How to auto-tweet effectively on twitter | Joined Up Business ...

Recently I had the ?pleasure? of incurring the wrath of a prominent member of the legal community. (And no, I?m not talking about the comments my controversial blog on roll on friday attracts). Apparently, my use of ?auto-tweeting? was ridiculous behaviour. Whilst, what I really wanted to do was bite back, I remembered best practice about dealing with an online complaint?and apologised and offered to talk about how I use Twitter in an off-line conversation.

This left me thinking, what is acceptable auto-tweeting and what isn?t? There are no hard and fast rules, and very often what is acceptable to one person is not acceptable to others.

Let?s look at the polar ends of the scale here with auto-tweeting:

The purist: The purist twitter user is one who thinks you should always turn up to twitter and tweet ?live?. Typically these are long-term twitter users whose day job is business development or some aspect of social media or comms. Whilst I don?t disagree entirely with the sentiments of the purist; after all you should always be open, honest and transparent when online. There is a problem with this attitude ? most of us have a day job to do outside of twitter. Getting the level of coverage and visibility on twitter to make a real impact often is not possible without some element of auto-tweeting.

The spammer: This person really doesn?t care about what you think of them. Very often they have been schooled in the arts of ?traditional? online marketing and it?s all about automating their message and spraying it out. (Not just on twitter). They want and need ?one-touch? marketing literally? Just as long as something sticks somewhere, they have enough evidence to carry on with their methodology on twitter. Relationships matter nothing to these people ? just as long as they can get a link or two clicked, then everything is fine in their world.

Now, between the purist and the spammer there are many shades of grey ? and I am not talking about the ?red room of pain? type of shades of grey here. For example:

Are you a spammer if you:

• occasionally schedule a tweet in advance as it is time-sensitive and you can?t do it live?
• use bufferapp to spread out your tweets across the day?
• use a plugin on your blog to automatically tweet out new posts to your twitter account when they are written?
• use a tool like twitterfeed?to tweet automatically from an RSS feed ? particularly of blogs whose content you like?
• use a wordpress plugin on your blog called Tweet old post to randomly tweet out links to blog posts in your blog?
• use hootsuite (or any other bulk scheduling tool) to automate some of your tweets in advance?

Of course you are probably not a spammer if you do use some or all these tools ? however, your use of some of these tools may incur the wrath of some twitter users who feel that auto-tweeting is the spawn of satan and should never even be considered. (You may find this article on how to make it easier to talk to people on twitter useful reading)

There is no right or wrong answer here. It?s about balance at the end of the day. Too much auto-tweeting and you will literally lose followers (and friends!) on twitter. You have to find the right balance of ?automated? content and ?live? content which works for you. I, like many of you, can?t be tweeting live all day long as I do have a business to run. My attitude, and the one I advocate to my clients is:

• automate your content on twitter but not your conversations
• balance your content with both relationship building tweets (e.g. live conversation) and credibility building tweets
• turn up physically to twitter at least once a day to engage with your network on twitter

What are your views on this thorny topic?

Source: http://joinedupnetworking.com/debate-what-level-of-auto-tweeting-is-acceptable/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=debate-what-level-of-auto-tweeting-is-acceptable

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