Automation: death or opportunity for effective social media marketing?

It depends whether you're content sharing or starting conversation

With so much written about the importance of marketing automation these days, the argument has touched on social media many times.

It makes sense too as social media becomes more important, we want to use social media more within our personal or brand marketing, so in turn we want to make that a good investment. Born from the world of email marketing automation of years ago, we now have products like Eloqua, Marketo and Genius, as well as smaller players such as Office Autopilot, all of which can enable large scale automation.

So can social media marketing be automated?

Of course it can - most importantly within Facebook and Twitter - Hootsuite is probably the best tool to use, and it's relatively cheap. Yet I have Scott Stratten's hilarious comment that that a unicorn is killed every time someone sends an automated tweet, I recounted this comment today which is what in turn spawned this post. After all who'd want to kill a unicorn! If you don't know Scott Stratten, he's the author of Unmarketing: Stop marketing & Start engaging (great book). Because of Scott Stratten, I faithfully advise anybody against automation in social media - it just cannot be 'right', can it? Today I was challenged, "wouldn't you have said that about email at some point, or any other area of marketing," hmmm, "Yes" I thought.

I searched around for a nemesis to Stratten's Unmarketing automation rule and found this great article on Fast Company, which tests the debate whilst revealing Stratten's nemesis in Chris Voss, a highly successful entrepreneur who claims that People who say automation in social media is wrong are full of s**t - well worth reading. He makes a compelling argument that we're already automating, and that "engagement" is relative to the individual. True engagement is only ever in person, he says.

You can automate content marketing, you can’t automate connection

The author of the Fast Company article, Allison Graham, has tested it for us.

As a person involved in content marketing, she regularly automated tweets, rotating about 150 short tweets which taken from the first edition of her book. So she stopped this out of fear, for several months. The result:

• Her followers’ growth curve stopped
• The amount of valuable content she shared dropped
• The number of retweets fell
• Engagement with relationships with existing followers remained the same

During the months using automated tweet rotation, Allison's Twitter following more than doubled, whereas in the last six months, the engagement approach alone only saw an uptake of approximately 10 percent. Not having the meaty content continually being shared limits growth.

The conclusion is that automation done properly, for non-time-sensitive, content-based posts, is hugely important to grow follower volumes network value.

1. Creating valuable content takes effort, and there's not always the time and space to stop and create it, let alone maintain it. Automation works well for maintaing value if you have content that you can re-shape and atomise for social media. A flow of content is needed to drive connection and maintain interest, re-tweets and in turn grow reach and interactions.
2. Don't pretend to be online ready to have a conversation, this is the common-sense difference. You cannot be authentic and automate 'in the moment' observation, commentary or conversation. If you do not have content that is non-time-sensitive and valuable to share, then just stick with live engagement posts that reveal your personal (or brand) personality.

Understanding the difference between engagement and content posts is all it takes to save unicorns after all, sounds like great advice? Imagine what this could do for content marketers, have you tested this yourself in your organisation?