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> 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 a
by 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 agoOP 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 agoThat’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 agoThe 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.
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoDoesn't have to be less engagement as long as it's very human like. I went overboard and used tensorflow to guess content of images on other people and leave comments, post stuff, generate comments text via NLP and as long as I used unofficial channels (eg via Javascript using PhantomJS) I had really good interaction. I got >100k genuine users in my facebook group, 10k users on instagram etc and now I have stopped automation on both as the genuine user interaction suffices for growth. Got API privileges revoked by twitter and the moral of the story if you have to be a 'crook', go all in ;) ps: my first version of the project is here: https://github.com/ganeshkrishnan1/socialmediabot https://github.com/ganeshkrishnan1/socialmediabot Now I use scala, tensorflow and stanford NLP
- babyArte 8y agoSometimes is really wrong but being what it is i can see this working the pictures and the tagging , such and evil genius of spamming lol! I actually had to star you and follow you on facebook just to see if people reshare that spam