Autopilot Posting

A Per­son­al and Hum­bling Example My name is David, and I’m a recov­er­ing auto-poster. It all start­ed when some­one I thought was a friend intro­duced me to Hoot­suite, where I could type one post and it would auto­mat­i­cal­ly update my sta­tus on all my social media sites – Face­book, Twit­ter and Linkedin. I saw how slick it was, and I was hooked. Before long, I was try­ing oth­er sim­i­lar plat­forms, like Postlings, Ping​.fm and Tweet­deck. Why did I do it? It was so easy, so fast. One click of a but­ton… it was crazy! I was sav­ing time and mak­ing posts and I thought I was net­work­ing, and the auto-posts kept get­ting more and more con­ve­nient. I thought I knew what I was doing – I had it all under con­trol… but then the crash came. I received a very nasty pri­vate note on Linkedin, telling me to ​“set­tle down” with my post­ing. I had for­got­ten that all my updates were auto­mat­i­cal­ly post­ing there, and as I looked over my past posts I was shocked to see how I had lost touch – I was annoy­ing rather than intrigu­ing my audi­ence on that site. Not All Social Sites are Cre­at­ed Equal Because the big three social net­work­ing sites have Sta­tus Updates in com­mon, ​“experts” advised us to save time by using one plat­form to post updates to all three at once. As social net­works mature, how­ev­er, we are see­ing how Face­book, Twit­ter and Linkedin are dif­fer­ent in many ways. On Face­book peo­ple just want to con­nect, hang out and share. Twit­ter tends to be more focused on net­work­ing and news updates. Final­ly, Linkedin is a great place to do research, join a busi­ness group and do B to B net­work­ing. There is a dif­fer­ent atmos­phere, audi­ence, and pur­pose for each social site, so your sta­tus updates need to be thought­ful­ly deliv­ered to the right place. Con­sid­er your audi­ence and get to know what your read­ers on each site are inter­est­ed in. Once you know them bet­ter, you can tai­lor your posts more specif­i­cal­ly and make sure you aren’t becom­ing a voice that your audi­ence tunes out. When Is It Ok? Now, hav­ing just bared my soul and exhort­ed you not to be an auto-poster, I do think there are times when it is ok to auto-post. The main thing is to make sure you are post­ing awe­some con­tent that will be well received. For exam­ple, I have a num­ber of clients who nev­er vis­it my web­site to read my blogs, yet they vis­it my Face­book page often. So I make sure my blogs auto-post to my Face­book page. I then have occa­sion­al posts on Face­book that are rel­e­vant to some of my Linkedin-only read­ers, so I make sure to auto-post those updates on Linkedin as well. The bot­tom line is to know your audi­ence. You need to ask them what they want to hear about, what is inter­est­ing to them. You then need to know where your audi­ence spends their time. Once you have those two things in place, you can then post the right con­tent to the right net­work­ing sites and rest assured your social media is work­ing for you. Do you have an auto post­ing sto­ry you’d like to share? p.s. By the way, Hoot­suite and Tweet­deck have their places. If you must auto tweet, best to use one of those pro­grams. Also, Hoot­suite is per­fect for ​“sched­ul­ing” your updates (you can write them all up and sched­ule when they go out).