Don’t Let a Robot Ruin Your Social Media Marketing!
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Fri, Oct 21, 2011
Companies can either fail or succeed at social media marketing depending on their strategy. We’ve seen a lot of great companies get it completely wrong by having the wrong attitude, but have seen others reap the benefits after putting in the resources and the work. The truth is: social media isn’t as easy as it looks. It can be hard work and it definitely takes time. And once you get into it, keeping up the momentum requires a lot of effort. Posing a question on LinkedIn once a week isn’t going to get your organization anywhere: constant engagement is required.
Automation in the social media world: good or bad?
With that in mind, people look for ways to automate the social media process. Some of these make sense: working in different time zones, for example. But sometimes we do it for the wrong reasons and it doesn’t make sense to do so. And on certain social media websites it really is silly to automate posts that result in robotic impressions.
Remember that all social networks are different. For example, while we have pages on Facebook, your fans will rarely actually visit it on purpose. The majority of fans will get your updates and posts through their own news feed. This means you need to be ever-present on news feeds without creating spam. Better still, post directly to Facebook with content rather than using automated third-party applications, as the Facebook algorithms have been known to favour content that is directly posted onto Facebook.
What’s your social media language?
The delivery style is vital for each platform. Cross posting with an auto publisher results in robotic language where on Twitter we should be using brief, fun, concise references, on Facebook engaging and casual language, and on LinkedIn more formal, professional language.
If users smell a robot, and can’t put a personality behind your brand on social media, they won’t come back. With that in mind, we suggest putting in the time and effort to make a personality for your brand through social media and watch the engagement roll in.
Check out our FREE whitepaper on 'How to Build your Brand with Social Media'.
