I just read another article of the ‘What to do and not do on Twitter,’ variety, and I agreed with much of it — except the point about automation. It said that if you automate your tweets, people will know they’re ‘fake’ and will unfollow you. That all automation is spam.
I completely disagree.
Let’s deconstruct.
WHAT IS AUTOMATION?
Automation is when you use a third-party application (like Hootsuite, BufferApp, or Tweetdeck to name a few) to schedule in posts that go out at a designated time. It’s not in any way spam just because you use these applications. In fact, Tweetdeck is owned by Twitter!
I think this particular article, and many people in general, confuse automation with scheduling. This article’s author said that when you automate your tweets, you’re sending the same tweet over and over which is clearly ‘fake.’ Wrong.
I schedule in tons of original tweets and posts, but I’m not spamming the same message over and over. Sure, sending the same tweet repeatedly is annoying (and spammy) — I agree. I see this frequently with newbie authors on Twitter who have no idea what to tweet about — more an issue of branding than anything else. But that’s not what I do. That’s not what many millions of us do. Automation simply means SCHEDULING when used correctly.
WHY AUTOMATE?
Some people feel automation is a criminal offense. Others depend on it exclusively. I lie somewhere in the middle: I combine scheduling with live tweets (or Facebook or Google+ or…well, you get it). Why? As authors, we are generally not on social media all the time (and if you are, shut it off!), particularly when you need to be writing. It’s just too distracting. Some people say ‘Well, fine then. I will just tweet when I can,’ which brings up the issues of consistency and timing. If you’re sharing good content consistently, you will connect with more people, build relationships with more people, and hopefully sell more books!
And this all goes to your branding. If not, and if all you share are links to your books, you’re doing it wrong. You’re missing out. You need to be reading this article!
TIME
I’m driven by time, as most of us are. When it’s time for carpool and it’s also #MondayBlogs, I cannot be in two places at once. That’s why people much smarter than I created these wonderful applications. My current favorite? Pluggio. You can follow and unfollow people (it actually runs a 24/7 program for you based on your keywords); it finds relevant blogs and news articles based on keywords you ‘plug’ in; it provides analytics for growth; gosh, and so much more. And it’s free.
FINAL WORD:
I feel like a broken record about not spamming, but it bears clarifying that automation doesn’t mean spamming, and scheduling is not the death of social media — just be sure to live interact also.
Let’s all take a deep breath and do what works best for each of us.
Except spam, cause that sucks.
