If you’re in B2B marketing, you’ve got limited resources and full-size goals. You know automation can help you win back time to work on the high-impact tasks AI can’t replicate, but moving from hype to how is easier said than done.

With huge demand for a steady stream of social content, it’s easy to get stuck in the hamster wheel of stressing over formats, hashtags, and pumping out post after post, with little time for strategy and creative iteration.

In this guide, we’ll review some of the top social media content automation tools and how to use them intentionally to be more efficient and effective with your social media content.

Social media content automation refers to the process of using apps, tools and software to create, schedule and publish social media content across various social networks automatically to reduce or eliminate the need for constant manual effort. Automation can include scheduling posts in advance, repurposing content for different platforms, social listening, and analyzing performance metrics.

How many automation tools have you already tried? If you’re like most marketers, you’ve likely already taken a tool or two (or three, or three dozen) for a spin.

With countless AI and automation tools released every day, it can be hard to know if you’re using the right one the right way.

We won’t tell you what the “best” social media automation tools are, but here are some of the top tools loved by B2B marketers.

As one of the only tools capable of transforming long-form videos into a range of short-form video, audio, and text-based content preformatted for social media, Content Lab is a go-to tool for brands like Qualio, AspenCore, and more.

Content Lab takes your most valuable source material (think: recorded webinars, podcasts, expert interviews, and digital events) and transforms it into social media posts that are relevant, authentic, and non-derivative—even when repurposed.

This is important because even on text-oriented platforms like LinkedIn, video plays a huge role. In fact, video is shared at a rate 20 times higher than any other type of post on LinkedIn.

Whether your video content is on Wistia, YouTube, or collecting dust in an archive folder somewhere, with Content Lab, you can simply drop the link or upload the file and transform that content into a range of formats for your socials.

Content Lab can help you:

• Automatically generate clips from any video
• Create social posts with text and video using AI
• Use preset customization options to tailor content to individual social platforms
• Create audiograms from podcasts or video
• Develop search-optimized blog posts that can be repurposed for social media

You also get live caption and transcript editing, user-friendly video editing tools, branded templates, and AI-recommended layouts to make each asset look and feel completely on-brand.

Content Lab users who use the tool in combination with Goldcast for digital events, can use live engagement analytics to decide which parts of your event should be repurposed into shorter videos for social.

Sendible is a social media management tool that streamlines content automation for marketers. It offers features for planning, scheduling, and publishing posts across various platforms, saving time and effort. You can manage multiple social accounts, analyze campaign performance, and interact with your target audience.

Best for: Larger marketing teams with multiple team members involved in social media scheduling.

Pricing: Starts at $29/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Get started with Sendible in 2 minutes.

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that enables users to schedule, publish, and analyze content across all social media channels from a single dashboard. Sprout also offers advanced features for social listening, engagement, and reporting, helping you connect the tactical with the strategic.

Best for: Marketing teams that need both automation and ROI insights.

Pricing: Starts at $199 per seat/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Learn how customer experience company Medallia used Sprout to reignite employee advocacy.

ContentStudio is a robust social media management and content marketing platform that allows marketers to automate social media content creation, curation, and scheduling. The platform also provides tools for content discovery, trending topics, and influencer outreach to help level up distribution.

Best for: Small to medium-sized teams that want an affordable tool with advanced add-on features.

Pricing: Starts at $25/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Check out ContentStudio’s interactive demo to see how easy it is to create and schedule posts and generate reports.

[IMAGE: PRODUCT IMAGE FROM SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATION PAGE]

Missinglettr is a social media marketing tool that automatically creates social media drip campaigns from your existing blog posts and video content. The platform uses AI to extract the most valuable quotes and images from your content, match them with trending hashtags and popular topics, then automatically share the content on social media. Missinglettr also offers analytics tools, a centralized social media calendar, and content curation tools.

Best for: Marketers who want to get more social engagement from their existing content.

Pricing: Starts at $15/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Find out everything you need to know about Missinglettr’s Drip Campaign creation tool in this video.

SocialBee allows users to create custom post categories, schedule posts, recycle old content, and track social media analytics from multiple platforms all in one place. SocialBee also includes tools for content discovery and audience engagement, making it a complete social media marketing tool for marketing teams looking to streamline their social media strategy.

Best for: Teams who want to bring all their social posts and analytics together.

Pricing: Starts at $24/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Check out this video overview of SocialBee’s platform.

[IMAGE: PRODUCT IMAGE FROM SCHEDULING PAGE]

Hootsuite is best known for its automation features for managing social media accounts and scheduling content across multiple platforms, but it also includes valuable team collaboration and engagement features, such as an easy link in bio tool, best time to post recommendations, and team roles and permissions. If you’re looking for end-to-end automation software that helps with both monitoring and optimizing your social media presence, Hootsuite is a classic choice.

Best for: Marketers with a high volume of content to publish across multiple platforms.

Pricing: Starts at $99/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Take a detailed 15-minute walkthrough of the Hootsuite dashboard to learn exactly how to get started.

CoSchedule is a marketing calendar and social media management platform that allows marketers to plan, create, and organize their content from one centralized location. CoSchedule’s primary feature is its social calendar which allows users to view their “entire social strategy in a single calendar” and schedule posts across several platforms.

Best for: Teams looking to align their social content with the rest of their campaigns for a central view of all things marketing.

Pricing: Starts at $19/month

Free trial: ✅

Learn more: Check out this guide to getting started with CoSchedule’s social calendar.

Most tools offer not only automation functionality, but also some kind of AI co-pilot or other “AI-powered” features.

In a world where nearly 65% of social media marketers say manual tasks keep them from doing high impact work, how can you use these tools to ramp up your productivity without cutting corners on quality?

Let’s take a closer look at the do’s and don’ts of social media content automation.

As a B2B brand, you can’t hop on every trend in the same way B2Cs can. Your success on social hinges on your ability to share knowledge and advice consistently across every platform.

It’s a tall order to say the least. To resist the trap of trying to automate everything, here are some tips to help you automate the right things.

According to recent data, the top three social media platforms B2B marketers use are Facebook (55%), Instagram (50%) and YouTube (48%). In the age of automation, there’s no good reason for marketers to be running around logging in and out of multiple different social media accounts.

Social media automation tools can easily bring all your content across various platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram together in a single dashboard. This doesn’t just save you time, it also helps ensure consistency across channels.

This one is surprisingly controversial. While the Gary V.’s of the world are staunchly against automated post scheduling, the truth is it can be a massive time-saver for busy B2B marketers.

With tools like Hootsuite and SocialBee that use AI to analyze and predict optimal posting times, you can improve your engagement by scheduling your content to go out at exactly the right time for your audience. Just make sure you’ve got a member of the team assigned to your social inbox and ready to pounce on incoming comments as quickly as possible to keep the conversation going.

According to Sprout Social’s Social Media Productivity report, 34% of the social media marketers surveyed said responding to customers via social media is one of the manual tasks that takes up the majority of their time.

At the end of the day, there is absolutely zero point in posting content to engage with your audience if you’re not going to actually…well, engage with your audience. One of the most valuable things social media automation tools bring to the table, is the ability to streamline customer questions and comments in one central inbox while getting real-time notifications whenever new engagements come in.

Despite the skepticism, data from HubSpot’s 2024 Global Social Media Trends report found that marketers who say their social media strategy was effective are 185% more likely to use AI to generate social media content.

But remember: generation and refinement are two very different parts of the content creation process. HubSpot’s report found that 71% of marketers using generative AI to create content said it performed better than content made without AI, but many of the use cases offered in the report focused on ‘value add’ through generating ideas and inspiration, and repurposing content by adapting it to a different audience, format, and tone.

In many cases, the result you get from AI is stronger with content repurposing compared to net new content creation. With strong source material from your webinars, podcasts, or other expert-led content, you can rapidly scale your social media publishing cadence, without cutting corners on quality.

Here are a couple examples of real brands doing exactly that.

Qualio: From 2+ hours to 30 seconds for quality automated video clips

For every hour of event content, Alex Pavlović, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Qualio, was spending 2-5 hours snipping, clipping, and repurposing webinar recordings to generate bite-sized content for social media.

“The light bulb moment with Content Lab came when, within 30 seconds, it pulled out 3-4 really great snippets,” says Alex. As part of their repurposing strategy, Alex and his team use content from each event to help promote their next one.

With AI in the mix, the marketing team at Qualio can quickly generate snippets that capture the message and spirit of each event, including snapshots of some of their most authentic and engaging moments.

Prior to Content Lab, Alex was admittedly skeptical about AI and the claims about its abilities. He watched the Content Lab clips back, half-expecting them to be mediocre, but he was blown away to find that they were pretty much ready to post.

Modern Sales Pro: Creating a complete sponsor data packet within an hour after every webinar

Webinars are a central component to the marketing strategy for the team at Modern Sales Pro.

After each event, the team uses Goldcast’s event data in combination with Content Lab’s to provide sponsors with a data packet that includes:

• Full registration list and attendance information
• CTA button clicks
• Engagement data from polls and chats
• Short video snippets to help promote the next event

“I think it's [Content Lab] going to be really helpful for TikTok, especially the one with the picture and the words on the side, that's the one that we use the most…We have a full calendar of social media and we are counting on Content Lab to be able to help us with this task for next year,” says Eduardo Duarte Ruas, Marketing Manager at Modern Sales Pro.

Unfortunately, there’s no blanket rule for what not to automate. Sure, there are some obvious no-nos (looking at you, robo-commenters 🙄), but the reality is every brand, audience, and marketing team is different.

In this section, we’ll share some key strategic frameworks to help you decide which tasks to keep in human hands.

Just because there’s a lot that AI and automation can do, doesn’t mean it needs to be a part of every process.

“It's a super versatile tool. And so what you don't want to do is use it as a hammer when it really should be being used as a screwdriver,” says Dr. Lisa Palmer, Founder, Dr. Lisa AI. “Whether it's AI, machine learning, or anything else, every type of model has an error rate. So, what is the consequence of your error?”

If you use automation to scale an error-prone process, you’re looking at more errors—not more efficiencies. AI experts like Lisa recommend using a clear framework for determining when to include vs. not to include AI in your marketing strategy.

Paul Roetzer, Founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute, uses a four-question framework to identify tasks that are prime for AI:

• Is it data-driven?
• Is it repetitive?
• Is it making a prediction about an outcome or behavior?
• Is it generative?

With a clear framework for understanding which time-consuming social media tasks to automate, you’ll be able to offload the manual work that doesn't deserve your energy and spend more time crafting a productive social media strategy.

Testing, creative shoots, more testing. In a perfect world, creative iteration is very much part of the process when it comes to social.

“We've learned some really important lessons so far. While I can streamline certain aspects of work, there are still elements of creativity, intuition, and emotional connection where human intervention is critical to getting the full job done,” says Lauren Boyman, CMO at KPMG US.

Lauren is part of a growing chorus of B2B marketers predicting a “level of transformation similar to what we saw almost two decades ago when digital martech came to the forefront,” due to AI’s massive potential to remove the grunt work and free marketers up to think more creatively.

According to BrightLocal’s 2024 Consumer Review survey, 75% of consumers ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ read reviews when browsing for businesses. But according to data from HubSpot, 64% of marketers are concerned that creating content with generative AI can harm their brand’s reputation.

No matter which niche you’re in, your online presence matters. To strike the right balance, consider using social listening tools to alert you to any important reviews or brand mentions, but keep your responses with a human. Sure, AI chatbots can help draft an initial response to a positive or negative comment or review, but the conversation itself needs to be live, empathetic, and 100% human.

Social media marketing automation isn’t a silver bullet. But with the right approach, it can be a valuable tool for reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and getting more back for every dollar or minute invested in social media.

The time-saving potential is huge, but the truth is there will always be areas of your B2B social media strategy that require a human touch.

When you’re ready to take recurring, repetitive and non-creative tasks off your plate and spend more time elevating brand affinity and engagement, Content Lab is here to help. Request your free trial today to learn more, or book a demo of Goldcast to see the power combo in action.