans and sweeping them off their feet. Hence, it makes even more sense to offer personalized experiences to them.

To address a few of these personalization challenges, you can use Bonjoro. It’s a cool way to intercept your customer’s journey with targeted messages and build relationships. For example, you can send a welcome video to every new customer that buys your product.

Pat Flynn (online course creator and entrepreneur) does the same using Bonjoro to welcome his new course buyers (yes, the tool integrates with popular email marketing suites!) Here’s one such welcome message sent using Bonjoro by Pat.

And if you doubt that delighting your new fans this way won’t help your bottom line, then think again. Look at the results Bree Noble got when she started thanking her new free Facebook group members.

Using the tool you also get detailed insights on the opens, views, and click-throughs of your videos.

How can you use the tool for social media automation?

You can integrate it with the Zapier “If-This-Then-That” engine, then carry out these two tasks on the go wherever you are:

• When you get an excited customer sharing product’s awesomeness on social media, you can send them “thank you videos” quickly.

• You could address complaints and apprehensions against your products on social media real-time with personalized videos.

7. Grammarly Keyboard

By 2018, a Cisco 2016 report predicted 50% of team coordination and communication would occur on mobile collaboration apps.

If you use a mobile app for social media scheduling, then you might know how writing on the small screen is inconvenient. While typing, you’re prone to commit spelling mistakes, typos, and grammatical errors.

How would you like a digital assistant that could run grammar and spell check for you in the background on all your mobile apps?

Meet Grammarly Keyboard. It makes communication on mobile error-free, clear, and effective. Wonder how?

Well, it integrates seamlessly with your mobile apps and mobile browser to ensure your prose is polished and professional. And whether you want to correct your writing on Android or iOS, Grammarly has versions for both the platforms. Here are the download links:

• Grammarly Keyboard iOS version

• Grammarly Keyboard Android version

I have used Grammarly premium version on my Macbook for well over a year. It’s been useful in correcting my typos and suggesting advanced improvements. I recommend giving its paid version a shot for vocabulary and style enhancement features.

A few limitations of the app include:

• It currently does not have a talk-to-text version (as highlighted in the review below),

• You’re forced to use the Grammarly keyboard as it doesn’t integrate with other keyboards. The unavailability of glide typing makes it inconvenient to adopt it.

• As per many users, your privacy is at stake as the app will read every line you write including sensitive information.

However, Grammarly claims otherwise in their announcement post of the keyboard app.

I recommend reading their privacy policy for your peace of mind on how your information will be used.

8. Fastory Widget

Is Instagram central to your social media marketing strategy?

Then, leveraging stories is a no brainer.

You can use it for various purposes to drive users to other brand assets online.

And the Fastory widget takes stories a step further by offering a live stories update on your website. You get to show fresh content to your site visitors that you would have anyway posted on Instagram (how’s that for automation?)

To get started, here are the three simple steps.

You might also want to explore the Fastory full mobile-first marketing suite. A standout feature includes creating immersive experiences with motion headlines.

Conclusion

Over 80% of consumers use social media to engage with brands. Further, they use as many as seven social media channels to reach them.

It’s impossible to monitor your brand mentions and post high-quality content consistently without a little automation. I showed you around eight tools that you can use for taking care of scheduling updates and other tedious activities alongside real-time customer service.

While streamlining with these tools, don’t overkill. If your brand isn’t human, then you no user would like to follow or engage with your brand.

Which of the above tools are you going to integrate into your social media marketing efforts? Are there any other social media automation tools that you use frequently? Let me know in the comments.