I‘ve blogged about this partially before, when I noted some particularly horrible Twitter advice, but I’ve had an epiphany that it’s not necessarily the auto-DMs on Twitter that are the problem (although I do agree with my friend Alex’s recent comment that welcome DMs are a growing cancer within Twitter).
I want to make sure everyone hears this. Please tweet it, retweet it, and tell all the so-called social media experts out there and all the people trying to grow their networks that auto-responders in social media are anti-social. In fact, I would go so far as to say:
Anything automated in social media is anti-social and against the very nature of the medium.
The platform itself is, of course, automated. The things coming from you, the people you follow, and the people who follow you should not be. Those things should be real and human and social. That’s the strength of social media. All these auto-responders that are the same message automatically sent to everyone who follows you are the antithesis of that strength and make you come off as a spammy machine.
Note: I’m not a social media expert. I am a social media consultant and I probably know a few things, but I, just like everyone else, am still learning what this brand new world is all about. I’m just certain at this point that these auto-responders have no place in it. Thus this post.
ps—Now, the one exception that makes the rule, I would say, is how my blog auto-tweets new posts. If I were writing 50 posts a day, then that automation would be anti-social, but as my titles are often conversational, as is my entire blog and I would be tweeting this post anyway, the automation doesn’t ring false. Does this make me a hypocrite? Let me know in the comments.
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Since you're only posting blog posts once a day (if that), why not take the time to manually write a twitter message about what you've blogged, it'll probably look better in the 140 character limit anyway?
On the other hand, I'm not likely to unfollow you because of an occassional “New blog post:” tweeet.
Yeah that's a good point. Maybe I'll do that…
great article.visited your site for first time today,but i must say your write is of top notch and i will surely frequent your site.
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