6 ms·

I automated all of my social media

71 points by patwalls 8y ago

arbol 8y ago
I automated my social media by deleting all of my accounts
- naavis 8y ago
  As the article says: > Note - this post is about automating my business social media accounts. I think automating stuff on your personal accounts or using bots is bad.
- thrownblown 8y ago
  Deleted code is debugged code.
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    This sentence gave me a miniature zen moment. It's gone now, though.
    - madacoo 8y ago
      To become Zen you must first delete Zen.
simplecomplex 8y ago
Everyone should do this with their personal content too. Post to your own website and syndicate elsewhere. That way you maintain ownership of your content and audience, and people don’t need to use Twitter/FB to follow you.
- unicornporn 8y ago
  POSSE, as they call it. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
thestepafter 8y ago
This an absolutely fantastic post, thank you for writing this. Start Story is also awesome, keep up the good work!
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
It's cool, but having broken icon image links gives away that its automated too much. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dvcbv4ZXcAAAEJR.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dvcbv4ZXcAAAEJR.png Also maybe add some more variation to the posts so that it looks human. When you pick a random article, and then stick a random block quote from the article on a picture... maybe just post your random quote as text and forget the picture every once in a while. Just to break up the visual rhythm. Also throw in a retweet from a list of accounts you like every once in a while. Edit: And last thing... really. Real humans rant. We get stuck on idea and make several posts on the same subject in a row. You can easily schedule a years worth of ranting in a couple hours with a tool like buffer. Just post 3 things about the Steve Jobs biography in a row like you just now got around to reading it.
bluetidepro 8y ago
> Let’s be honest - the main downside to automating social media is less audience engagement (likes, comments, etc). This is the first point under the "There are some downsides to automating" section. I think that's the most important thing to read and realize whether you should even continue to read or not. If social isn't a marketing strategy your startup is using at all, yeah, do this. It doesn't really matter too much then. But if you're actually trying to use social for any value, doing this is a terrible idea, in my opinion. The author/OP phrases it as this is all a good idea if social isn't your main marketing/acquisition channel, but I think this is still a bad idea if social is even your secondary or tertiary marketing/acquisition channel. Your engagement will tank on social, and people will be able to smell it a mile away if your social is worth engaging with or not. It's quite easy to tell if stuff like this is automated or not. I feel like the OP downplays that too much. With that said, you do you, and decide what works best for your company. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is still a useful post if you put what I mentioned above aside, and decide to do this for your social strategy.
- patwalls 8y ago
  OP here. Yeah I agree, maybe I should have said if it's not in your "Top 3" I think it also depends on your resources. If you're a solo founder then it can be hard to justify much time on social media. And I also think you can have both. You can automate some posts, and also do ad hoc stuff. In my use case I publish articles on a consistent basis, why not automate the social media side of that?
  - bluetidepro 8y ago
    That’s a good point! I def agree it can be a good strategy to do both - automate some and still do manual work. That’s a win-win to break it up!
- flocial 8y ago
  The other hidden cost of automation that feeds into less engagement is that some social media will put a damper on automated/bot accounts based on internal criteria for organic engagement. Also, automation isn't a binary choice. You can lessen the frequency of automation and mix in organic content.
rak00n 8y ago
Wait, no source code?
lcfcjs2 8y ago
IFTTT.com can do all of this, how is this even news?
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
> Let’s say that it takes 5 minutes to publish each post on social media… With 7 articles a week on 3 platforms, that’s a couple hours of work per week saved. But it doesn't take five minutes to publish each post. It probably takes less than one. I wish I could get away with this kind of impact analysis at my job.
KBBL 8y ago
Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.
georgeecollins 8y ago
Perfect, bots talking to bots. Now if we can only automate being influenced by ads the whole system will work perfectly with zero effort.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  With this quick hack I drained my bank account! I set up an Instagram bot to browser for 30 minutes a day. It had a 2% chance to click any of the ads I saw. This aggregated URLs of products I wanted. To simulate bad late night purchase I set a Chrome headless instance to crawl these page at 11pm each night. This had all my form-saved information. To model drop off from bad UI, it would recursively auto fill the forms and try to proceed through the purchase, this gave me about a 70% drop off rate once in the checkout process. (Just to be clear I didn't actually do any of this.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - georgeecollins 8y ago
    What if we made a version of product search that sorted results by the number of times your reading bot saw the product advertised in your social feed (from bots). The entire social media enterprise could be supported with zero human effort.
- netsharc 8y ago
  I had a shower thought once that between the time all humans died and the Internet goes down (all that infrastructure still need human maintenance), Twitter would be just filled with bots posting their spam under the top trending hashtags, creating feedback loops as the system sees other hashtags the bots use and push them up as trending. And the last machine that'll be running will probably be a machine desperately trying to talk to a payment API because it needs to bill their long dead client after some other algorithm overspent the client's ad budget...
  - castratikron 8y ago
deytempo 8y ago
Isn’t that like automating your cocaine addiction?
bunkydoo 8y ago
That's cool, I deleted all of mine
mohamedmansour 8y ago
TLDR; “Used bufferapp API to post all social networks

71 points by patwalls 8y ago

arbol 8y ago

I automated my social media by deleting all of my accounts

naavis 8y ago
As the article says: > Note - this post is about automating my business social media accounts. I think automating stuff on your personal accounts or using bots is bad.
thrownblown 8y ago
Deleted code is debugged code.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  This sentence gave me a miniature zen moment. It's gone now, though.
  - madacoo 8y ago
    To become Zen you must first delete Zen.

simplecomplex 8y ago

Everyone should do this with their personal content too. Post to your own website and syndicate elsewhere. That way you maintain ownership of your content and audience, and people don’t need to use Twitter/FB to follow you.

unicornporn 8y ago
POSSE, as they call it. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

thestepafter 8y ago

This an absolutely fantastic post, thank you for writing this. Start Story is also awesome, keep up the good work!

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

It's cool, but having broken icon image links gives away that its automated too much. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dvcbv4ZXcAAAEJR.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dvcbv4ZXcAAAEJR.png Also maybe add some more variation to the posts so that it looks human. When you pick a random article, and then stick a random block quote from the article on a picture... maybe just post your random quote as text and forget the picture every once in a while. Just to break up the visual rhythm. Also throw in a retweet from a list of accounts you like every once in a while. Edit: And last thing... really. Real humans rant. We get stuck on idea and make several posts on the same subject in a row. You can easily schedule a years worth of ranting in a couple hours with a tool like buffer. Just post 3 things about the Steve Jobs biography in a row like you just now got around to reading it.

bluetidepro 8y ago

> Let’s be honest - the main downside to automating social media is less audience engagement (likes, comments, etc). This is the first point under the "There are some downsides to automating" section. I think that's the most important thing to read and realize whether you should even continue to read or not. If social isn't a marketing strategy your startup is using at all, yeah, do this. It doesn't really matter too much then. But if you're actually trying to use social for any value, doing this is a terrible idea, in my opinion. The author/OP phrases it as this is all a good idea if social isn't your main marketing/acquisition channel, but I think this is still a bad idea if social is even your secondary or tertiary marketing/acquisition channel. Your engagement will tank on social, and people will be able to smell it a mile away if your social is worth engaging with or not. It's quite easy to tell if stuff like this is automated or not. I feel like the OP downplays that too much. With that said, you do you, and decide what works best for your company. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is still a useful post if you put what I mentioned above aside, and decide to do this for your social strategy.

patwalls 8y ago
OP here. Yeah I agree, maybe I should have said if it's not in your "Top 3" I think it also depends on your resources. If you're a solo founder then it can be hard to justify much time on social media. And I also think you can have both. You can automate some posts, and also do ad hoc stuff. In my use case I publish articles on a consistent basis, why not automate the social media side of that?
- bluetidepro 8y ago
  That’s a good point! I def agree it can be a good strategy to do both - automate some and still do manual work. That’s a win-win to break it up!
flocial 8y ago
The other hidden cost of automation that feeds into less engagement is that some social media will put a damper on automated/bot accounts based on internal criteria for organic engagement. Also, automation isn't a binary choice. You can lessen the frequency of automation and mix in organic content.

rak00n 8y ago

Wait, no source code?

lcfcjs2 8y ago

IFTTT.com can do all of this, how is this even news?

mmmmmmmmm 8y ago

> Let’s say that it takes 5 minutes to publish each post on social media… With 7 articles a week on 3 platforms, that’s a couple hours of work per week saved. But it doesn't take five minutes to publish each post. It probably takes less than one. I wish I could get away with this kind of impact analysis at my job.

KBBL 8y ago

Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.

georgeecollins 8y ago

Perfect, bots talking to bots. Now if we can only automate being influenced by ads the whole system will work perfectly with zero effort.

TACIXAT 8y ago
With this quick hack I drained my bank account! I set up an Instagram bot to browser for 30 minutes a day. It had a 2% chance to click any of the ads I saw. This aggregated URLs of products I wanted. To simulate bad late night purchase I set a Chrome headless instance to crawl these page at 11pm each night. This had all my form-saved information. To model drop off from bad UI, it would recursively auto fill the forms and try to proceed through the purchase, this gave me about a 70% drop off rate once in the checkout process. (Just to be clear I didn't actually do any of this.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- georgeecollins 8y ago
  What if we made a version of product search that sorted results by the number of times your reading bot saw the product advertised in your social feed (from bots). The entire social media enterprise could be supported with zero human effort.
netsharc 8y ago
I had a shower thought once that between the time all humans died and the Internet goes down (all that infrastructure still need human maintenance), Twitter would be just filled with bots posting their spam under the top trending hashtags, creating feedback loops as the system sees other hashtags the bots use and push them up as trending. And the last machine that'll be running will probably be a machine desperately trying to talk to a payment API because it needs to bill their long dead client after some other algorithm overspent the client's ad budget...
- castratikron 8y ago

deytempo 8y ago

Isn’t that like automating your cocaine addiction?

bunkydoo 8y ago

That's cool, I deleted all of mine

mohamedmansour 8y ago

TLDR; “Used bufferapp API to post all social networks