The big problem with social media is that it’s a snowball. Once it starts rolling for you, there is simply no way of stopping it increasing. If you have a book you want to promote, social media is naturally the most logical starting point and with the success of ebooks, it’s a no brainer.
However, once you get over the initial few months of hard work and hours of grind; following, engaging, chatting, posting and doing all the things that we all know are the basics of successful social media, you discover that you are now a social media addict and have traded almost everything else you do for Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads and the all the other sites that are just so darn useful for authors.
Well before you get to the point that you have trouble remembering your family members’ names, it’s probably time to take a break and have a good long think about where social media is taking you and the benefits it’s creating for you. Remember that book you’re supposed to be promoting?
I can honestly say, ‘Been there, done that.’ It was at that time that I knew I had to find a better way. Of course the answer was automation. Now while some will stick their noses in the air and cry foul, let’s face facts. No one has more than 24 hours in a day and most people need to work, eat and sleep.
All social media sites now offer degrees of automation, so hey, it’s ok. Twitter has so many automation tools available, you can have it posting for you every ten minutes 24/7. Facebook has ‘Buffer’ now, as well as plenty of tools for auto posting of blogs and if you’re a little clever, even RSS feeds. Goodreads, Amazon Author pages and well, just about any site you can think of offers automation to some degree.
So thank goodness for social media automation. Now you can automate everything and get to know your family again – and remember their names. You will even have time now to write another book.
Only problem is, if you rely too heavily on automation and have it all set to bombard the social media world every ten minutes, you’ve just become a spammer. Bad luck. Go to jail, do not collect $200, or sell another book.
So be careful, plan well and by all means automate. But don’t forget what built your social media presence. Keep engaging, but in moderation. Set yourself a time limit, then go have fun with your family.
I’m definitely not a huge fan of automation, but I agree with where you’re coming from. I have too many other things to do than to glue myself to a keyboard and watch Twitter like a square-eyed hawk. That said, when I do delve Ito social media I want to feel like I’m talking to a human being. If that human being is scheduling human posts that’s fine by me. But if that spammer fills an automation app with posts about their products and then blasts them out every hour then I’ll just stop listening.
I totally agree. I like sharing good seo and content marketing articles that I find on the net and only very occasionally do I tweet my own articles. Even so, I do my reading in the morning over a cup of coffee and tweet as I go. Before I used to use timely.is so as not to send a splatterbast of tweets in a short period. Now with the new autoscheduling feature of Hootsuite it is even easier.