Social media offers businesses great marketing opportunities. However, in order to effectively take advantage of them, companies need to produce diverse and abundant content almost 24/7. That is why many companies hire a specialist who focuses entirely on online marketing. Now there is an alternative to this practice. It is called social media automation and it is turning into a trend.
If you are wondering whether or not you should adopt this strategy, you should carefully look at all the pros and cons of social media automation.
Advantages
More People Will See Your Posts
You can use an automation tool such as HootSuite to schedule your posts. In that way you can publish content throughout the day or even during the night. In the recent past, social media marketers increased their activity around 7 – 8 pm. That was because this is typically the busiest time on social websites. However, not all users check their profiles around that time. With the rise of smartphones, people can update their status anywhere and at any time. With automation, you can post content as frequently as you want. As a result, your activity will be noticed by more people.
Convenient
This is one of top advantages of this practice. Social media automation allows you to distribute, manage and follow posts with a few clicks. All you need to do is to create content and a schedule. The system will handle everything else. Therefore, you will no longer be a slave to social media platforms.
Content Consistently
If you update your business social profiles manually, you probably know that consistency is hard to achieve. Even if you try to follow a strict schedule there will always be outside factors that may hinder your work. For instance, you may experience a problem with your web connection or computer equipment. Automation seems to solve this problem. You are now free to travel or simply take some time off without having to constantly think about your company’s social media presence.
Disadvantages
Lack of Consumer Connections
Marketing is not the only benefit which social media websites offer to business. Through these platforms, brands can connect to their clients and vice versa. Unfortunately, automation cannot fulfill this part. While it may update your business’ profile, it is not able to reply to comments, complaints and requests. Even if you take the time to reply to your customers on the web, that will not happen in real-time. This may harm and weaken your relationship with your clients more than you think.
Poor Monitoring
When companies use automation, they often forget to follow how each of their social media posts is doing. They start to pay less attention to results and only focus on content and its scheduling. Nevertheless, this disadvantage can be easily handled. What you need to do is to go through your posts’ daily impressions as frequently as you can. That will allow you to see what type of content works with your audience.
Bad Timing
Social media automation means that content will flow into your social page regularly, even if you are not online. That, however, may sometimes cause you some troubles. A good example here is Guy Kawasaki’s inappropriate Twitter activity during the Boston Marathon tragedy. Kawasaki is one of the most followed celebrities on various social media websites. His trademark is to publish a few posts per hour. After the Boston Marathon bombing, he was caught using automation, since his account continued to flood the web with inappropriate Tweets. The cost – lost of thousands of followers and huge media outburst.
Now, that you know all the main pros and cons of social media automation, you can decide whether this practice will work for your business or not. Our advice is to always stay connected even if you are relying mainly on automation. In that way you will be able to communicate with your audience and to avoid offensive content.
