Social networking: say it; don't spray it

January 5, 2009 / Filed under: Social Networking, Tips

With all the social networks out there, it's easy to consider auto-posting from one network to another. It saves time and pushes your message out to a wider audience.

However, this is not always the best tactic because it reduces the uniqueness of each social network, and decreases the trust your followers have in you. If your message is being generated by a machine, and not you personally, or when technology starts doing the work for you - the entire concept of being "social" has been defeated.

To help keep your social networking profile as clean, legitimate, and friendly as possible, here are some tactics that you may want to avoid:

  • Blogging software that auto-tweets new blog posts
  • Auto-DM's
  • Scheduled tweets
  • Apps like Ping.fm or Facebook's BlogIt app
  • Any third-party app that auto-posts to another social network

In all of these cases above, a machine (the system, technology - whatever you want to call it) is updating the social network for you. This should be a red flag telling you one of these things:

  1. You have joined too many social networks and have passed the threshold of being able to manage each one on it's own.
  2. You are not interested in using social networks for their main intent (meeting and interacting with people), but rather to mass-distribute your message in a one-sided manner.

It's best to always say it rather than spray it (pushing your message out to as many networks as possible).

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