There is no shortage of available tools aimed at making the life of a social media manager a little bit easier, but are they hurting more than they’re helping?
Building a social community takes resources — namely, people and time — and any effort to minimize the role of these resources seems to cause nothing but problems. When social media managers cut corners in the name of efficiency, language gets lost and the personal connection so many people seek in the medium never develops.
There is no Social Media Easy Button. Stop looking for it. Sure, auto posts save time, but they’re anything but social.
Learn from the following: A water main break last week at Webster University caused the school to cancel evening classes. We updated the website, posted news to Facebook, and tweeted out pertinent information. A local news station paid attention and relayed the important news on its own site, which auto-fed to Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/FOX2now/status/197797393700356096
For the record, Webster University did not cancel the entire evening, just evening classes.
Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Buffer and other applications certainly make life easy for community managers. They allows us to schedule tweets, track click-through rates and monitor conversation from multiple accounts.
The problem is that they also allows us to be lazy. Our audiences deserve more from us. And it doesn’t help that Facebook appears to penalize users who post from these third-party applications.
Hubspot last month conducted an experiment to study the impact of how people post. It found content published through a 3rd-party applications (such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc) suffered 67 percent fewer likes and 60 percent fewer clicks than manually posted content.
The message here is simple. How you post matters. Creating content that people like, share and discuss takes time. The benefits of an engagement community, however, are certainly still worth the effort.
I think there’s a give and take to auto-posting. For a small team like mine (which currently is a team of me), the ability to schedule posts would greatly increase my post frequency. The posts would still be relevant, but right now I’m not at my desk enough to post the content I’d like to be posting. If I can double my post frequency (which would still make it a decent number – not overwhelming), shouldn’t I consider a management tool? In the long run, I would expect more exposure and engagement.
There’s also the ability to assess effectiveness – reach, click-throughs, conversions – that is very tough to do without a social media management tool. That’s the other thing pushing me toward choosing a third-party management solution. Thoughts?