Should you automate your posts? [Daily Dose]

Daily Dose – Social Media Tip of the Day – Should you automate your posts?

I recently read a great post discussing the “end of automation“.

It discussed the problems with posting to Facebook and other social media sites through third-party applications (like Hootsuite and NetworkedBlogs).

Many people (including me) use third-party applications to save time and to share information more efficiently.

In an ideal world, you would be able to monitor all your social media accounts in real time, all day every day.

Unless you are paid to do this as your full-time job, you probably have other obligations that take up some of your time. (Even if it is your full-time job, life has an annoying habit of sometimes getting in the way.)

So what’s the problem?

It seems that these automated posts are not showing up in Facebook News Feeds and have less “EdgeRank” than “organic” content.

(EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm for determining what gets into your News Feed. Organic content is when you post a status update, link, photo or video in real time.)

I love Hootsuite and use it frequently. Facebook has asserted that they have adjusted EdgeRank to reduce the alleged negative effect of posting from a third-party application.

However, the blog post and other studies have given me pause.

My tip for today is to try manually posting your content for one week and see what happens.

Does it get more interaction? How does it compare? Let me know, and please share the results in the Comments section below.