By Maulik Patel

11 Jul 2019

If there’s one strategy that incorporates the overwhelming demand for ongoing content and flourishes brands at the same time, it is thought leadership.

The positive impact of thought leadership has increased since the beginning of the social media era.

Active social media users are constantly looking for content to entertain them. Thought leaders feed them by delivering hoards of content throughout the week. Social apps, crowded with thought leadership content, make users feel tethered to the brand from where content is coming. On one side, users enjoy the content, on another side, brands are pervading – all due to thought leadership.

As tempting as it sounds, thought leadership comes at the cost of loads of time and effort from the brand’s side. There are 65+ social media networks, each with a different context. If not all, the brand has to publish content on a few of them to reach their targeted audience. It is not thought leadership hindering the success of brands on social media, but the content required to flourish as a thought leader.

That’s why social media automation comes to the rescue.

Before I tell you how to put thought leadership in action via automation, let’s have a brief look at what it is.

Thought Leadership is the art of positioning a person or a company or a brand as the leader of their field of expertise via valuable content.

Social Media Automation is software or technology used to automate various marketing tasks and repetitive tasks of the organization.

Combine both and you will never run out of content. Plus, your brand will be recognized as an inspiring thought leader for users. Then only the conversion turns into a piece of cake.

How to Automate Thought Leadership on Social Media?

If you were to walk around social media, you’d notice only content in different forms like articles, videos, images, podcasts, quotes, questions, etc. Not mentioning those replies and comments are also a part of the content. In a nutshell, you have to be everywhere.

Instead of giving you a heap of doing this or doing that, I will tell you about 4 types of thought leadership content you must prepare in advance and tools to automate them on social media.

Don’t worry, this won’t take more than an hour a day.

Always follow two rules,

“Schedule what you create

Share what you curate”

Oh yes, you need it all if you want to shine on social media as a thought leader.

Looks like a lot, but I am going to tell you how to automate everything in advance for a month.

Automate Content Creation on Social Media

First of all, I would suggest you swear by creating at least 1 long-form article in a week. From there onwards, you would be able to create other forms of content. This is called content distribution. To save time, you can hire a writer for the blog. Instruct a graphic designer to convert the article into different visual and audio forms.

Note: You don’t need to convert the whole article. Select some impressive chunks from the article and transfer them into visual form.

Now, its time to automate your created content on social media.

3 Things You Must Know before Automation

1. Find out the best time to post on each social media network

2. How often to post on various social media networks

3. Which content works best on which social media network

Well, you have to find it on your own. Let’s say your key social network channels are YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Obviously, for YouTube – Videos, for Facebook – Images & Videos, and for Twitter – a Tweet with a link to Blog.

Got it.

Let’s schedule it then.

Schedule all your created content on social media via tools at the best possible time with the preferable content for each network.

Tools

Top 3 Scheduling Tools to Automate Thought Leadership Social Media Content

Buffer allows you to schedule social media posts in advance for upcoming months. You just have to connect your social media accounts in Buffer and you are ready to schedule posts for a month.
HootSuite offers similar services to Buffer. Along with scheduling tools, it lets you track real-time updates and brand monitoring.
SocialPilotis a mixture of Buffer and Hootsuite, offering every service possible for social media automation including scheduling, bulk scheduling, analytics, and much more.

2. Automate Content Curation

Thought leadership is not all about promoting yourself. It’s about spreading the best content for your users, even if it comes from a third party. I know you don’t have much time for sharing yours as well as others’ content. That’s why content curation helps you achieve this task.

Content curation is gathering relevant content of a particular topic or field of expertise across the web. Big brands use content curation to generate more value for their users.

Automating content curation is easier than automating content creation. All you have to do is find a tool, suggest your favorite topics or keywords and let it post relevant content on your behalf.

3. Automate Recycling Content

There are contents that never go out of trend. Users love to read them again and again. The online world is full of evergreen content. If you have a blog, you must be aware of the content that users still read whenever they land on your site. Collect such content and schedule it, again and again, to show your care towards the targeted audience.

Note: Maintain a certain time difference between sharing the same content repetitively.

You already know that scheduling tools help here. But you need other tools that help you find evergreen content.

Tool

No tool can beat Buzzsumo for locating content having maximum shares and engagement. If you can’t afford it, simply type your keywords on Google and the best content will find its way to the top of the list. Collect the toppers, share them, and reschedule them.

Tool

For me, it has always been Quuu. It’s the first social sharing automation tool that shares content based on your selected topics. Quuu has partnered with Buffer to schedule curated content. You can go by default scheduling settings or modify the date and timings as per your preference.

4. Automate Social Media Listening

Posting and posting content is not enough. Your personal interaction is a must to make users feel that you exist in real. Or not some robot who focuses only on sharing content and increasing followers. For that, you must be available at places where questions of your expertise asked or where your brand’s mentions take place.

It’s next to impossible to find such places manually. Here you necessarily need a tool to accomplish the task for you.

Tools

Brand24 and Mention.com will help you there. They take you to places where users are talking about you and where your voice is must either to solve the problem or participate in the discussion.

Social listening is the best part of the thought leadership campaign.

Future of Thought Leadership on Social Media

Thought leaders and their social accounts are the first places for users to get their answers on. With the increasing use of social networks, this is going to flourish more and more. Instead of trusting brands, users prefer to trust humans. No wonder, influencers, and thought leaders hold the key place on social media networks. It’s time to make a place for yourself before it’s too late. All it takes is a few tools to shine as a thought leader.