Is social media automation awesome or awful?
Setting your brand up on social media is a pretty quick and easy job. The tricky part is maintaining your presence. To do it the right way, it takes time. You need to take a chunk out of your day and dedicate it to monitoring, creating content and engaging with your audience. For many small business owners, it’s hard to find enough time to focus on social media and they can’t afford to pay someone else to take care of it for them. One possible (and popular) solution is marketing automation software.
What is marketing automation software? Basically, it gives you a voice on social media when you’re not actually there to provide it. It allows you to do things like create an auto response message that gets sent out any time someone sends you a direct message or an @reply on Twitter, auto follow when a user follows you, send auto posts to other social media sites when one is updated, and auto retweet any mentions of your brand on Twitter. Some software also performs your social media monitoring functions for you. It sounds like an awesome solution, right? Well, for some it can be, but there is one big potential problem with relying too much on marketing automation.
The key idea behind social media is that it is social interaction. Relying too heavily on automation can take away from human qualities of your interactions with other users. If your messages are all the same, your brand will be perceived as inauthentic, which, in the social media world, is the kiss of death. People enjoy interacting with brands that seem real and human. The moment you start to sound robotic, your audience will start to shut you out. Even if you think you’re being clever about it, people will notice if you are letting a robot do the talking for you and they will think your brand is awful. (Awful at social media marketing, anyways.)
Marketing automation can provide some great options for those who are under a big time crunch, but you have to remember that your social media efforts can’t be fully automated. If you want to get the best results, you are still going to have to commit some of your time to your social media activities. People will respond better to a real person who is truly paying attention to them than they will to a marketing robot.
Have you used marketing automation to manage your social media activities? Did it work for you? Please share your experience with us in the comments.
