What Lurks Beyond the Keyboard - Social Media Automation

When tackling the task of social media strategy, you can't ignore automation as a solution to covering multiple channels, but do you really know what happens when it goes beyond your keyboard?

Whether it's Twitter, Facebook, digg, de.licio.us, whatever the outlet, if you're serious about creating, monitoring, and maintaining your online brand/presence, you probably have explored automating.

A recent e-mail came to me through my website that I want to share with you because it speaks exactly to the point that I want to make.

Vickie -

My question is about automatic uploading to twitter from other sites.

I see multiple tweets posted at the same time.

When I open my twitter page and see nothing but one person’s tweets I UNFOLLOW them.

You have four tweets from HootSuite all at once plus two or three others. That is fast closing in on my threshold to unfollow you.

Fact is I really love your tweets, but feel I have a live outside your tweets and don’t want to follow many links.

How do these sites work?

Can you control the number of posts from them?

What is the logic of having a lot of tweets? Is it effective? How is results measured?

I plan to try to tweet twice daily – maximum unless someone demonstrates that something else works better.

Thanks for the answers.

You can post this to the blog if you wish, or I can post an entry if you wish.

Thanks

Gordon Hughes

There's an in and there's an out, right? On this we can agree. But how it gets sent out, and how your viewer gets it are two VERY different things. Think of it like the mail truck running out of gas on the way, or maybe hitting a pothole. And that's the mail truck on MY end. What about the mail truck DELIVERING the content? Well, there's not much I can say to that end.

For my own strategy, I've found that for twitter, Hootsuite is well-suited to my needs, being able to schedule content and space it out. I certainly don't want overkill, but I do want to maintain my presence in the area of social media marketing. Therefore, I have to maintain a brand presence on a regular basis.

Now, if there is a follower who chooses to look at content at a particular time in the future, my tweets are obviously going to get backed up and it's going to look like maybe I'm publishing them all at once.

Or maybe, in fact, hootsuite had a hiccup and it didn't post them as I had scheduled.

And hmm, has twitter ever gone down? See, we just don't know what happens when it goes beyond our keyboard.

In the past, in doing e-mail marketing campaigns, I've learned to test the e-mail to myself first to make sure that the content is exactly what I want to appear when a recipient receives it. But do they ever? Or did I just end up in the junk folder?

Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share on the subject? Have you ever had an automation strategy gone haywire?