Transcript
[00:00:00.550]
Hi. Welcome to Marketing without Judgment. If you’re not aware, my name is Megan Brame and I’m an award-winning digital marketing strategist who helps entrepreneurs create ride or die fans for life. I’m here to answer your marketing questions no matter how nefarious they might be. So this episode I want to talk about bots.
[00:00:18.910]
Are they worth investing in? If you’re unaware, bots are used for a variety of automation things post scheduling, engagement, outreach, follow, unfollow, you name it. If there’s anything that is manual that needs to be done most likely there’s a bot out there that can do it for you. So when thinking about a social media strategy your goal is to create enough of a momentum that it just kind of runs itself and likes to get likes and comments and follows and things just become more automatic. Now that’s the ideal world, right?
[00:01:02.490]
Where it just all kind of happens by itself. But in reality you’ve got to spend some time with boots on the ground and making sure that you are doing any engagement possible to get your name out there. Luckily for us, social media is a fantastic method of organic marketing. Organic marketing is marketing that you don’t pay for but consequently you are in a sea of other people. So even though this is for the most part a free method of marketing your business, it doesn’t mean that it’s an easy or completely successful method.
[00:01:44.670]
For me, what I tell my clients is that social media is just like a branch of marketing. It’s not the end all, be all and shouldn’t be the end all be all of your strategy. But it can be a big time suck, right? I just read a statistic that most marketers will only spend 6 hours a week doing engagement on a social media platform which I think is fantastic because I used to know people who would spend hours and hours and hours just like mindlessly scrolling and liking or following and things and it brame so cumbersome for them. I completely understand why people were burned out from it.
[00:02:27.830]
But if you want to grow your following to get more sales then you’re going to need to find a way to be consistent. Now if that is 1 hour a day every day at 01:00 p.m or something like that, that’s totally fine. But if you want to supplement it, if you’re an entrepreneur who is doing all this on your own and you’re just feeling strapped for time, if you want to do this on your own but you need a little bit of a boost I think bots are reasonable. Does Instagram not like when people do that?
[00:03:01.820]
Yes. So if you want to use a bot that has social media capabilities keep in mind that most likely it’s a violation of the terms of service. But if you can do it in such a way that it doesn’t, it flies under the radar. It seems organic, like a natural progression. Like it’s not liking 36 posts in 3 seconds or something like that.
[00:03:31.150]
It’s actually spread out and looks more human. Then you’re going to be able to kind of work in a gray area that can be effective. Now, like I said, it cannot be your only method of engagement. You need to put a face, a voice behind your social media strategy. So what I love to do is I use an app called Metricool and it’s an app for marketers.
[00:04:03.440]
It does a lot of analytics and stuff like that. But what it has is a section where you can go into Metricool and reply to all the comments, the DMs, things like that right there. So I don’t need to keep opening different apps or things like that. I’m able to do it all in one fell swoop. I do that once a week.
[00:04:30.110]
Now, my social media strategy might be really different from yours and if yours is more of LinkedIn or Facebook or things like that, you want to tweak that to be… I don’t feel like bots work in those kind of
worlds. I feel like bots are more for places like Pinterest, Instagram, maybe Twitter. Leave a comment if you use a bot on Twitter and be really curious to know and I feel like you need to just use them sparingly. Can they help?
[00:05:03.030]
Yes. Should they be the end all, be all? No. Will you get dinged for using them? If you’re not playing it cool, don’t go overboard.
[00:05:16.670]
A little bit goes a long way. And make sure you’re doing everything consistently. And I don’t mean everything like you’re running all the things and I mean make sure that a bot is a supplement for your full social media strategy which includes posting consistently, replying to DMs and comments, and engaging with the community. So I hope that’s helpful. Leave a comment and let me know.
[00:05:46.050]
I would love to answer any more marketing questions you have in the meantime. I will talk to you next week. Bye.
