How to Auto-Post Content to Social Media For Shopify Business Effectively

Whether it’s you or someone you’re hiring, someone needs to build a social media content schedule for your business. This is the first stage toward having an effective social media marketing strategy. 

Benefits of building a social media content plan

Planning ahead allows you to be more consistent and relevant with your posts, and it makes it easier to track metrics.

• Ensure you’re posting consistently. 
• Organization. 
• Posting relevant and fresh content around current events, sales, product launches, etc. 
• Easier to keep track of impressions, CTR, conversions, and other metrics. 
• Saves time, money, and stress over the long run. 

Fail to prepare and you prepare to fail. Honestly, there’s a great pleasure in being able to open an app or spreadsheet and see everything your business is going to be doing for the next three months. It gives you control and peace of mind, leaving you more energy to deal with the challenges and problems elsewhere. 

 

How to plan your social media content

Now you have a tool to post automatic content on social networking, plus you can see clearly how to do it effectively. It’s time to build a plan for your social media marketing strategy. This includes everything from the platforms you’ll post on to the metrics you’ll track later on down the line. 

Choose your tools: Networks, planners, and analytics

Choose your networks

First thing’s first, you need to choose which social media platforms you’re going to focus on. Facebook is an obvious first choice, although Instagram isn’t best suited for all businesses. You’ll probably do better on Instagram selling designer handbags than second-hand car parts. 

Choose one or two social media platforms to focus your efforts on, then you’ll need to create a separate content publishing schedule and plan for each network. 

Choose your planner

Some businesses settle for an excel Google Sheets document to plan their content – and this is fine if it’s what you’re comfortable with. You might instead choose some project planner tool; however, these come with more features to plan content, although they won’t auto-post for you. 

We’d suggest using Socialpublish because it allows content creation, account management, auto-posting, and scheduling all in one place. 

Try to mix up your content when planning, for example, blog, blog, video, product promotion, blog, video. This keeps your social media channels fresh and more interesting. 

Choose your analytics

Analytics allows you to measure the reach and engagement of your posts. This information lets you see what works and what doesn’t, which can then optimize your social media marketing strategy for more conversions. 

• We recommend Google Analytics to track who arrives at your online store from which social media platforms. 
• Install a Facebook Pixel onto your website to measure conversions gained from Facebook ads. This is a piece of code that you install into your website to connect it with Facebook. 
• Use Insights on Socialpublish to measure all your social media analytics in one place. 

You can use Facebook Insights to measure the reach and engagement, such as likes, comments, and shares, of your posts. You can also use Instagram Insights to get the same information on that platform. 

Set goals and decide what to measure

The goals you set will determine the kind of content you post. For most businesses, the goal is going to be driving traffic to your eCommerce store or Facebook Shop to gain more sales. That said, it could also be to get email sign-ups, raise brand awareness, or add more followers to your business’s page.

It’s important to set goals so you can later measure how effective your content posting was. You should also decide what metrics to measure to determine this. 

You might choose to measure:

• Reach and engagement
• New followers  
• Website visits
• Sales 
• Email sign-ups 
• The bounce rate on your landing page 

Your specific goal might be to:

• Reach 10,000 people 
• Get 100 shares
• Increase website traffic by 15% 
• Boost sales of a product by 30% 
• Gain 500 email sign-ups

You should measure as many metrics as possible, regardless of your goal. Doing this will allow you to look back later at patterns over time and see what was most effective. You can then optimize future content based on what you’ve learned. 

Research and draft your content

The benefit of scheduling ahead is that you can time your automated posts with seasons, sales, product launches, and other events. Use your analytics data to see which products are popular at different times and promote these products on your social media channels accordingly. 

Identify promotions and content topics  

A simple example is a clothes store that sells Kashmir gloves during wintertime. This is quite an obvious time to sell when the weather is cold. Some niches will have less obvious opportunities to promote products, for example, you might sell more calligraphy sets around spring – perhaps the fresh new life at that time of year inspires your customers to take up a new hobby. 

You can’t predict everything, this is why analytics and research are so important to see what products to promote on your social media channels. 

You can use Google Trends, or just keep an eye on your competition, to see the kind of topics that will resonate with your target audience. Try to post useful written and video content for your audience to drive up engagement. Keep it fresh. 

Draft your content 

You can use tools like Socialpublish to build posts, add products, photos, and videos, or post links to your blog and schedule for later. It’s best to draft your content in advance and review it when you know the post date is coming up. 

Outsource content creation 

You can’t do everything yourself and it’s worth trusting professional freelancers to make your content for you. You can obviously manage basic posts, but when it comes to video content, blog articles, and photography, it’s best to leave it to the pros. 

• Use Fiverr or Upwork to find freelancers. 

Outsourcing content creation gives you more time to focus on managing your business and will generally give you great results. Reach out to content creators you like and try to build a more permanent working relationship with them. 

Track your content performance and learn from experience

Use analytics and your pre-set goals to measure the effectiveness of your content once it’s been posted. You can measure the reach and engagement of Facebook posts, or measure redirects from social media platforms to your eCommerce store. 

Find what works and gradually build a social media marketing strategy that converts. Schedule ahead, auto-post your content to save time and effort and outsource content creation whenever possible.