Can You Auto Post Without Looking Like A BOT?

About the Author: I'm an artist at heart, always feeling creative. I fell in love with social networking and social media years ago when I was introduced to Twitter and it grew into a love affair when I created my website and had to learn to optimize my site, and market myself online. Now I like to share what I've learned over the years with my friends both old and new. Sometimes I might have a snarky, "Oh No She Didn't" attitude, sometimes I might have a comedic sense of humor, but regardless of the view take, I hope you will enjoy what I write.

Knikkolette | Dec 31, 2011 | Comments 21

Buffer

Some of you new to my site may ask, what is auto posting, why would I use it and what is a bot?

An auto post is a post that is created by you, but scheduled to post at a later time, possibly when you are not online. There are several applications that can make these posts for you such as Buffer, Twaitter, TweetDeck, HootSuite and MarketMeSuite just to name a few.

A bot, on the other hand is an automated account programmers use that mimick accounts of real live people. For instance, you may have seen sites that advertise selling massive numbers of followers or fans for money. These followers and fans are usually bot accounts. They look impressive in that you have a large number associated with your account, BUT (and you can see I emphasized the word BUT) there is no value there and we will cover this with another post another day.

Auto posting can be used effectively and ineffectively. My goal in this post is to show you how to use auto posting without looking like a bot.

The following are a list of posts I’ve seen people post and I’ve posted myself successfully:

1. Quotes: These can be posted any time of day, people will retweet (RT) them and can be set up on a schedule for reoccurring auto posting. If you do set up the quotes on a reoccurring schedule, I recommend every 60 to 90 days. Your followers have good memories. I learned this the hard way by posting quotes every 15 days and one of my followers pointed out I looked like a bot.

2. #Follow, #FollowFriday, #FF posts: This is a great way to save a lot of time and rack up some good karma. Imagine how special you can make someone feel by dedicating an entire tweet to one person for a #Follow mention! Not only that, people are much more likely to follow someone you recommend based upon a dedicated #Follow tweet than they are when they see multiple people’s names mentioned in a tweet like you usually see. I have these set up to reoccur weekly and even though the verbiage is the same, it still carries the same weight. It’s a single tweet dedicated to a single individual.

3. Promoting a friend’s webinar, new book, charity, etc… If you want to help someone promote something why not set it up as an auto post? I love Twaitter’s option to have a tweet post every day for x number of days. I set it up once then forget about it.

4. Google+ circle request: I have an auto post set up once a day that simply says “I would love to have you in my Google+ circle! http://bit.ly/tW3OG4” and another one that’s similar for my personal Google + account. I honestly believe this has helped my personal account grow from 300 to over 1,000 in 2 months.

5. Offer to help: I recently set up an auto post that states that if someone wants interaction on their Facebook fan page, all they need to do is post the request on my Facebook fan page with a link to my fan page. This has worked out great – I’m not worried about gaining fans – although I’m sure this will eventually help grow my fans when people see I follow through consistently. Not to say I haven’t gained any new fans – I have… for me, I’m doing it more to help others. Other benefits could be increase in visitors to your Facebook fan page, increase in comments, increase in likes, increase in your EdgeRank, etc…

What you will notice about the options above on auto posts are the following:

1. No questions: If you ask a question it will need to be answered. If you are not online, you can’t answer the question. (However, there are notification applications such as TweetAlarm that can notify you via e-mail when you get a tweet so, technically – you could if you have a smart phone or access to the internet.)

2. No posts that require immediate interaction on Twitter: Notice my posts that require interaction lead to another social media platform. Google+ and Facebook. It’s O.K. to have a delay between interaction if it’s not on the same social media platform.

These are the ways I use auto posting, do you have other ways I haven’t thought of? I’d like to know. Also – if you have a Facebook fan page you’d like some interaction with, let me know on my fan page and I’ll drop by and say hi. If you have any questions you’d like answered, post them and I’ll write a blog post or record a video.