Social Media Automation – Have a Care!

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Here at Savvy Marketers, we’re all in favour of making life easier by using some of the great automation tools available online. Social Networking can eat away at precious time so a bit of planning and scheduling can make it appear you’re everywhere, even when you might be out enjoying the sunshine!

But it is possible to go a bit too far and create a rather different impression to the one you wanted. Here are some unfortunate recent examples that demonstrate this very well:

• Twitterfeed – is great for automatically tweeting RSS feeds of blogs and articles. But recently I’ve seen people either leave the number of tweets per hour set at 5 – so there’s a sudden surge in their twitter stream, while others are either sending out duplicates of everything, or even tweeting feeds of subjects that have no relevance to the business they’re in.
• Automatically following people back on Twitter when they follow you isn’t a good idea at all. Often people are just trying to get a high number of followers and will ‘unfollow’ you within a day or so – I still can’t work out what that’s all about! I use www.socialoomph.com and ‘vet’ new followers by visiting their websites, before deciding if I want to follow them back.
• Unlike many people, I do believe that an automated welcome message to new followers can be OK, provided it is welcoming – and doesn’t include a pitch, or even a link to a free report (that’s a bit tacky).
• When you set up every tweet to automatically update your status on LinkedIn and Facebook, it gets very irritating for your connections on those sites. Do you really want everyone to see every tweet you send? Twitter is the best place to contain the chatter, so use the appropriate tools and be selective. And I’ve seen some rather confusing results of automated tweets coming in the other direction, from people’s Facebook pages, so it’s a good idea take a bit of time to test those links too.
• If you use any of the numerous URL shorteners, do take the trouble to double (and even treble) check that they go where you want them to. It’s such a wasted effort otherwise.

So, while I agree these automated tools are great at saving time, please don’t just set them off to run without occasionally monitoring that they’re still doing what you intended.

What do you think about the automation tools?  Do let us know by leaving your comments below.

About Louise

Louise Barnes-Johnston has been working in social media marketing since 2007 after realising that it was a powerful marketing tool which would enable her clients to raise the profile of their businesses on the internet, even when working to a limited budget. Her specialism is in researching social media practices; trying out the most effective online tools and then sharing the best of them with her clients.