How much automation should you be relying on for your social networking? That is the million dollar question that many social media managers wrestle with on a daily basis. While running an effective social media campaign is one of the most effective ways to help boost a site that has been effectively SEO optimized, a social media campaign takes a lot of time to be run correctly. This is particularly true because it is not generally an initiative limited to one network – often it is several networks at one time with each needing a certain amount of care and feeding to thrive.

Automating is something that can cut down on that time requirement, but too little does no real good and too much can render a campaign wholly ineffective. What we will look at today is automation in regard to Facebook and Twitter as these are two of the most popular platforms to work in concert. These tips are merely meant to help point you in the right direction. They can be mildly tweaked to meet your individual needs.

One of the biggest mistakes in automating these platforms to work together is doing it backwards. Far too many brands have their tweets sent to Facebook to be automatically posted. While this certainly helps keep your Facebook wall fresh, it looks bad. If you are even moderately active, you have a wall filled with tweets that obscure your greater content. The last thing you want to do is make your content hard to find. Some argue this is a good tactic to get more Twitter followers, but the other side is if someone is following your brand on Facebook, they likely already do on Twitter as well and the re-posted tweets are merely duplicate content to them. Secondly, few people will engage with tweets that are not on Twitter itself.

What makes more sense is sending your Facebook posts to Twitter where people can then come back to your Facebook page to engage with your content, click your links, etc… at greater length. This sets up a chain reaction of actions that all build value for each of your platforms involved. The point of it all is to get people to act and then get back to your site where they can be converted and you see the fruits of your labor.

What you have to keep in mind though is that automating only handles the posting of the content one time. As users engage with you, you need to be there to answer their questions and otherwise interact with them in order to keep them loyal and perusing more of your content. That, again, is how you work the networks to get conversions, and it does take time. Automating is fine in moderation, but it still requires real human monitoring and interaction to work to its full potential.