Automation Doesn’t Have To Preclude Authenticity

Social Is Meant To Be Social

I was recently tweeting with a self-described inbound marketer. Inbound marketing is essentially what I do, but I really do prefer the term content marketer/manager (which is a component of inbound marketing), or my actual title here at Markon: Digital + Social Strategist. These other titles accurately indicate that my job is about more than creating referrals back to our website. They’re about authentic engagement. They’re about telling the stories of our brand and the brands that we intersect with as the managers, designers and communicators who craft those entities. It’s about spreading news about the endeavors of the entrepreneurs and community leaders we have the great fortune of working on behalf of.

But, that’s not the point of this post.

The aforementioned marketer immediately asked me what automation tools I use. I don’t spend a lot of time with other marketers, but I imagine “what automation tools do you use?” is as frequent a question as “what do you do” is at a party.

I promptly, and honestly, retorted: I don’t? I prefer to do a lot of this myself. I take advantage of search and mining tools like Topsy. Yes, I have used tools, such as Follower Wonk, to compare social rank, to analyze our followers and make decisions about who to follow. I enjoy Twitter and Facebook’s native analytics tools, but I don’t automate too, too much.

50% or so of the social media posts you see from Markon are pre-scheduled in an app called Buffer. Sometimes they’re written the morning of the day they’re posted. Sometimes a week before. Sometimes even weeks before. Automation, to a degree, is important in an environment like mine. If I was glued to social media all day long I’d never get anything else done. Which would be terrible.

Writing Your Own Posts Should Not Come As A Surprise

A thought leader I follow recently posted about how someone he crossed paths with commented that they were impressed that he writes “his own posts.” If you go by his post, he was as taken aback as I was that someone would say this. Why wouldn’t he write his own posts? For that matter, why wouldn’t I actually be on Twitter in that moment I posted something? Or, Facebook?

I’ve always been a proponent of authentic posts. In an early time in my career I would make subject matter experts write feature stories, or provide quotes for social sharing, because I felt it was valuable that perspectives, directly from the source, were being shared with our audience. For that matter, I wrote my own, irregardless of how they might be received. I make my colleagues at Markon write things all of the time, too. It. Is. Valuable.

People: do these things. . .

When you’re a frantically busy entrepreneur, completing the myriad tasks that your company depends on you to complete, it’s more than alluring to sit down on a Sunday and schedule social media posts to go out throughout the week. By all means, do it. But, don’t pre-schedule your posts and then fail to check in for engagement.

Social is meant to be social. I find we have the best engagement rates when I take time during the day to check in on our clients, to engage with their posts. Similarly, impromptu posts from our team exceedingly perform at a higher rate. In the same vein, sharing stories from the broader community we exist within, while the topics are still newsworthy, adds value to our appearance in our fan’s feeds.

We have a policy at Markon that we respond to every comment or reply made to us on social. We don’t follow for follow or like for like, but we make sure that engagement happens — even if it’s just a “thank you.”

When brands check out of their social only to check in to see how their page is performing, they’re making a big mistake. When I say social is about being social, I’m telling you it’s about responsive — which to a large degree means being present.

Michael Wagner is the Digital +Social Strategist at Markon Brand Design, a design agency in Vancouver, Washington. This feature is the long form of a shorter post that originally appeared on Markon’s Blog.