7 Worst Twitter Automations

My 7 worst Twitter Marketing Automations

Everyone in social media is complaining either about social media automation taking the interaction and engagement out of the word social or complaining that the programs don’t do what they want them to do…so I thought I would make a list of the worst automations in the hope that we might get some traction from our community to bring these to people’s attention.
 

1) Automated direct messages :- now these have to be the most annoying for people, it fills up my inbox when I am expecting to have one of my clients or potential new clients sending me a message about a project I get one of these saying “Thanks for following, what are you looking for?” The problem is that people set these up and never remember to switch them off!
 
2) Automated reply when you send a Tweet out a piece of monitoring software detects a word which may or may not be applicable to you, very annoying!
 
3) Paper LI :- now this is one of the worst forms of content scraping, it searches the internet and then curates content within an online newspaper, generally these are for the laziest social media managers. Of course there are exceptions to the rule on this, actually the other day I was featured within one and had a look it was excellent. But I have been included in hundreds of these and they are Junk! Absolute junk…stop wasting my time Paper LI.
 
4) Automated True Twit validation is also utter junk, these tweets come through as a direct message and say to validate click here…what a waste of my time, no sorry I will not bother with this at all ever!
 
5) Accounts that use automation platforms extremely well and then you send them a Tweet which they don’t reply to, omg this is the biggest fail, you have driven someone to take action and then when they have you haven’t ever responded…ridiculous!
 
6) People who send you an automated reply when you follow them with a link to their product pushing you to buy it before they have even spoken with you.
 
7) People who just tweet you with lots of other people’s @names with no message, what does this mean? Someone please tell me?
 
Yes I do automate some of my social media activities, scheduling is one that is crucial for me, enabling me to post at the right times for my network to get the most out of our content. I also automate a couple of welcome messages the second of which invites folks to like our Facebook page, we have built over 800 likes in 3 months by doing this. It is also possible to do some other kinds of particular location based automations, which can work extremely well for bricks and mortar businesses. They can enable them to send out vouchers to people and lots of other useful stuff or advice as the tools I use can even send messages based upon keywords in their bio…
 
If you are a social media consultant and are reading this saying “But what the hell is he saying it’s not right…” I may remind you that companies like IBM, Oracle, Adobe and many others actually have an entire suite of tools which can actually have entire virtual conversations based upon touch points including sentiment analysis. Enabling them much like email marketing systems to control the entire journey of the non savvy follower to sell them something or encourage them to register for a free report or watch a video.
 
Marketing automation is here folks and there are ways it can be used and ways it shouldn’t, as you can read from this post I stand somewhere in the middle. Many of my clients need help setting up these kind of automations and I remind them that very careful monitoring is necessary. Without a team of social media community managers keeping a close eye on the automations that are running some very serious problems can occur, which could be catastrophic for the business or ceo involved if its his or her account that has been left untended.
 
I will be writing many more posts about automation and how it can be used as part of your entire marketing plan, in the meantime please have a look at our other articles and please comment below this blog as I would be interested in your opinions on this.
 
@natschooler or nat @ natschooler.com