Automation and Social Media - Peashoot's Audience Builder.

Is this a good idea?

Social media always faces the same issue - business value comes from scalability, and actual social value comes from true personal contact. For those who won’t click the link, Peashoot’s Audience Builder feature (based on my incomplete understanding reading the documentation) helps you search for specific keywords or phrases is tweets, then set up an auto reply to a limited number of users who post those keywords.

This isn’t an abusive implementation of this idea. The suggestion appears to be offering something of value, and useful information, to people who would be interested. But the second automation becomes a part of the process, it’s effectively guaranteed that this will be abused.

The heroes of social media marketing / business (Gary Vaynerchuk is a great example) are the kind of people who realize that social more or less excludes automation. The kind of people who spend countless hours answering countless emails. This is hard, hard work. But there are direct benefits to build real relationships, to building trust.

The secret of social media as a marketing or business tool seems to be this: it doesn’t scale past the number of involved, caring, passionate people you have willing to dedicate time to it. It has to stay personal, or it will be exploited beyond recognition.