Social Media is growing fast. With the rise of Social Media comes Social Media Marketing, a new trend capitalizing on Social Media’s ever growing popularity.
It comes as no surprise that many programmers are creating programs to boost social rankings and credibility.
I have to admit, it sounded pretty darn good. How many Diggs do you want on your blog post? 100? No problem just program it in. You got it.
Now, how many people do you want to read your post? Sorry, can’t help you there.
It’s the same way with Twitter, you can get a thousand retweets but with no guarantee that you will have a thousand people reading your content.
I have to admit it though, I gave one a shot. It was really great, at first. All those Diggs and Retweets on my posts.
Then I started looking at my Twitter account and what the program was tweeting on my behalf. Some of it I would have retweeted myself if I had known about it.
Other Tweets left me going ” What on Earth is that?” Things that I would never tweet about. Probably inaccurate programing on my part.
Another tool I looked at, but stopped short of trying, would find Facebook friends for you among other tasks.
Then I started looking at it from the other persons perspective. How would they feel if they found out that we were Facebook friends only because some computer program hooked us up?
Some won’t care, some might be insulted, with the whole range of emotions in between.
Social Media is supposed to be about you, being you. You bookmark things you like. You tweet about things you are interested in. You make Facebook friends with people.
Not some Computer Program choosing your friends and telling you what you like.
Both tools I looked at had a type of feedback loop so that it appeared the actions were all coming from your computer, after all, bookmarking your own content from your own computer won’t have much validity with the social media sites.
How long until Digg, Reddit, and other sites catch on and do their version of the Google Slap? Months of work could be gone in a flash.
Security Issues
These tools need to have your IP Address on file to work. How secure is their database? If a hacker gets in and gets your IP Address they own you and your life, it’s just a matter of time.
So if you decide to make use of this type of tool, be careful.
Take some time to choose your keywords so that the program picks the right topics for you to promote.
Food for thought, The JasonBetter blog has well over 40,000 daily readers. Yet he only gets about 30 to 40 Tweets on his very best posts, and they are all good, high quality content.
Do you really need to artificially boost your Content?
Hey Michael
You make a great point here. Social Media should be just that a place online where people socialize online. When you involve machines in the process to act on your behalf your online social life is belittled to a point of no existence.
The concept reminds me of a film I saw recently 'The Surrogate', where humans where using machines to do their daily activities. As you can imagine it all went t*ts up in the end.
Great post
Dwayne
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Hey Dwayne, Thanks for stopping by.Have you seen the latest? “Auto-Content Blogging?” In their headlong rush to find a “shortcut” some people never realise that the only true shortcut is learning the lessons and then doing the work.
Michael
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