Why Social Media Automation Can Be a Bad Idea

With social media being all the rage lately, people are now utilizing different social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for their business. This is a smart way to streamline your marketing and get the word out about your company. The newest trend with businesses is social media automation. Automation is “the technique, method, or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means, as by electronic devices, reducing human intervention to a minimum,” With everything in life, there are pros and cons. With automation, there seems to be more cons than pros.

#Pros of Automation

• Automation can be great for speeding up the ‘getting-to-know-you’ process (such as commenting on people’s posts) but automation cannot control what is published as a comment. Not every business has the time to go through their list of clients to comment on each of their social media posts in order to stay interactive with them.
• Another pro is that social media automation can reach a larger group of people, faster. If a company is really in hurry to get the word out about their business, automation can reach hundreds of people within minutes.

#Cons of Automation

• Automated commenting can lose the personal touch for a meaningful post. Automation can even publish a comment that has nothing to do with the post itself. If a company is using social media automation and commenting the same thing on multiple users’ posts, social media users are going to know that it is no longer personal, which can harm the business’s reputation.
• Speaking of reputation, social media automation can cause a company to gain a bad one. The tiniest mistake can really decide if that company keeps or loses its social media audience, which ultimately decides the fate of the company’s overall brand (and sales).
• Automation doesn’t build relationships. Relationship building is key in order to keep clients and make new ones, so it is best to not put those relationships on autopilot. Building relationships allows a level of trust between users and businesses that other businesses may not have–especially if these business are automating their social media presence.

If you have funky social media automation, this can ultimately make your company look bad and could potentially destroy relationships. The extra work of doing your own social media interactions will never harm your company; in fact, it will make your company unique in the best way.