I recently had a couple of personal Twitter accounts suspended due to the posts being perceived as automated, so I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some ways to automate the process without looking like a bot.

Be Human

Social Media for brands and products should be more about relationship building rather than hard or even soft selling all the time. Creating awareness and trust with the user, provides you with a platform on which to start stimulating conversation.

Automation Tools

There are many tools on the market that allow you to schedule posts to various channels. This allows some sort of customization to the content – which is what you want. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are just 2 such products and allow you to post whenever and wherever you want…

Manual Automation

For my personal Social Media I have a few things set up. I don’t use G+ as much as I should, Pinterest & LinkedIn are not part of the process for me at the moment.

• Twitter -> automatically goes to Facebook
• Instagram -> automatically goes to Facebook
• FourSquare -> automatically goes to Facebook
• YouTube -> likes are automatically posted to Facebook
• GetGlue -> automatically goes to Twitter -> Facebook
• Spotify -> LastFM Scrobbler -> Facebook
• Personal Blog  (using twitterfeed) -> automatically goes to Twitter -> Facebook
• EzyInsights Blog  (using twitterfeed) -> should go to Twitter -> Facebook

As a brand

The same sort of setup can also be established for brand pages in order to stimulate conversation, but you have to ensure that you are targeting your audience correctly. Different platforms have different user types who might prefer certain types of content over others.

Is it right?

You can easily measure the effectiveness of each post in the different channels so you can have the data to back up your posting strategy. I asked the question to Robert Scoble a short time ago – as he posts a lot of the same content to different channels at the same time.

I’m assuming that he has a slightly geeky audience across all platforms so as long as the content is worth sharing then he is on to something. But this won’t be the case for all.

What do you think? How do share the same content across your Social Media platforms?