We get it… you’re busy.
You’re busy in real life – with meetings, conference calls, and paperwork – and you’re busy on your social accounts as well, balancing and curating the content of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. With all that’s going on it can certainly be a chore to keep up with each of the posts, the quality and quantity required of the content, and the engagement necessary in order to build a brand and a social reputation.
Often, individuals will turn to a third-party application (such as Hootsuite) to organize themselves and set up a sort of game plan – it’s a strategy that is convenient, relatively simple, and can have your social media accounts functioning at peak performance. However, there can certainly downsides to automating your posts and tweets. In this post, we’ll explore the pros and cons of automation. Be sure to share your thoughts with us in the ‘Comments’ section below!
Pro #1 – Saves Time. You can arrange to have an entire day of posts scheduled in one sitting. And, if you’re organized and have a clear vision of the content you’ll be projecting, this step will be an absolute breeze.
Pro #2 – Optimization and Efficiency. You can purposefully schedule your posts for the best times during the day, knowing that they’ll be both seen, and engaged with, the most. (For example, setting an Instagram post for 5 pm ET on a Wednesday).
Pro #3 – Interaction. Once you schedule your posts, you’ll have one less social step to worry about… now you can take that time to engage with your followers and fans.
Con #1 – Less Perceived Authenticity – We’ve said before that social media users can tell when someone ‘real’ is ‘really’ sitting at the controls to post their content. There will be times when, as you’re scheduling your posts, that the information starts to all look the same and lack creativity… work to stay on top of your game.
Con #2 – Lack of ‘Real-Time’ Interaction – Again, users want to be able to perceive the ‘realness’ of a content provider… they want to be able to tweet or comment and get a response back in a timely fashion. Communication will seemingly be stalled for a time before you check back into that application.
Con #3 – Bad Timing – There will be times when a post is scheduled and goes off seemingly without any knowledge or understanding of the world’s events. Take the recent attack in France for example… what if while the Twitter world is showing it’s support with #JeSuisParis, you have a scheduled post for visiting Disneyworld? Quite simply… it just won’t look right.
