Andrew “Fundy” Funderburg, is no stranger to Tiffinbox. Read his previous contribution about his album designing program for wedding and portrait photographers. In full disclosure I have to tell you that he and I are collaborating on SociRoll, the social media marketing tool he discusses briefly in this guest blog post.
I’d like to start off by saying that I am at the top of the list of haters of social media tools being used to spam people. Do not use social media to spam your followers.
So, the question is, why would I invent a program for automating Social Media marketing. The answer is simply that I have more things to share with my friends and followers than I have time in the day to share.
Social Media is all about making connections with people. For me it is about making deep connections. I’m not the type of person always tweeting and posting a ton of personal information. Sure, I’ll hop on Facebook and Twitter during the weekend and talk about the movie I’m going to see or whether my kids won their basketball games. But, during the week, I post a few personal things–mostly information about photography and the business of photography.
We strive to collect and provide some of the best content in the wedding and portrait industry. Content that we create and share today is still valuable in one or two months. If we manually update everything on Facebook and Twitter, all of this old content is lost. We constantly have new followers and friends and these new people will be just as interested in our old content as our new content.
Since August of 2010, we’ve written 150+ blog posts. More than 100 of these blog posts are related to the business of wedding and portrait photography. There are articles on everything from how to price wedding albums to how to sell portrait packages and everything in between. I want to make sure that our followers see this info.
It would be physically impossible for me to make sure that each one of these blog posts is featured in a tweet once a day. I would lose track of what I shared yesterday, probably miss some things, duplicate some things, etc. The point here is that if I have SociRoll auto post one of my blog posts every day, or even twice a day, we won’t repeat sharing a blog post for 3 months. And then we take into account the fact that if something doesn’t show up in your Twitter in the last five minutes, we won’t see it. The chances of someone seeing repeated Tweets is very low.
Now, let’s take a professional photographer. Let’s say the average wedding photographer shoots 30 weddings and 40 portraits a year. That’s 70 blog posts a year. Then let’s say they have been in business for 3 years. That’s more than 200 blog posts. Sharing one of these (or even two of these) events on their Facebook fanpage every day will seriously add to their brand and their site traffic.
So, do we set it and forget it? No. We let SociRoll do the heavy lifting for us, and we work hard to respond to people, retweet our friends, add personal touches, etc. But we know that our content that we’ve worked extremely hard to create is being shared among our friends and followers. Here's how to get started with SociRoll.
Latest posts by Andrew Funderburg (see all)
- Effectively Automating Social Media Marketing - June 13, 2011
I believe automating is ok to a point. Scheduling tweets for new blog articles is something I do. Scheduling my repost tweets in the afternoon and evening is something I do. I use Buffer and/or Timely to schedule future tweets as well. However, I would not recommend automating entirely. That would defeat the purpose of social media.
The concept is interesting enough that I clicked through to SociRoll to get more info.
Scotty – I’d be interested in more of your thoughts about how full automation defeats the purpose of social media.
social media is about the interaction and connection with others. By completely automating the process you are eliminating the core component of social media.
The people who automate social media badly make automation look bad. The people who do it successfully are invisible because you can hardly tell they’re doing it.
I agree to a degree, but interaction and connection are only part of what social media is about. I don’t think you can automate relationship building, but some things can be automated, such as sharing using apps like @sociroll:twitter and @triberr:twitter .
As I said before, automating (to a point) is ok. Automating entirely is not.
Lots of ying and yang here. The potential for misuse is high. Misused, it will bore and alienate readers and give social media a bad rap.
But the development of a simple tool to automate scheduled RTs is inevitable. Plus there’s a natural exit strategy – sale to Tweetdeck/Twitter.
I am curious to check it out. If you plan on charging a fee it better offer a lot more value than I can get for free from Tweetdeck or Hootsuite’ scheduled Tweets.
All the best with it!
– – Tim
Automation is good when it creates more opportunities for real connection; bad when used to replicate or replace real connection.
Well I don’t think you can entirely automate. Also, I include blogs in the social media ecosystem. A blog is putting out a new post of content and people can interact with comments or with a blog post of their own. This is social and this is media. This can’t be done automatically. The content has to start somewhere.
Automating the sharing of content to sites like Twitter, Facebook, ect is totally fine with me but the person better make note that their feeds are broadcast only.
Seth Godin doesn’t use something like Twitter but I’ve heard he responds to emails very quickly. Short and quickly.
Do you have an example of someone automating entirely?
In general there is obviously a need or want for a service/product like SociRoll.
Sharing old posts via social media has proven to be successful – not from me automating tweets myself but from me clicking on tweets, reading, and commenting.
Many times, automated tweets look automated and it really takes away from it all – think about those tweets you see that say “from the archives” and using a plugin that just pulls from your archives. When it tweets blog posts that clearly have lost relevance, it’s done badly.
We need to realize that social media is social but it doesn’t have to mean that we’re “always on.” If I tweet something and you reply to it, I don’t need to reply to you within a few seconds, minutes, or hours.
Even if I tweet or post to Facebook manually, I could get up and go to the gym for a few hours. It’s not really any different than me having automated the tweet for an hour and a half’s time so that when I’m finishing up from the gym, I can be active if people are talking.
Before automation gets a bad rap, remember that there are ways to automate for times when you’re expected to soon be back to reply in a timely fashion.
Hi,
For effective automation of social media their is an user friendly cross posting plugin name Blog2Social. A user can cross-post blog posts on social media automatically, customized and scheduled. It allows the post author to advance directly to the posting dashboard of Blog2Social Word-press, in which pre filled posting texts are provided.