Social Media Automation

When to use Social Media Automation

Automation of social media poses one large threat. This is dehumanising

yourself. Make sure that the posts that are automated are personal
enough that your audience does not see you as a spam account. Finding
the middle ground between staying in the conversation and automated
posts is the key to success.

Remember – once you have set up social media automation, you can’t just
forget about it. To have a successful account be that personal or business, you
need to monitor the progress of your social media account. You have to keep
connected and engaged with your audience from the beginning to the end.
From your first post to your last.

You can use automation tools to decrease the amount of time you spend
daily on social media. It can reduce work but doesn’t mean you can stop
working altogether. You still need to put effort in. The result of social
media automation should be that you can use your time more wisely;
making the time you spend on social media websites as productive as
possible.

Understanding which parts of social media to automate can be difficult.

One rule proposed by TA McCann is that for every 10 posts you do, 5
should be content from someone else, 3 should be content from you that
is relevant but not a sales pitch to them and the last 2 should be
something personal, something that makes your account more human
and more approachable.

One way of working the social media automation system and keeping a
‘human’ account, is automating posts that are not that important.

Examples of this would be, quotes or retweets. These can be automated

at times of the day where you’re away. These kinds of posts will make
sense at any time and continue to humanise your account.

Another good use of automation is to post on your sites every time a blog
post has been uploaded on sites like blogger using the RSS. This will help
increase your viewer count, just make sure to keep in touch with your
audience and to not only post links to your blog because that’s going to be
boring and very spammy.
So why use automated posts?

Really the aim of automated posts is to maintain a presence. Posts like

quotes and retweets aren’t going to be seen as spam so long as you mix
them up with personal tweets and topic related ones.

But there are times when definitely not to use automated posts. The most
important time to be personal is in dealing with customer relations. If you
are a business, customer relations can be the difference between keeping
and losing a customer. An impersonal automated post is going to put
anyone off contacting you and they may just move to a company with
better service. People like to be talked by other humans not by an
automated robot.

Another big no is automating troubleshooting. This is similar to customer

responses and will have the same outcome if done via automated posts –
you will lose customers.