Social media provides us with a unique opportunity to connect with anyone and share our ideas all around the world.
While individuals are making great use of social media platforms to stay connected with family, friends, and colleagues, brands are also actively utilizing social media as an effective marketing strategy.
However, there are many individuals as well as brands who are doing it wrong.
Whether you’re a brand or have an individual account, if your social media marketing activities are entirely or mostly automated, then you’re missing the entire point of having social media presence in the first place.
Social Media Marketing: The Human Definition
Social media is a conversation and it takes two to be social.
Anything else such as automated likes, comments, DMs, posts, and tweet replies are nothing but broadcasting pre-recorded messages.
This is why nobody has ever called Radio or Television a social channel.
Although, I do agree that sometimes certain messages or updates need to go live at a certain time and scheduling such business-critical messages or updates helps to make sure everything goes as planned.
But that doesn’t make social media automation tools a viable alternative for turning up as a “human”.
Take Oreo’s famous 2013 Super Bowl tweet for example.
During the 2013 Super Bowl, Oreo smartly capitalized on the massive power outage inside Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.
That tweet received 6,800+ likes, 14,100+ retweets, 1,000+ comments, and is now being called one of the greatest marketing tweets of all time.
Now, if Oreo’s social media team had opted to schedule & automate their tweets in advance during the 2013 Super Bowl, do you think it would have achieved the recognition of creating one of the most buzz-worthy tweets?
Of course not and that’s the point!
Social media automation is never going to be a viable replacement for running successful social media marketing campaigns.
But if you still disagree, I’ve 5 more reasons why you should not automate social media marketing for your brand or individual account.
Top 5 Reasons Not to Automate Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms are built for interaction and engagement. Therefore, it requires a human touch.
However, there are many people as well as brands out there who don’t fully “get” social media and abuse its wide reach by unthinkingly spamming their community and social connections.
In the end, this practice always leads to a disastrous failure.
In fact, to help you better understand its negative impact, I’ve shared 5 reasons not to automate social media marketing for your brand or individual account.
1 – You’ll Miss Out on Real-Time Opportunities
If you automate all your social media posts and not monitor the channels actively, you’ll definitely miss out on key real-time opportunities to post.
Any news-worthy event that occurs, whether it’s a happy occasion or a tragedy, is a great opportunity to post.
Remember the Oreo’s DunkInTheDark example I mentioned earlier?
Well, that’s what a key real-time opportunity means!
Simply put, posting about the current events is a great & proven way to create interest in your brand and increase engagement as well as interaction.
But, when all your posts are pre-scheduled, you’ll miss these key real-time opportunities to post.
2 – Automation Can Sometimes Backfire & Ruin Your Reputation
Pre-scheduling all your posts in advance can also sometimes lead to ill-timed posts after tragic events.
One example of such ill-timed posts was when Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter account continually re-posted his content after the Boston Marathon Bombing.
His posts stuck out in a stream of other posts about tragedy, and when someone politely suggested to turn his auto tweets off, Guy’s response, well, was not perfect.
When many people found out about this, Guy Kawasaki’s reputation got a bad hit for quite a while.
Surely, you wouldn’t want this to happen to your individual or brand account, would you?
There are many social media platforms such as Instagram, for example, that don’t even allow using automation tools or bots to automatically send DMs or follow people. It’s a direct violation of their terms and conditions.
So, if you use social media automation tools, there is high risk of having your brand account suspended.
3 – It Can Wreak Havoc Your Brand Value
Your brand value on social media has a direct impact on your sales & profit margins.
And automating likes, following, or posting through social media automation tools can not only make your brand look like a spam bot and appear less trustworthy, but it can also seriously damage your overall brand value.
Take Vodafone’s “auto-reply tweet” for example.
Vodafone’s auto-reply tweet shows how poorly they are monitoring customers’ concerns on Twitter which is ultimately affecting their brand’s trustworthiness.
4 – The Majority of People Already Hate It
I ain’t the only one who hates social media automation.
As I said before, there are many people across the globe who actively avoid brands that automate their social media activities such as posting endless streams of content or sending automated DMs.
Social media is meant to be (or at least should seem) authentic and social. So, if you’re automating any social media marketing activity, it’s only going to alienate your community.
5 – It Will Affect Your Future Engagement
If you let social media automation tools run your account and don’t respond to those who try to engage with you or your brand, your target audience will eventually notice it.
As a result, it will directly affect the present as well as future engagement opportunities because automation will never replace the human connection you can offer to your target audience.
Conclusion
All things considered, social media automation has very limited benefits that are really not worth losing your brand value, future engagement, loss of human connection, and account suspension.
That being said, I would also love to hear about your experience (or tragic incidents) with social media automation.
Feel free to share your opinions in the comments!
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