You’ve cruised into the end of the year feeling accomplished. While successfully balancing family time over the holidays with a last-minute work task or two, you dug into a few chapters of that book you’ve neglected. Congrats!
I’ll bet these winning moments were thanks to automation. It’s OK. We all do it, including myself.
Christmas Week Social Media Fail
Just before the holiday I used an app to schedule several social media posts to go live while I was spending time with my family. But, my plan backfired. A glitch in the software flagged each link as potentially malicious, after being shared publicly. Ouch!
After deleting several posts, sending emails to the service provider and pausing the program, I’m re-thinking how to use automation.
But, Small Businesses Need Automation
Let me be clear: I think automation is useful and necessary when you don’t have a dedicated social media professional on your team. However, it’s critical to realize that automation still requires regular maintenance, or you could end up hurting your business presence rather growing it.
If I ignored my social feeds for a few days, I could have lost the trust of several loyal readers thanks to some bogus posting errors.
Thankfully, I was able to correct the issue quickly.
Let my automation issue be a lesson to content creators and strategists far and wide. Enjoy your time away from work tasks, but if you have automated newsletters, social media posts, emails or blog posts queued up ready to go, be sure you (or a hired helper) are the first viewer for every single one. Taking a second to make sure the automated process went as planned could save you months (or years!) of re-establishing trust and readers!
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