Less is More!
There are so many social media management tools out there that claim to be able to rocket boost your social media campaigns into overdrive. Perhaps they can, but it’s not always what you want! Trust us when we say we’re always looking for tools that can help us improve what we do for our clients. You can also trust us when we tell you that we’ve had some bad experiences with social media management tools that have taught us a lot about what NOT to use! If you’re serious about social media, and you believe it’s a big part of your marketing strategy (it’s 2017…it IS a big part!) then there’s no place for short cuts.
Automation
There are a lot of tools around that can automate the daily tasks that you should be doing on social media platforms, and sometimes this is great. We don’t want to bad mouth any tools out there so we’re not going to name any names but here are a few things to consider when you’re looking into automation.
Posting tools: If you come across any tools that automatically post content to your social media pages, be very careful when you’re setting them up. Key words and even listing specific feeds to take content from can often backfire. You could wake up one day with content on your pages that has NOTHING to do with your business and could even be very controversial. If you have a specific niche and you believe you can narrow your automation tool down to make sure it only posts content that will work well for your business, then go ahead and give it a try. But will it really ever make posts that look as good as when you make them yourself, with images and videos that you choose?
Retweeting tools: For some of our clients, we do actually use an automated retweet tool. There are certain keywords or lists of Twitter feeds that will only ever contain tweets that our clients would happily retweet themselves. This is great, as we can set things up and just let them run. However we’d be lying if this had never backfired on us! In the early days of using the tool we had a lot of problems with inappropriate retweets. Now we’re very careful about which clients we choose to use the tool for, and how we set it up.
Auto likes: Auto likes are quite easy to get right…it’s a shame that most of them can trigger security alerts on your accounts…and rightly so! If Twitter or Instagram notice that you’re account is liking a lot of tweets or photos all of a sudden they often flag your account and make you change your password etc. They don’t want bots on their platforms and this sort of activity triggers an alarm for them which is fair enough. Run auto like tools at your own risk. We’ve never actually heard of anyone using these tools carefully getting their accounts banned, but it’s not something we are willing to risk for any of out clients!
Auto Following/Unfollowing: For us this is a big no no! We log into all of our client’s accounts each day and follow relevant people and unfollow people who aren’t interacting with us. It would be great if we could use tools that did this automatically as it would save us so much time. But they will get you banned, and if it’s not your account that gets banned it will be their tool that gets banned leaving you back at square one and probably out of pocket from the money you spent on the tool!
Just do it all yourself
We realise that time is an issue and that’s one of the biggest benefits of our service as we do everything for you. But if you’re serious about social media and you want to give it a go before hiring an expert to do it for you, then don’t take short cuts. Although we are constantly testing the latest social media tools to see if they could help us with the work we do for ourselves and our clients, we only actually use ONE social media management tool! The only thing we actually use it for is scheduling posts to social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc because it’s easier than doing it natively. For every Facebook post we make, we make it in Facebook and decide on what time to publish or schedule it.
