Managing your social media accounts can be very time consuming. That is why most companies that have the resources available usually hire a social media marketing person to handle the load. It’s a lot of research, scheduling and engagement. That’s why some people (especially those who are bootstrapping a business) need to manage their social presence themselves. This can be a huge ordeal if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why some look towards automation tools.
In this article I’ll only really speak to Twitter automation. I’m focusing on this social network primarily because it is here that we see a lot more automation tools. Facebook has it’s fair share, but a lot of people use it for personal reasons whereas Twitter is more flexible and free.
Twitter automation in my eyes can be seen as very spammy. Black hat marketers will tend to create all these fake accounts on Twitter and basically use it to spread their message. I mean, this makes sense right? It’s much easier to make hundreds of Twitter accounts, and you can really contact anyone (unlike on Facebook). It is here where we can see a lot of automation from people feeding content from blogs and churning followers to build a massive following where they can market their messages.
Well, this sounds pretty bad right? It’s actually not always the case.
Twitter automation tools can be used quite effectively if you know what you’re doing. Lets start from the beginning.
Imagine you create your first blog for your company. You wrote 1 article per week. That’s pretty manageable. It’s easy to spread the word of your content through a service such as Hootsuite. What if now, you’re publishing 5 articles a day? At this point, it starts to become a process. Scheduling posts to go out every so often can certainly become a hassle. That’s where Twitter automation comes in.
With a twitter automation tool, you can basically focus on writing your content, and spend less time scheduling. You can also feed content from other relevant sources with ease.
Twitter automation tools should not be your only focus in social media management; however, it should be included to help with what you’re already currently doing.
What are your thoughts about social media automation?
Photo via Keoni101
