Automation and Social Media: You Need to Know How to Balance

Automation and Social Media: You Need to Know How to Balance

Automation and Social Media: You Need to Know How to Balance

Finding that sweet spot between live interaction and posts can be a tricky business. Some people like to automate everything, and others are purists about live posting. A hybrid approach can save you time and energy, but what is the best ratio of automated to live posts? And how often can you post before your audience starts to roll their eyes and unfollow you? Here’s a look behind the curtain, so you can choose what you want to do.

By the way, you may have missed this post about social media automation.

Being Informative vs Being Annoying

Hardly anyone sets out to be annoying, but sometimes there’s a fine line. Being top of mind is what we’re all aiming for. In an interesting article from Buffer about social media frequency, author Kevan Lee suggests posting 14 times a day on Twitter, or about once per hour. Of course, there’s another ratio to consider: how often to post about yourself. Could you post about your own brand once in five or once in ten times?

Scheduling Tweets

Scheduling Tweets

Twitter: Live Engagement & Automation

For Twitter, I started with scheduling nothing, then went to scheduling 10 tweets daily, then 5 scheduled tweets, and now 0. When an interesting topic comes up, it goes into my scheduler so it appears at an optimal time. Besides that and the Tweet Old Posts plugin (every 4 hours), the rest is live engagement. The result has been that my follower count has gone up. My ratio of automated to live tweeting is about 1:3 or 1:4. By the way, here’s an article about why not to buy followers and who has the most fake Twitter followers.

Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics

Facebook: Optimizing Through Analytics

Do not believe those articles and infographics about the best times to post. Check your Facebook analytics to find your best times and frequency. Unless you bought followers, you should be able to see when your fans are online. I find the best engagement before 9 am and up to 3 pm. It’s important to use a big picture. Some people like to tag others, but I find those posts annoying. For Facebook, I post about once daily. Hubspot has an interesting article about how often you should post on Facebook. As far as automation goes, I’d recommend it and especially if your audience is up early, for instance, and you’re not. Again, check your analytics.

Pinterest Scheduling

Pinterest Scheduling

Pinterest

For Pinterest, since about half of all users are in the United States, you might want to limit your pinning to those times when your audience is online. I’ve been pinning roughly 8 times a day: 4 times live pinning and four scheduled pins. The scheduled pins are from my own blog, and go out between 5:30 to about 8 pm. The others go out usually all at once.

What Works for You?

Do you schedule? How much? Leave me a comment! I’d really like to know!

 

 

Comments

  1. I’m about the same. Though I have fewer blog posts so my Revive Old Post scheduler is set to every 7.5 hours.

    We forget there are humans on the other side of the computer and that a little bit of acknowledgement goes a long way.

  2. I use Hootsuite’s bulk scheduler for Twitter. I have a handful of tweets from each blog post scheduled. I have it all mixed up so there are anywhere from 8-14 tweets per day. I review the scheduler weekly. Will pull out old content, change wording, add content so no need for the plugin. I always try to add in an additional 5-10 tweets per day, all of which are replies shares or another form of engagement.

    A mix of live and automated.

  3. My scheduling probably isn’t where it should be. I try to knock social out each day in about 30 minutes (as per your post!) So I find tweets that I like and want to share and other content and then schedule it out. When I can, I love to live tweet and just share awesome things, but it’s not always easy to do. You guys just wait until I’m out of school for good this May—I’m gonna turn into a social media monster :D

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