Automating your Social Media Updates

These days we are always looking for new ways to make our working day more efficient and this often means using technology to ‘automate’ as many tasks as possible.

In the Social Media world there are many free tools we can use to automatically update our social networking accounts when we publish new content to the web.

Such tools include:

www.hellotxt.com – lets you publish status updates to 50+ social networks
www.ping.fm – similar to hellotxt, lets you publish status updates to a large number of social sites
www.dlvr.it – a newer service integrated with Facebook, Facebook Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn
www.twitterfeed.com – one of the first services that automatically published content to your Twitter account. They have also integrated Facebook now.

There are many more tools out there, but these 4 listed above do a good job at reaching most social media sites.

All of these tools simply save your website RSS feed, and then constantly check (usually every hour or as specified) to see if any new content has been posted/added – which is then automatically sent out to your social networking accounts as a new status update.

This may seem like a must have for any social media guru or marketer, however lets look at the Pros and Cons to weigh up if this is right for you.

Pros

1. Saves times – this is often the main reason people will use such Social Media automation tools.

2. Easy management of multiple social accounts – if you are a marketer looking after multiple brands, using such tools will greatly improve your efficiency and make sure nothing is missed.

3. Reach a bigger audience at the right time – no doubt the more status updates you send the more people you will reach, however using such tools also allow you to schedule when these updates will be sent, eg in the morning/ day when most people are online.

Cons

1. Not 100% real – experienced social media users will see you are automating your updates and this is not as genuine as someone hand crafting their updates. They may infact prefer to follow someone who spends the time to personalise their updates and engage with the audience.

2. Marketing use – many marketers will simply use automation tools to broadcast their clients message as far as possible, sometimes excessively. This can create a bad impression and even damage a brand if done poorly. But these marketers wouldn’t be doing it if there wasn’t any gain.

I think these tools do play an important part in most Social Media marketing activities, but using these tools in conjunction with personal updates is the best way forward in my opinion. Don’t let your brand or business come across as a Robot!