As an evangelist for real and meaningful communication in the social media marketing arena, I don’t like much about automated “anything” to be honest. There are applications which allow you to post to your Twitter account simultaneously to posting on Facebook, Subjot, Empire Avenue, LinkedIn or YouTube for instance – and if you want to, you can give most applications access to your life via other platforms – so it follows that you do need to be careful that you don’t overload and bombard your followers with the same
message eleventeen times. Careful and judicious use of these is required.
However, although I can see how they might help you to provide value in the form of valuable content to the people who listen in on you, I cannot see the value of an auto DM – an automatic direct message that you set up your Twitter account to send every time someone follows you. None of us these days want any more communication that we choose to have – getting something sent by a bot does not make me feel valued, even less so when it contains a link that is trying to sell to me.
It’s too impersonal. If I want to send a message to a new follower, I do so, using their name, and making it about them. It’s the first step in an ongoing relationship on some level so I don’t wish to start that with some sort of generic blanket approach.
If you choose to send them and like receiving them then that’s fine, but if like me you don’t want to have them jamming up your messages box, you can try this tip from @MQTodd – who’s full of great tips actually 😉
1) Log in to Twitter.
They will follow you back within a few minutes.
