The Best and Free Way to Automate Social Media Marketing in 2022

To be honest…

Posting on social media is not my cup of tea -nor did I think I could afford to automate social media posts. For folks like myself, it feels like I’m walking on eggshells trying to make sure I have everything in line for my personal account -which is why I don’t post often to my personal accounts. There are so many things you have to consider like creating content, editing, finding good hashtags and so on.

With that being said, I felt burnt out from posting and had to take a break from social media for a few months. It felt great not having to worry about my business accounts, but I noticed the page did not grow during my absence. It’s safe to say that this approach will not do well if you are using social media for business purposes.

Of course, the next line of thought anyone would take is “how do I prevent this from happening again?”. While you can always find another set of hands to help, we wanted to see if there was an easier way to create consistent content for our brand. We had heard about automating posts well in advance, but it seemed like you needed to pay for a monthly service to do this. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. In this article, we’ll go over how you can automate your company’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Creating Content For Your Business Social Media Marketing

Your content is what is going to stand out to your audience. You can post anything you want! As long as it is going to engage with your audience and sticks to a particular trend that your brand can get behind. For instance, our brand likes techie memes and we post them quite often. However, we’re trying out some video concepts like promotions, short explainer videos and our logo with neat animations and groovy music.

Canva is a great free online tool you can use to create stunning graphics and video content for your social media. We’ve been using this for quite some time and we have had nothing but great things to say about the platform. We used Canva to generate the featured image for this post about python gaming projects. We would recommend you try Canva out!

Whatever direction you decide, be sure to take enough time out of one or two days to make it all happen. Whether you need to have a dedicated time for shooting video or making memes, be sure you have enough time to create quality content you can post. Once you have everything squared away, it’s time to get ready to post!

Editing Your Content

You should edit the dimensions of your images and video down to the correct size you will be posting. For instance, most social media posts will use a 1:1 aspect ratio, whereas stories on most platforms are 9:16 aspect ratio. If this will be for YouTube or your website, 16:9 aspect ratio is a good format.

If you have any experience in photo/video editing, setting some time to edit all of your footage will allow you to focus on finding hashtags whenever you are ready to schedule posts. These skills are also very handy outside of social media marketing, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to learn these skills anyhow.

Hashtags

While our main focus is not in social media marketing growth, there are a couple of good practices that everyone will mention when it comes to hashtags. The algorithms change consistently, but in general you should keep your hashtags:

1. Related to your content
2. Mix high-post hashtags with lower and mid-ranking hashtags
3. Don’t go overboard with hashtags

These general rules of thumbs will help you in any market, but you may find a different strategy works better for your particular situation. Experiment with your hashtags and see what works and what doesn’t.

Facebook/Meta’s Business Suite

The business suite from Facebook/Meta is a great tool you can use for automating your business Instagram and Facebook pages for free. Given that this tool is directly embedded into the software, this makes social media marketing so much easier! For example, this is a screenshot of our first month of posts that we automated in 3 hours total. It was no issue creating the posts once we got into the swing of things, but the bulk of the time was spent creating content to post.

Be sure to space your content out throughout your desired time period. In this example, we wanted to space out a month’s worth of content in one day to see if it was possible (and it was). Be sure there are no holes in your posting schedule. If you post every single day, there should be posts allocated for each day -even if that means cutting back your projected time period of posts. For us, we like to space things out and have 4-6 posts a week.

Canva

While it is not a free option, we’ve also been using Canva for the majority of our content creation. We started the Pro trial that includes a scheduler within the Canva app, and it’s been a very pleasant experience! Additionally, you also have the option to store brand kits to help keep your content in the same established look of your business.

At the time of writing, the yearly subscription is $120 for a team of 5, which is pretty good when you compare it to paying for the Adobe suite of tools. Additionally, anyone can design with Canva right out of the box with no training.

If you’re going to use Canva, it’s worth the extra $$ to schedule your content directly in Canva, but it’s extra $$ to keep in mind.

Closing Thoughts

Automating your social media can be done quickly and affordably for any personal or business account! I’m upset we couldn’t have found this sooner, but we’ll definitely be employing this in our social media marketing strategy moving forward. Given the flexibility that this offers, we recommend you do the same! Give it a try and let us know how your experience with this automation tool was for you in the comments.