November 21, 2016
Most of us don’t have time to manage our social media accounts, yet we can’t justify the price to hire a social media coordinator so we often resort to automation to get the job done. It’s affordable, quick, and you can get a lot of followers, fast. I’ve always been curious to see what the effect was like and whether it’s worth it. I tried Twitter automation – you can thank me later.
Be prepared to lose your friends
When you use an automation tool be prepared to lose control. The tool I used was SocialQuant and once the tool was activated, I unfollowed at least 200 people because they were inactive. (This meant my friends…I’m Sorry!) The tool doesn’t post on your behalf but it does have the ability to follow and unfollow people on your behalf to build a following for you.
Random Direct Messages
The tool targets people to follow you in order to grow your followers base. Along with that you get a whole collection of Direct Messages. These messages can be customized but they are automatically sent by the tool. I would average around 10 Direct Messages a day. The catch here is that automation is actually taking up my time because I have to read each message to see whether they are genuine or spam.
I lost my feed
The moment I signed up, I unfollowed a lot of people which means the tool is automatically selecting users to follow based on my targeted keywords. In return, I lost my feed. What used to be a feed filled with content that I enjoyed, is now a clutter of spam. It’s reached to a point that I will need to spend several hours to clean up my feed to regain power over my newsfeed again.There is also a limitation on how many users you can unfollow at a time – making my clean up time even longer.
Gain followers fast
If you are strictly looking for your base to increase then automation is a possible route to consider. Within a span of 5 days, my followers grew from 550 to nearly 730 averaging about 40 new followers a day without doing anything. However, the quality of these followers are quite poor with low content engagement levels.
Is it worth it?
I wouldn’t recommend using tools to grow followers regardless of whether these accounts are real or not. I’ve lost control over my feed, the people I follow and I’ve spent more time unfollowing and cleaning up direct messages for all that it’s worth. However, if you are interested in growing the account in number, this is definitely a fast way to go about it however, what’s the meaning of social media when all interaction are driven by automation?
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