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5 Social Media Automation Errors that will Annoy your Followers

  • May 19 2016
  • Comments Off on 5 Social Media Automation Errors that will Annoy your Followers
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If you’ve entirely or even mostly automated your social media strategy, then your website or business is missing the point of social media strategies altogether. After all, social media is about conversation not broadcasting a pre-determined message. In fact, many people argue that it’s better to be ignored entirely by a social media account rather than receive an automated reply. Here are five social media automation errors that will annoy your followers.

 

1.  Automating a Direct Message to New Followers

When a person follows your account on Twitter, it is in no way an agreement that it’s okay for you to send them a direct message. Twitter is not an easy email list to get your message across. Instead, it is a conversational platform that revolves around the idea of giving before receiving. This means that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is setting an automated DM to request a new follower to like your Facebook page or follow you on Instagram, as this does nothing valuable for your follower and makes you come off as greedy. Keep in mind that it is not genuinely engaging to send every new follower an automated DM and so it’s best to avoid this tactic.

 

2.  Sending Automated Posts on Google+ 

Just because you have the ability to push your message on a variety of platforms to reach a wider audience does not mean that it is always the best idea to do so. Google+ has been increasing in popularity over the past couple of years, which has caused many marketers to use automated messages to spread their brand directly to people. Doing so sends them a Google+ notification, as well as an email making it a double no-no. Although there is nothing wrong with sending people genuine, thought-out messages every once in a while, filling people’s inboxes and sending them notifications will do nothing but annoy them. If your business made a significant breakthrough or was published in a major big name blog like Forbes, then by all means let people know. However, there is no need to automate messages to people every time you publish a new post.

 

3.  Automating Your Pinterest Invites 

Although there aren’t too many complaints about Pinterest automation, it is increasingly becoming a problem. Don’t automate invites on your Pinterest account to ask people to contribute to your Pinterest boards. Most people will not care about pinning on your Pinterest board, especially if you’ve never made the effort to interact with them on any other social media platform. Although Group Pinterest was designed for collaboration; they were not designed for you to send out spammy invites to people who you’ve never interacted with in the past. If you’ve made the effort to foster a relationship with a group, then collabing on a group Pinterest board can be an excellent social media tactic, otherwise avoid sending out automated invites.

 

4.  Automated Google+ Community Invites 

In principle there is nothing wrong with inviting people to join your Google+ Community to test the waters. However, sending out mass Google+ Community invites to people without considering their interests will do nothing but annoy them, especially as this is a tactic widely used by businesses and so most people will simply ignore them or have already turned their Community invites off. If you have to send out Google+ Community invites, then take the time to target the right audience before doing so.

 

5.  Scheduling Every Post

Scheduling posts in advance is much easier than doing so live. However, you shouldn’t avoid engaging with your followers live altogether. In fact, you should try to engage with your followers live as much as possible to come off as real and authentic. Even if you do schedule all of your posts, you should take the time each day to engage with your followers, participate in Twitter chats, respond to mentions, etc. This is an extremely important part of social media marketing that can get lost when you don’t bother to log on to your social media accounts because you’ve automated all of your posts.

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Cameron Mackey

Cameron is the Content Manager for the Vorongo Blog. He has spent three years in various content marketing roles. When he is not working with Vorongo he enjoys photography and hiking.

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