With social media companies booming in the industry, it has become a common practice for brands to automate their social media posts where they use scheduling software for this purpose. It is done with the intention to save time and keep social media profiles active during holidays instead of a person manually uploading the post. I understand the justification provided by social media managers. However, I still believe the simple premise “if you can not manually post the update, don’t do it”. There are three simple reasons why I say that!
Reason One : Lack of effectiveness in the reach
Whenever an automated post appears on the timeline/news feeds, it appears with publicity/branding for the tool that was used to schedule the update. For example, if Facebook updates are scheduled on Hootsuite, it would always say it “via HootSuite” or “HootSuite Photos” for images that are scheduled. Whenever the viewers see the highlighted branding on the post, they tend to ignore/skip the post with the impression that the brand is not even bothered to have a person to manually update it and as customers why should we care. This situation could cause more harm than good as followers feel the sense of ignorance.
Reason Two : Environment is dynamic
Today’s environment changes at a rapid pace and we are unable to foresee the conditions that would prevail in another few hours time. Social media marketing is all about speaking to your customers according situations that are prevailing. Customers would always prefer a brand who would speak about social sentiments rather than only being stuck in the sales motive. Posting an update which does not match the prevailing trends and the social sentiments can result in angry followers and bad publicity as followers do not wish to see scheduled updates on timeline which carry mismatching messages to the current trends on the timeline. A popular radio station in Sri Lanka recently had bad publicity as a result of a scheduled update related to a concert appearing during Tsumani Warning. The response from followers was terrible.
Reason Three: Monitoring Feedback
Scheduled updates mean that there is no person behind the page monitoring the feedback from followers. This could result in serous damage to the brand reputation when there are unattended queries and spam comments replicating disorganization of the profile.
