Should You Automate Online Marketing?

There are many different apps and tools that allow you to schedule and automate everything from your blog to social media, but the question isn’t whether you can. It’s easy!

Most resources will ask “how should you automate marketing online?” or “which tools can help you automate internet marketing?” but the question you should be asking is: should you automate online marketing?

Focusing on social media, the whole benefit and intention is to have conversations with your best customers. It doesn’t really matter how many followers you have… what matters is how many followers are engaged. So it is better to have 500 active fans than 1500 fans that ignore you…

With that being said, the benefit of automating social media is more about time management. You might be able to balance automation with authenticity by utilizing a tool that instantly cross posts across multiple networks… but then you will have multiple accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, Pinterest, etc.) that are full of recycled information.

Where is the benefit there? What is the point of having multiple accounts if they aren’t each individually catered to the core audience using that network? (Example- Pinterest is best for DIY or artsy images, while Twitter is best for trending topics and hashtag driven conversations.)

In short, minimal automation can be beneficial because it does help you stay on top of things. Nothing is worse than a stale account that is never updated or maintained. Yet if you are struggling to keep up with it all then you might want to deal with the problem at hand—by downsizing on the social accounts or by hiring a dedicated internet marketing manager—rather than creating a new problem.

In the long run, overly automating your online marketing campaigns—especially social media—is counterproductive and will result in a one-sided conversation that elicits no participation.