Social Media Automation - or - Automatic Social Media?
Just as salesforce automation didn't automate sales, social media automation does not create automatic social media
Automation, from a marketing perspective, is an innovation trend. It connects functionality to build a new capability. Recently, we experienced the innovation of marketing automation. This platform concept didn't create automatic marketing, it connected email and web analytics to solve a new, high-value problem for marketers. It enabled marketers to get closer to an audience who is increasingly hard to reach in an early stage of buying.
Social media is a visceral, human to human, interaction that clearly and easily shows sincerity... or insincerity. It's also a "pull" channel where audiences self-select or filter connections and content to best fits their needs.
Automation is not the same thing as automatic
I draw this delineation to now explain why one is good and the other is not.
- Social Media Automation - This is about improving and shortening the process of doing social media. It often involves the connection of technologies into a single workflow designed to solve specific problems. If the problem at hand is improving outbound social media marketing, the platform may do things like connect content curation, a campaign engine and social delivery and advocacy. The resulting system is human driven but the platform connects specific functionalities so the throughput is more efficient and more measureable.
- Automatic Social Media - This is about generating social messages based upon a predefined query. Without human intervention the system finds content that matches the query and automatically sends messages. The objective is volume, to push messages.
In both cases, the objective is to reduce friction in the attempt to deliver more social messages. However, in the first case, social media automation, the focus is on making the human selection of ideas and crafting of messages more efficient, and in the second case, to eliminate human touch and minimize the importance of selection and message.
Don't take my word for it, try both. I have. What I found every time is that more is not better, better is always better. Focus on social media automation and find ways to reduce the friction in your process of selecting ideas and crafting messages. Test message approaches. Isolate topic ideas. Find what works for your audience and do more of it... eliminate what doesn't work.
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Mark Ogne is Chief Marketing Officer at NewzSocial, the innovator of outbound social media marketing. Prior to this role, Mark developed and directed the social presence for a global F1000 company, building it from obscurity to a Kred top 5% influencer.
Mark, you draw a useful and necessary distinction. I'd add a comment pertaining to the post's expressed emphasis on outbound communications. In seeking to automate for reduced friction, I anticipate equal or perhaps greater value in perceptive automation of the inbound or "closed loop" aspect of social media. Ultimately the goal is "stickier" relationships with a target audience or customer/partner base, and that comes as much from being recognized for effective listening as for well-targeted messaging. Part of listening effectively is making it easy for your audience to give feedback, and parsing/routing/responding to that feedback in demonstrably relevant ways. Automation can and should support that side of the equation, up to the point of determining the substantive response - which I feel remains a human responsibility.