> Let’s be honest - the main downside to automating social media is less audience engagement (likes, comments, etc).

This is the first point under the "There are some downsides to automating" section. I think that's the most important thing to read and realize whether you should even continue to read or not.

If social isn't a marketing strategy your startup is using at all, yeah, do this. It doesn't really matter too much then. But if you're actually trying to use social for any value, doing this is a terrible idea, in my opinion. The author/OP phrases it as this is all a good idea if social isn't your main marketing/acquisition channel, but I think this is still a bad idea if social is even your secondary or tertiary marketing/acquisition channel. Your engagement will tank on social, and people will be able to smell it a mile away if your social is worth engaging with or not. It's quite easy to tell if stuff like this is automated or not. I feel like the OP downplays that too much.

With that said, you do you, and decide what works best for your company. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is still a useful post if you put what I mentioned above aside, and decide to do this for your social strategy.

OP here.

Yeah I agree, maybe I should have said if it's not in your "Top 3"

I think it also depends on your resources. If you're a solo founder then it can be hard to justify much time on social media.

And I also think you can have both. You can automate some posts, and also do ad hoc stuff. In my use case I publish articles on a consistent basis, why not automate the social media side of that?

That’s a good point! I def agree it can be a good strategy to do both - automate some and still do manual work. That’s a win-win to break it up!

Doesn't have to be less engagement as long as it's very human like. I went overboard and used tensorflow to guess content of images on other people and leave comments, post stuff, generate comments text via NLP and as long as I used unofficial channels (eg via Javascript using PhantomJS) I had really good interaction.

I got >100k genuine users in my facebook group, 10k users on instagram etc and now I have stopped automation on both as the genuine user interaction suffices for growth.

Got API privileges revoked by twitter and the moral of the story if you have to be a 'crook', go all in ;)

ps: my first version of the project is here: https://github.com/ganeshkrishnan1/socialmediabot

Now I use scala, tensorflow and stanford NLP

Sometimes is really wrong but being what it is i can see this working the pictures and the tagging , such and evil genius of spamming lol! I actually had to star you and follow you on facebook just to see if people reshare that spam

The other hidden cost of automation that feeds into less engagement is that some social media will put a damper on automated/bot accounts based on internal criteria for organic engagement. Also, automation isn't a binary choice. You can lessen the frequency of automation and mix in organic content.

I automated my social media by deleting all of my accounts

Deleted code is debugged code.

This sentence gave me a miniature zen moment. It's gone now, though.

To become Zen you must first delete Zen.

As the article says:

> Note - this post is about automating my business social media accounts. I think automating stuff on your personal accounts or using bots is bad.

Perfect, bots talking to bots. Now if we can only automate being influenced by ads the whole system will work perfectly with zero effort.

With this quick hack I drained my bank account! I set up an Instagram bot to browser for 30 minutes a day. It had a 2% chance to click any of the ads I saw. This aggregated URLs of products I wanted. To simulate bad late night purchase I set a Chrome headless instance to crawl these page at 11pm each night. This had all my form-saved information. To model drop off from bad UI, it would recursively auto fill the forms and try to proceed through the purchase, this gave me about a 70% drop off rate once in the checkout process.

(Just to be clear I didn't actually do any of this.)

What if we made a version of product search that sorted results by the number of times your reading bot saw the product advertised in your social feed (from bots). The entire social media enterprise could be supported with zero human effort.

I had a shower thought once that between the time all humans died and the Internet goes down (all that infrastructure still need human maintenance), Twitter would be just filled with bots posting their spam under the top trending hashtags, creating feedback loops as the system sees other hashtags the bots use and push them up as trending.

And the last machine that'll be running will probably be a machine desperately trying to talk to a payment API because it needs to bill their long dead client after some other algorithm overspent the client's ad budget...

You should check out the short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury

My favorite chapter in "The Martian Chronicles". I will never forget it.

It's cool, but having broken icon image links gives away that its automated too much.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dvcbv4ZXcAAAEJR.png

Also maybe add some more variation to the posts so that it looks human. When you pick a random article, and then stick a random block quote from the article on a picture... maybe just post your random quote as text and forget the picture every once in a while. Just to break up the visual rhythm.

Also throw in a retweet from a list of accounts you like every once in a while.

Edit: And last thing... really. Real humans rant. We get stuck on idea and make several posts on the same subject in a row.

You can easily schedule a years worth of ranting in a couple hours with a tool like buffer. Just post 3 things about the Steve Jobs biography in a row like you just now got around to reading it.

Everyone should do this with their personal content too. Post to your own website and syndicate elsewhere. That way you maintain ownership of your content and audience, and people don’t need to use Twitter/FB to follow you.

POSSE, as they call it.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

This an absolutely fantastic post, thank you for writing this. Start Story is also awesome, keep up the good work!

Isn’t that like automating your cocaine addiction?

Wait, no source code?

TLDR; “Used bufferapp API to post all social networks