Today, we talk about social media as a part of an overall online marketing strategy. Social signals do influence SEO. This is clear. However, how to manage social media is a point of contention. Purists believe that social media should be 100% personal and original, each and every time. Others believe that social media automation is the way. We believe in something in between. Original, personal social media content is key, but for a small business, some automated tweeting is not only acceptable but necessary for a business with limited time and resources. Check out our video to learn more about this delicate balance.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video on free automatic tweets. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me as well.
Good afternoon, Chad. This whole issue of social media has been gaining steam now for a number of years. And here in 2013, I don't think anybody denies that it's very much a part of any well-formed marketing strategy. There's certainly social signals in SEO. So, they help you gain rankings. And it's just what people need to see as an assist when their closing a deal. So, today we want to jump into this whole notion of using automatic tweeting platforms or things that will automatically push out information into your Twitter feed.
There's a whole controversy around automated tweeting. There's a lot of purists who say, no, automatic tweeting is bad. We see a lot of small businesses who just don't know where to start. Their Twitter feeds are empty, haven't been updated in six months and look pretty sad. So, what kind of guidance can we offer our viewers? And start with this question. Should I use free automatic tweets at all?
Yeah, well I think there's kind of two different kinds of free automated tweets. As we see in the market all the time, there's stuff that's complete garbage. Then the answer should be definitely not. It doesn't make sense. It's not relevant to your business.
But what we want to talk about today is the way that we think about automated tweeting. Every SEO campaign or content marketing campaign that we start with always starts with research, and it starts with understanding what the audience is looking for. So, all of the information and things that we're doing, whether that be creating infographics or if that's creating article content, onsite blogs, all of these things always are built and done with the audience in mind.
Now, what we're talking about with automatic tweeting is then taking some of that information that we're creating, that might be going out and syndicated on an infographic site or might be posted to your website is an onsite blog, and also repurposing that so they can also be tweeted. So, I think, in that case, automated, using a tool to help you be more efficient and productive makes complete sense. In fact, most people look at it and say, why aren't you doing this? But you do have to sort of separated out what people might immediately brand as something being bad, automated tweeting from what we think is something actually that can be very efficient and good.
Right. It's really an interesting point. You can think about any other industry or go back in time, making cars in the auto industry. The more they used robots, the more efficient they made the line, obviously, the better. And they competed better and could offer a better product at a better price. So, certain business principles around automating workflow that need not have human involvement is just sound thinking.
And I think Google sort of conditioned everyone in the search engine marketing space to be a little afraid of anything that's automatic, that is not natural or manual. And so, I think there's a tendency to shy away, as you said, to think, oh that's somehow not right. But I think your point is right on. You shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Make your work process more efficient, but, at the end of the day, the building block, the content, has to be good. So there's plenty of automatic tweeting tools I've seen that are just total garbage. They're just sort of taking things at random and spitting them back at people. And they really make for a Twitter feed that's not very engaging and not very appropriate for it's audience. And it won't gain followers as a result. And I think that's where these sometimes get a bad name.
If you can find one from a service, that's what we've talked about doing, using very good content that's built from a research team, that's written by writers who are really focused on the end user and providing value, there's no reason you shouldn't be more efficient. And of course, there's lots of other platforms that people use for social media for that all the time. So, I think for that small business that's having a hard time getting into it, isn't this a good first step?
Isn't this the first place they should start? And then, what's likely going to be their reaction? I would think they would say, well, it's not specific enough to my business. Where do they go from there?
Right. Absolutely. And the way we've been thinking about it is that it is a good first step. I mean, certainly, social media is always hungry for content. So, if you can knock off a certain amount of that content that needs to be published and discussed by leveraging things you're already doing for other purposes, I mean, that's smart marketing. Right? It's reusing, not so much reusing, but it's using and getting the maximum value from the investment you're making in creating great content. So, yeah. Definitely start there.
And what we've talked about, is that it does make sense, at some point, that people are going to want to add more onto it. But if you think about it, if we're doing 10 or 15 or 20 free automated tweets a month, that takes some of the pressure off of you to go in and highlight specials or promotions or other community involvement that you might be doing that are much more specific to your business. So, I think, again, you can start with something like a free, automated tweeting type of process, but then you can graduate or add onto that a lot of other options that will make your social media presence richer.