automation tools

How Automation Tools Can Hurt Your Social Media Marketing

Social media automation tools enable social media managers to work more efficiently. You can schedule your content in bulk. You can efficiently and rapidly cross-post. You can do a lot more with a bit of code.
However, as you can do all of this, it is critical to avoid over-reliance on automation tools.
If you would like to see progress on social media platforms, your tactic cannot simply be to create content, schedule it as a post, and then overlook it. Without human interference, you will miss out on an integral part of social media that automation cannot help you with.

Marketers on either side of the aisle frequently debate the benefits and drawbacks of social automation, and none of the sides is entirely correct.
Automation is not intrinsically harmful; it is simply one method of social media management and content marketing campaigns. Marketers, on the other hand, frequently make mistakes during the deployment phase. Theoretically, you should strike a balance that allows you to benefit from the effectiveness of social automation while also sustaining genuine user interactions with your audience.
Here are a few ways automation may be undermining your social endeavours, as well as some easy tips on how to redirect your social implementations back on track:

How Automation Tools Can Hurt Your Social Media Marketing

1. Automation Tools Won’t Create New Opportunities

If you’re not receiving any interaction, think about the last time you tried to make the first move.
Make new friends on social media. Advertise your work to people you think will appreciate it. The social is social, and it cannot be colonized on its own.
Boost your work tactically in discussions, comment threads, as well as other venues as you see fit.


Participate in Twitter threads, leave comments on LinkedIn posts, and perhaps try to get a head start by writing for a noteworthy Medium publication with more readers first. Just ensure that whatever you say is valuable.
Second, you must carry out research. For example, you can search for the keyword phrases you want to target. Have you been using the terms that people lookup?

Examine what others in your marketplace are doing. Examine what other “successful” social media figures are doing and consider how you can adapt it to your own business. Go to Reddit and look for relevant threads. Ask your colleagues for their thoughts, or go one step forward and request your customers.

The base of your social media efforts should be researched. You can’t just guess what’s right or wrong or where you can improve; you have to know.

This may provide you with ideas for improving your information, copy, and cadence. You might come across people with whom you could potentially collaborate. You’ll be inspired and taught, and you’ll learn something new.

So, if your social plan is limited to automation tools, you risk allowing your low engagement to persist. You’ll miss out on new opportunities that come from making friends and conducting research — both of which must be done by you.

To be clear, I am not saying, “Drop all of your social networking site automation tools right now.”

They do help to expedite work. What I mean is, don’t count on it. It is not enough to simply cross-post, bulk-schedule, and then forget about your posts. You must still devote time to using and learning about social media organically.

So recognize what else to automate, but remember that you must also participate. Overdependence on these tools undermines the time-tested formula for social media-being as social as possible.

2. Automation Tools Has the Potential to Destroy Your Brand’s Value

Your social media brand value has a serious influence on your sales and profit margins.

And using social media automation tools to automate likes, following, or posting can not only start making your brand look like just a spam bot and give the illusion less credibility, but it could also potentially destroy your overall brand value.

In the image above, we can see that Samsung replied to a tweet concerning a Sony mobile phone. This is as a result of the keywords Samsung’s social media automation tools were monitoring being too broad and including phrases that were out of the target market scope; this resulted in the bot replying to issues brought up by Sony product problems.

3. Posting at the Incorrect Time

You should never use automation tools for your social media posts till you understand your target really well to know when they’re most active and likely to engage with you. These factors differ depending on the audience and also from one social channel to the next.
Based on the historical engagement metrics, your social observations can show you when your viewing public is most active; schedule content to be posted online during those hours.
Sending an automated message on or before 9 a.m. every day would be pointless unless your followers are most likely to interact with you between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., for example. Determine the posting schedule for your social channels, both automatically and in real-time.

4. Take Caution When Using Curated Content

Content curation tools can help to ensure a steady flow of content. This is an excellent method for delivering specifically targeted content to your audience. This can help you establish yourself as an important source of information. Furthermore, because you have a steady stream, social media algorithms may begin to favour you.


Very often, this is considered further and can backfire. First, ensure that you are monitoring the content that is being published and that it needs to meet your specifications; you would not want to unintentionally promote a rival’s content or publicly release an academic article that appears to contradict your brand’s values.
Another is to monitor frequency. You do not want your system to become a faceless content aggregator; this is where engagement will suffer. Furthermore, a high volume of quality content will gobble up your own content.

5. Neglecting the Individuality of Social Channels

Each social channel is distinct. Just as the timeliness of engagement varies by channel, so too does the content on its own. People use social media in a variety of ways, and the tonality and layout of posts ought to be appropriate for the channel’s users.
It is not a smart tactic to automate social media to the point where a certain content or update is endorsed on every single network at the same time and in the same manner. To take advantage of the power of engagement, tailor your message, tone, width, and framework to each platform.

6. Campaign Results Are Ignored

You can’t ignore your analytics just because you’re automating your content.
Evaluating social insights ought to be part of the marketing routine. Use such insights to track how your followers respond to specialized pieces of content. Did you lose followers after sharing a particular piece? Was the engagement for a particular curated topic higher than usual?
Use the data to reevaluate your strategy and look for additional subjects and content that are similar to the top-performing posts. You don’t want to lose followers, so avoid any subjects that have initially caused people to unfollow you. This information will only be available if you manually process and supervise your insights on a regular basis.

If you are looking to use other tools for your social media and digital marketing, then you should consider influencer marketing.