The world is full of innovators and the minute they see a problem, they go to work on creating a solution. This also holds true with social media.
One of the big issues that always arises when using social media for marketing is the amount of time that must be invested to get results. It takes quite a bit of time to build a sizable community on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you are a blogger, you know how much time and effort it takes to publish just a couple good posts each week in order to build a sizable community. And, lets not overlook all the time and effort it takes to prepare a good newsletter and build a community around that.
In response to these issues, innovators around the world have created automated software to handle some of the more time consuming administrative aspects of social media. This software is called “robots” or just “bots” for short. The utilization of bots covers a broad spectrum of applications from increasing the size of online communities to committing illegal acts. Whether or not bots should be used in social media is a question that elicits responses ranging all the way from “why not if they can help me accomplish much more in far less time” to “bots are evil and should never be used.” Consequently, I expect this article will trigger quite a bit of debate as readers share their opinions.
Personally, I came a little late to the social media table. It’s only been a couple of years since I started to get involved. When I first started, I thought it would be crazy not to use available automation. However, several people advised me not to use bots because there was nothing social about them. They said, “How social is it for my bot to talk to your bot? You need to build relationships and a bot cannot do that for you.” I was also told that if I used bots it would probably result in me being shunned just as “spammers” are shunned. It made sense because who wants to be shunned? So, I avoided the use of bots altogether as I struggled to build my networks and communities.
Then I met an individual who was quite successful in marketing with social media and I asked him about bots. His view differed from that of my early mentors. He felt that what I had been told was only half correct. He said, “Yes, to be successful at social media marketing, you do need to build relationships and bots cannot do that for you. But there are a lot of time consuming activities associated with social media marketing that have nothing to do with building relationships. This is where bots can become very valuable.” This sounded logical to me.
Having a network of millions is worthless to social media marketing if your prospects aren’t among them. Even if I invest the time to develop relationships with them, if they are not my prospects, I am probably wasting my time. My new mentor gave me this example, “I have a great relationship with my sister but I don’t want to date her,” he said. I knew this was true from the very beginning.
About a year ago, I joined Twitter just as an experiment to see if it made sense for business marketing. The first thing I realized was that finding the right people to follow (with the hopes that they will follow you back) takes a lot of time. I would check out the profiles of the people following the people I was following to see if they were in my small business target market. I would also search the hashtag #smallbiz and follow those that were tweeting about small business. All of these activities took quite a bit of time which made building a sizable community of prospects in my target market a very slow process.
My new mentor then explained to me how he used TweetAdder to find Twitter users that were in his target market and to follow them automatically. He has over 100,000 followers on Twitter. Meanwhile, I have only been able to build a Twitter network of a couple of thousand. We all know that size does matter (assuming that they are in your target market). So, who do you think is correct, my early advisors or my new mentor?
Last week I purchased TweetAdder and went from a little over 1,900 followers to over 2,500 in just four days. This may not sound like much, but if I had been doing this for the past year, I would probably have somewhere between 50,000-100,000 followers by now. And absolutely nothing I have done prevents me from building relationships with the people I follow. The software will do many other things like send Direct Messages to all of your follows. Since I haven’t used these features I don’t know whether they hinder or help with relationship building or if even they will make me look like a “spammer”. In my humble opinion, these are the main factors to consider.
These types of tools are also available for Facebook and MySpace as well. So now I am going to make up for some lost time and start building my communities at a much faster pace. This will give me more time to build relationships with those who are following me.
Bloggers can use WordPress Plug-ins and third-party software tools like TwitterFeed, HootSuite, OnToplist and Google’s FeedBurner which will automatically send their article’s titles and links to Twitter followers and Facebook friends. These tools are bots and by themselves can save you a lot of time that you could be investing in relationship building.
Now that I have sung a few bars of praise for bots, I need to address when they can be downright evil. So evil, in my opinion, that I am not going to provide their names or links because the harder it is for people to find them, the better. There are evil bots out there that can add content to a blog on specific subjects after copying it from other blogs. This saves the blogger the trouble of writing original content. Of course, since content is copyrighted, it is illegal to use it without the author’s approval. The blogs where this is practiced are also full of advertisements like Google AdSense and affiliate marketing ads. So, it seems the only purpose for these blogs is to suck in traffic for financial gain. Normally, I don’t mind find advertising on a blog offensive, but when it comes to stealing content that belongs to someone else, I have a serious problem with it. This is why I think these bots are evil and since they are designed to break the law, they should be illegal.
In fact, because my own content has been stolen, I started a LinkedIn group called “The Blog Zone” for the purpose of helping other bloggers find out where their content may have been pirated and what to do about it. Since then it has morphed into something much bigger, broader and better. We still have a subgroup called “Copyright Matters” that addresses copyright infringement and plagiarism.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand… are bots valuable when it comes to social media marketing? When bots are used to perform administrative tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with relationship building, I do think they can be a very valuable resource. But, if you intend to use bots to spew out self-promoting advertising instead of building relationships and endearing the people in your network to you, chances are, you are going to become socially unattractive and your network will unfriend, unfan and unfollow you. You will lose trust with your community and they will ostracize you. And then you will end up being one of those people who claims “social media marketing does not work”.
Now I would like to hear from you. What are your thoughts about using bots in social media marketing? Is it thumbs up or thumbs down and why?
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If you would like to contact me, you can do so by visiting my LinkedIn page or emailing me at mike.clough@bestbizpractices.org.
Posted by: Mike Clough
