You Can’t Put Social Media on Auto Pilot
I have a new client who, up until now, used to have an interesting approach to social media: he has several social media accounts, including Twitter and Facebook, and also Ping, which enables him to send a message to all his social media accounts at once.
Basically, he created the different social media accounts, and then put the whole thing on autopilot and forgot about it. He never bothered following anyone on Twitter, for example. He never initiated any conversations with anyone over there. All he did was create the account, and then send occasional updates via Ping whenever he posted a new blog post to his blog or updated his site.
Needless to say, this client is convinced that “social media doesn’t work” and that “it’s a waste of time.” It took me a while to convince him to allocate part of his marketing budget to social media – but this time to real social media, where you actually do (or I do for him in this case) what you’re supposed to do on social networking sites which is to network, to connect, and to have conversations.
Creating a Twitter account and never using it to follow new people who are relevant to your business and to have conversations with them is indeed a waste of time. If all your Twitter account does is get updated with links to your blog posts and there’s nothing else in there, then you’re not doing it right and in this case it’s better to not do it at all.
Social media, when done right, can create important connections overtime. But it takes time, patience and effort. If you’re looking for immediate results, or if you’re expecting to see results from inactive social media accounts that you put on autopilot, then you’re going to be disappointed.
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