Small Business Automation: The Mega Tweet

The Hurdles of Small Business

Running a small business is not easy an job, where a larger organisation has the luxury of being able to employ people to perform specialised tasks, a small business owner can not afford such a luxury. In most cases the I.T manager, Marketing manager, Customer Service manager, Adminstrator, Cleaner, CEO, CFO and worker is all one person - the small business owner. This presents the following challenges:

• Simply not enough hours in the day to simply complete all these tasks, it is a constant juggling act as to which task takes most priority. 
• Each role requires different set of skills and talents, many case the owner would have to apply additional time & energy to complete such tasks draining on their ability to perform the work they are actually skilled at (which also returns revenue).

The above challenges poses the following risks:

1. The owner is not "recharging" their energies on a regular basis leading to potential burn out.
2. The owner's mind is distracted with too many things such misses important business items
3. The owner simply ignores those things which are outside his' or her's natural skillset leading to a determental impact on the business later on.

Entry of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the use of internet related marketing tools & strategies to promote your business. This includes:

• SEO of your webpage
• Google Ad Words campaign
• Facebook/Instagram Ad campaign
• Sharing on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Linkedin groups & personal feed
• Linkedin message campaign
• Landing page linked to in bound marketing emails
• Blogging

Digital marketing can be a highly valueable tool for small business owners this is because the entry cost to participate is much lower than traditional marketing campaign and through the use of targeting audience the effect of reaching a niche audience is much more effective.Therefore for a low cost, a small business owner can reach the attending niche customer they make the most profit from. 

As a Chartered Accountant, I have seen some small business owners attain explosive gains via the use of effective digital marketing campaigns. Unfortunately I have also seen the reverse and many business owners spending much on consultants or time designing campaigns with little effect.

One aspect I am aware that drives the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign is regularity. There needs to be an understanding you are building an "audience" in order to build and keep an audience there must be regular and frequent news and information to keep your audience entertained. This is why "content content content" is a motto of digital marketing i.e. engaging, quality and frequent content.

For a small business owner who may not be able to afford their own marketing consultant (or who has been stung paying thousands to a non performing marketing consultant), Microsoft Flow can be a handy tool to use.

 The Mega Tweet

The purpose of this Flow is to help spread brand awareness and build an audience without having to do any extra work. 
This Flow reposts my original Tweet message (promotion or branding article) that was publicised on #smallbizau eleven times over the course of a month.This is particularly useful for a very popular hastag where it is unlikely the audience who seen a previous tweet would see future tweets simply because the channel is flooded with tweets on a daily basis, Microsoft Flow is therefore an easy way to get your voice heard in a very crowded social channel or alternatively if you are trying to build momentum for a big event e.g. a webinar.

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 In order to stop causing an endless loop of tweets I have added an aditional criteria:

** is just a character set I am using to stop my repeated tweets from retriggering itself (otherwise each new tweet will trigger this flow, causing an endless loop of tweets which I am sure Twitter won't be happy about). Therefore to stop this issue I have added my special character set ** to each of my repeated tweets to stop this from occurring.

Twitter also does not like you posting the same tweet twice (likely you will receive an error arise in your automation if you do). Therefore to overcome this issue, I have added an alternatively character between my tweets, in this case a full stop (.).




Using this process, you can choose to repeat the tweet as many times as you wish. In my example I have decided to tweet sporadically over the course of a month.




Connecting To The Mega Tweet

The above Mega Tweet is usefulfor automating repetition of your own Tweet but it also can be useful in connection with other digital marketing channels. 

In the above Flow I have linked YouTube to Facebook & Twitter. For example when I upload my latest webinar on my accounting firm's youtube channel it will share it on Facebook and Twitter. Note in Twitter I have included the #smallbizau this means this Flow will also trigger my Mega Tweet Flow. 

Therefore every time I upload a promotional video on youtube I have confidence it will be shared across many times across the popular Australian hastag #smallbizau thereby receiving maximum attention.

Which Flows can you deisgn to help your small business marketing campaign please comment them below!