Automation is a powerful tool for any business, especially small businesses that don’t have a lot of employees. There is a myriad of useful tools to help you automate almost anything you choose. However, it’s important to understand that automation should serve you, and save you time and money.

Here are some things you should absolutely choose to automate — and some that are better if done by a human.

You should automate: your file backups

Backing up your important files and documents is key for your business, and even if you have a routine in place to manually back up your files every so often, this is an excellent task to automate so you never have to worry.

Setting up your files to automatically back up to the cloud can save you headaches and free up your time and mind for other tasks. There are several free tools available that you can set up once and then forget about.

You shouldn’t automate: emotionally charged employee communication

There are absolutely some HR tasks that you can automate, including communication, but if it involves delicate topics or a very specific situation, it’s better for your human resources team to handle it themselves.

Not only does the human touch make sure that nuances of emotion don’t get lost or misinterpreted, but it also encourages a more positive company culture. If your employees feel your HR communication is too cold, they won’t feel safe or appreciated in the workplace.

You should automate: your social media

You do not want to be creating and publishing social media posts every day. Instead, you or your social media coordinator should take a couple of hours every week to create your social media posts and schedule them in a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Zoho Social.

Your posts should be scheduled for a time of day when your audience is most likely to view it. Setting the time for 11:34 instead of 11:30 on the dot, for example, can lend a more human feel to automation.

Other ways to “automate” or simplify your social media process are:

  1. Have templates for certain kinds of posts that you can easily plug content into. This also helps you maintain consistency in your feed.
  2. Choose a few types of posts to use consistently, such as quotes, Did You Knows, trivia, photos, etc. This helps your or your marketing team come up with ideas week after week.

You shouldn’t automate: responses to customer reviews

You may have seen customer reviews where businesses respond with a generic message — the same one on every review, especially negative reviews. These feel unnatural and impersonal because it’s clear that they have no thought or care behind them.

To create a connection with your customers, make your reviews more specific and personal. Have someone respond to each review with a personalized message, and follow up with negative reviews through direct message if necessary. Use people’s names.

You should automate: lead follow-up

Following up with a new contact or potential lead is time-consuming if you’re going to do it right, much less following up with several. Although you should be adding the personal touch to these new relationships and getting on phone calls, implementing lead follow-up can make the process of closing a lead much easier.

Building a long-term nurture campaign helps you stay in contact with leads and build a relationship; you can remind them about your business, set up calls and appointments more effectively, send them free content, and more.

You shouldn’t automate: quality control

When it comes to ensuring the quality of a product, whether it’s for internal use or for a client, there’s nothing like a pair of real eyes to check it. Humans catch things that machines just don’t, especially when it comes to something like ad copy or a blog post.

If your employee wrote a blog post, for example, they could simply run it through a tool like Grammarly to make sure it sounds good and is free of errors. But there’s nothing like an editor to review something as subjective as a piece of writing and really make the quality great.

Similarly, for something strategic like an ad campaign, having a specialist review the ads and the strategy can make a world of difference in the effectiveness of the campaign.

Automate With Care

Automation should always be working for you, not against you. If it doesn’t save you time and money, or worse, if it alienates your customers and your employees, don’t use it. But there are many useful ways to incorporate automation into your business and give yourself more room to grow.