So you are starting a blog.  Or a company.  Or launching a new product.  Or you’re an intern or analyst somehow tasked with marketing and social media.  Me too.  I’m a couple of those – so we have things in common.  Here’s where I’ve landed so far with Marketing Automation.  Leave a comment or Tweet me @keenerstrategy if you have additional awesome ideas I can try or if you have any questions about what I’ve done.

This entitled “How to Have Your Marketing Automation and Eat It Too” because I have a fundamental impatience with my craft.  I don’t want to wait until the perfect time to publish a post.  I had the thought, I put it “to pen” and I feel closure knowing its OUT THERE.

Here’s what I do:

I use WordPress to write the post and I publish it as soon as its done.  This doesn’t optimize for the WordPress Reader audience, but that isn’t the source of views for me.  It also shares to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

LinkedIn and Twitter are the source of my views.

I have IFTTT (IF This Then That) set up to automatically Tweet my post like this:

This way, using the insights from Hashtagify about my target market (people who would want to read about how I “do” product innovation and management) I can automatically add the high-impact hashtags and have Buffer send out the tweet at the time optimized for impressions.

So it looks pretty simple the first time:

Then the second time (when it matters on Twitter via Buffer) it has great tags added automagically:

After trying both, I do like Buffer better than HootSuite.  I like the iOS app better, but the real differentiator is that it works with IFTTT – something I use for other fun things and intend to expand because it is awesome.

The other great thing to do with Buffer – because I write about innovation and Tweet posts from TechCrunch – is to use Chrome and the Buffer Chrome extension.

Have fun automating!