Social Media Marketing Automation: Good or Bad

Published on March 3, 2015

No matter how workaholic you are, you cannot be online at 24/7 managing social media marketing campaign, that’s one of the reasons why people choose social media automation. Is it good to automate updates on your social media networks? The answer can be yes and no.

“Yes,” if you know how to do it, “no” if you still have little knowledge about how this mechanism works. Let’s go deeper into the details.

How to automate your social media activities?

Schedule at the right time: Determine the time when your target audience is the most active – reading your posts, giving feedback, etc. – and schedule your updates for that time. Make sure it’s also a good time for you, since humanity can’t be automated. A good social media marketing campaign can’t work out without human engagement. You need to be able to reply to comments, retweets and so on.

What you choose is what you get: Also, automation can be beneficial if you choose not just a bunch of posts in order to update your profile but schedule the posts that are the most relevant to your audience.

I know it sounds as a general tip, like “put the quality above all”, however, some people choose all the posts that are suggested by an automation software and schedule them. Did you check the links? Are you at least briefly aware of the content that you share?

Another problem is that people look only at the title and the source of the post. This does not mean that you are aware of the content. Let’s say, you see a relevant article title on a trustworthy A source, does it mean you have to schedule it immediately? What if the article on A source is quality but short and your audience will get interested in the one that gives more details, say the B one. Of course, you can schedule both but which one would you schedule first when your audience is maximum active? It is important to check the article before scheduling it.

Does Social Media Marketing Automation Mean Neglect?

If most of the time the updates on your social networks are automated, it’s obvious who is really doing the posting and it has a certain percentage of neglect. I myself use Hootsuite and love this tool but I change the ow.ly links to the original ones once in a while to make sure my audience does not get bored.

Permanent Scheduling, no monitoring?

If your automated posts aren’t monitored, your audience could leave. Another problem is the loss of human connection with businesses, your potential audience, as all you suggest them is a third-party app posting, instead of human connection and interaction.

What is the best way of automating social media marketing?

I’d put it like this: social media marketing automation is good if you do it reasonably, i.e. scheduling quality content at the right time both for you and your audience, monitoring, interacting and engaging your fans.