And if I do, how can I maintain a “personal” touch?
What a *great* question, thank you! The simple answer is you shouldn’t automate ANY part of your social media marketing, communications, product development, customer service, or talent acquisition efforts. At least, not until you understand social media well enough to know exactly how to use each social media channel to connect with your target audience. Yes, it is very tempting to use every tool you can find to reduce the time you spend managing your social media efforts, but think about the irreparable damage you can do to your brand. Do you really want to drive faster in the dark? Let’s take a look at the risks and benefits of automating the different parts of your social media strategy, and turn on your headlights in the process.
My usual disclaimer before we start – all opinions expressed here are my own, and come from my experience running social marketing campaigns, managing social marketing teams, and advising social marketing clients. Your mileage will vary.
A recent study from the University of Missouri confirms what we marketers know instinctively: people (both B2C and B2B people) want to connect with real people, not with companies, products or brands.
Interestingly, I’m asked with surprising frequency why I use my own name and photo on my company’s Twitter account, rather than my company’s name and logo. Ask yourself the question: who are *you* more likely to follow, friend, subscribe, or connect with on social media? A real person, or an anonymous entity? There’s a very real reason why President Barack Obama is starting to write his own tweets. To market and sell *his* product, the country’s best communications experts have convinced him that he must personally connect with people on social media.
What your mom never told you about automating social media
To better answer this question, I will break social media “management” into five distinct areas: listening and monitoring, tracking and analytics, creating content, publishing content, and managing your connections.
Which tasks should you always, never, sometimes, completely, never, or partially automate? Let’s jump in!
1) Listening and Monitoring: Immediately automate as much as you can.
While there is nothing better than directly reading your target audience’s social media posts, the reality is that it quickly becomes physically impossible to read *everything*, while balancing your daily workload. Social media never sleeps. There is always the risk that just when you step out for a cup of coffee, you will miss THE post that has the potential to change your business forever. Thankfully, there are many free tools that can help you to effectively manage this gargantuan effort, as not all of us have the trained staff and the financial resources to use Vocus or radian6 [full disclosure: my company uses one of these for fee solutions, and is evaluating the other]. A fast, easy, and free place to start is Google alerts.
If you have not yet already done so, stop reading this article and take three minutes RIGHT NOW to set up Google alerts for your name, your company’s name, the name of your #1 product or brand, and your #1 competitor. “But Ken,” I hear you say, “the last thing I want is more emails!” Google alerts are immediate, free, and can be routed using your email’s rules function to a sub-folder so they don’t clog up your email. Besides [using my dad voice here], as marketers, our number one job is to listen, and social media exponentially increases our ability to do so. I’m old enough to remember paying millions of dollars a year for (instantly) out-of-date customer and market research. Wouldn’t you rather get immediately actionable intelligence delivered in real-time to your inbox?
2) Tracking and Analytics: Immediately automate as much as you can.
Yes, I can do math without a calculator. But I would never try to analyze the results from multiple social media accounts manually. While many of the same tools you use to listen can also be used to track and analyze, don’t overlook the free (and freemium) analytics that come with most social media accounts. Spring for the pay version of Flickr. Ante up for the lowest pay version of SlideShare. The analytics capabilities already “built into” each social media channel are often the easiest and cheapest way to track your marketing ROI, especially if you are only using a handful of channels.
3) Content Creation: NEVER automate, period (unless…you’re a bakery).
When people follow you, even if all they initially want is a discount, they become engaged because of their connection with you. Whether they find you interesting, educational, informative, useful, entertaining, funny, hot, or just a hot mess (celebrities often fall [literally] into this last category). Said differently, these people want to know what you personally have to say. They are not following your agency, your publicist, or your staff, and most certainly not some “bot” that automates (or semi-automates) the creation of your posts. The ONE exception to this rule? Bakers. Yes, bakers. The single most ingenious use of social media I have seen to date was designed for bakers. They have harnessed the power of Twitter to automatically tweet out when they have hot bread coming out of the oven (I love you http://bakertweet.com!). Now *that’s* marketing.
4) Content Publication: Sometimes, but with caution.
This is where social media automation, under the right conditions (such as when you’re speaking publicly) can work brilliantly. Imagine you’re presenting a keynote address to a packed ballroom. If you’ve pre-written tweets summarizing each of your slide’s content, your tweets can be “magically” shared with the world (this post from TNW tells you how).
However, under the wrong conditions automation can fail, and fail big. Take your blog. Imagine you’ve labored for days researching, writing, and editing a thought-provoking post. You then configure your blog to “auto-tweet” your new post out to your followers when it goes live. Sure, people get the link to your post, but the tweet is nothing more than a link. It’s bland, and it is missing your characteristic style, flair, and personality. What motivation have you given your followers to read your new blog post, let alone new people to follow you?
5) Connection Management: Only AFTER you understand your social conversion factors, and with extreme caution.
The dark underbelly of social media is what a significant group of people embrace as the more desirable alternative to ”white hat” approaches based on the sharing of their passion and expertise to personally engage with their target audience. Instead, these opportunists give social media a bad name with a “get rich quick” approaches that promise to deliver thousands of followers and lots of buzz by creating and monetizing large numbers of social connections. A search for social media automation tools on Google yields millions of results (14.8 million results at the time of writing this column). Ask yourself why you are using social media, and what it is that you want to achieve. The litmus test I use? Would it help or hurt my brand with my target audience if I shared the tools I use, and why I use them?
For example, I think Manage Flitter is invaluable for helping me to identify [and then disconnect from] “dead” accounts, where people have either stopped using Twitter entirely, or simply haven’t tweeted in months. That said, I still recommend you avoid the use of *any* connection management tool for your first 30 days on a given social channel. Going back to my driving in the dark analogy, why would you EVER risk automating a process before you know how it works for you?
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What do YOU think? To what extent should you automate your social media, and how can you maintain your personal touch when you do? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
Editor’s note: Do YOU have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question with the hashtag “#DearKen”. All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.