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.