Automatic vs Scheduled vs Live Updates vs Update Feeds

Regardless of whether or not you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or GooglePlus there are facilities to assist you with managing your social networking accounts. These tools are status update helpers. However before we begin let’s look at several common update methods and define them.

• Automatic update- are content triggered updates. Basically you mention a keyword which triggers an automatic response from a bot. This is that most disingenuous from of update. It always leaves a metallic after taste.

  

• Scheduled update- a scheduled update is a carefully crafted note that has been set to publish at a specific time and date. These can also be scheduled on a recurring basis. This is similar to how many blogger keep their content updated by writing articles and having the system publish them on a scheduled basis.
• Live update- obviousness aside a live person may not be capable of publishing updates 24/7/365.
• Update feed- is usually a service linked to an rss feed and will publish updates based on the changes to that source. In this mode you are using the tools available to gather information for you and publish it.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that unless you as a business you should steer clear of automatic updates. Moreover even if you are a business then you really really REALLY should think twice about using this method. Too often automatic updates can appear flat, robotic and SPAMMY. The last thing you want for yourself or your business is to appear like spam. Unless of course you are a spammer then by all means continue doing your obvious marketing so that I may continue to filter you to /dev/null.

Scheduled updates on the other hand are very useful for maintaining a full a round the clock stream. In addition since they are manually written they can be properly vetted prior to being scheduled. This is essential for compliance regulated industries where everything must be preapproved through typical corporate channels.

In any case many types of content lend themselves to being scheduled. However just because you can schedule something doesn’t mean it should be scheduled. You need to put some thought into both your posts and the scheduling. Perhaps you write regular posts for a blog and want to post status updates to announce a particular new article. This is where scheduling can be extremely effective. Or consider the a musical artist releasing new material and you want to announce this simultaneously across multiple media. Scheduling is perfect for these sorts of tasks.

Scheduling updates especially on twitter using something like TweetDeck you can even send yourself reminders. That’s correct you can direct message yourself with important reminder so long as you have two twitter accounts because DMing yourself is like sending yourself a birthday card. It’s kind of narcissistic because it looks like you don’t have any friends so just don’t do it. Really I mean it. If you are on twitter and have to resort to messaging yourself to hold a conversation you should dial up the men in the white suites w/ the padded wagon. #JustSayin!

 

Update feeds are based on services like twitterfeed that watch RSS streams for new content and automatically summarize the information and tweet it from your linked account. I can not stress enough that if you link every possible high volume site to your account you will achieve nothing as these updates well be no different than automatic updates previously mentioned. The recurring lesson here is you need to exercise some care, and dare I say it COMMON SENSE, when choosing the content that you wish to represent yourself.

Remember it’s not about how much you say but how much what you say;

says about you!

You don’t want to be know as the guy with the loudest voice who never shuts up but then again you certainly can not garner enough attention being a church mouse. It is definitely a balancing act but not one that is too difficult if you use some common sense based on the thoughts I have presented.

One more consideration is to definitely create carefully crafted excerpts. Remember the excerpt is your friend and when people share your post on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus the excerpt will be associated with the URL automatically. I can not stress enough that you really need to take the time to carefully craft your excerpt. Although you can make the excerpt as long as you want, you only have 3 short sentences to fit next to the URL on most social media sharing sites.

In addition always try to make your excerpt intelligible in the first 120 or so characters because many of the single click buttons and tools will pick up this text from your excerpt and insert it into your post. Status feed systems will likely use this as well especially ones that watch RSS and atom feeds. Finally if you consider using some sort of tool to repromote older content the excerpt and title will likely be included by default. By not completing a proper excerpt you are committing a grievously major SEO/SEM & social media fail. It means that when you use one of these tools your post is scanned similar to SEO/SEM for context and you have no real control over what is actually sent out.

If you have ever sent a status update from your cel phone only to have words munged by well meaning spellchecker software then you know what it feel’s like to be misrepresented in a message.

Hey dude meet me at the orifice first thing in the morning…9 AM

For instance sending a text like the one above can be comical among friends but a business colleague may not find it so humorous. Of course once again if you are in the porn industry then perhaps this is exactly the message you intended. Honestly who am I to judge. Odds are however it you are reading this that you’re not and sad as it is to say I have actually received that exact text message once.

Honestly your goal in writing content is to encourage as many people as possible to read it in the first place. Wouldn’t you want to leverage every possible advantage you can in achieving that goal? Do you really want to leave your promotional efforts to chance? Think about it…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for the BSD News Network and JAFDIP.

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