Should I Automate Social Media

If you already have social networking profiles, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. then you know that you need a lot of time to maintain all this virtual “real estate”. You also know that as a small business owner you are already pretty much maxed out. Fortunately, automation comes to the rescue!

But wait, aren’t you supposed to be 100% authentic and automation is the opposite of that? Wouldn’t automating some of the social media work go against the spirit of social networking?

I don’t think so and here’s why:

Your time is finite and you can only spend so much of it on various aspects of your business, including social media. If you have enough time to do it all manually without sacrificing other important commitments, then you don’t need to read any further.

Automation tools are just that – tools. In itself they are neither authentic nor unauthentic. It’s up to you how you use them. For example, you can start sending batches of hourly updates with links to dozens of blogs that you don’t even read. Or you can choose to send just a couple of posts each week that impressed you the most.

Automation is only a small part of it – a social media strategy that relies solely on automation and delegation (to an employee or a virtual assistant) won’t get you far. As John Jantsch says in one of the DuctTapeMarketing.com posts “Automation is not a substitute, more of a supplement.”

This being said, I firmly believe that auto-follows, auto-responses, auto-DMs and such do more harm than good when trying to build relationships and trust in social media. That’s why I do not include tutorials on how to automate what’s supposed to be a two-way conversation.

So how do you know what can be automated?

Revisit Your Goals - what are your social media goals and how they will be affected by automation. For example, automation is more suitable if you’re trying to increase your company’s or brand’s visibility online. On the other hand, if you are building yourself up as a niche authority, you should be very careful about what you automate.

Listen carefully – listening in on social media conversations works better if you use at least some automation. Instead of spending hours sifting through conversations and searching for your brand or keyword mentions, set up your filters (Google Alerts, TweetBeep, RSS feeds, Techrigy, etc) once and enjoy consistent results.  

Do Unto Others.. - each time you automate part of your social media involvement, you essentially turn it into a broadcast, a one-way announcement. Automatically posting your blog updates is one thing (since it’s essentially an announcement anyway). Greeting your new followers with a cookie-cutter DM note is a very different situation. In other words, how do you feel when someone else does it to you?

Ok then, let’s see which social media tasks shouldn’t be automated (or for that matter, delegated).

• Following and unfollowing
• Direct messaging
• Replies to other’s direct messages
• Any part of two-way conversations
• Blind and automated content digging or sharing

Feel free to add to this list or disagree with it. Share your experience automating or delegating social media tasks – what you do, are you reaching your goals, tools you use, etc.

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, small business

Related posts:

1. How to Build Your Social Media Strategy
2. 7 Reasons Social Networks Are a Waste of Time
3. How is Social Media Used for Business?