Yesterday I retweeted someone.
I enjoyed seeing their travel photo.
I hit the RT button. I chatted with the person, letting them know I enjoyed seeing their travel photo.
Said individual chatted with me, letting me know, “no sweat.”
The tweeter whom I engaged then Liked and RTed about 10 of my prior posts from the day. Most of those posts were automated. Those RTs led to link clicks, traffic and all that good stuff.
I tapped into the missing ingredient in the blog automation secret sauce to make this happen: manually engaging on social media sites through which you automate.
The Video
If you prefer to hear me gab for a little bit watch this Facebook Live Broadcast (recording) as I explain this concept in greater detail.
Go head; hit the play button and enjoy.
You will even see my hearty stubble and a super cute cat named Delilah.
The Missing Ingredient
Most bloggers curse automating. Automation does not work, they say. Automating is a waste of time. Especially on a network like Twitter.
This is their main claim; if you automate, people will ignore your updates.
I say……of course!!!!
Why the hell would anybody grow warm to a bot? Why would any human being grow fond of a cyborg? Would any sane, successful, thriving blogger who worked diligently for years build a bond with a bot? Heck no. We seek human beings as friends. We connect with human beings. We compassionately admire human beings, with their wins and losses, their successes and their struggles.
The easiest way to be human on social media is to manually engage people on social networks for at least 5 to 10 minutes daily.
This is the missing ingredient in the blog automation secret sauce; you engage folks, sharing their content, complimenting them, chatting them up. They see you are human. They could care less about your updates being automated or not; if you keep engaging daily, they will click automated and manual updates, visit your blog, boost your traffic and yep, some folks will hire you or promote you or endorse you or buy your stuff too.
Human bloggers – who prove their humanity through persistent engagement – find that their automated links are just as clickable as their manually tweeted links because they have uncovered the power of connection. Connect with a human. Befriend a human. Human beings become your friends. Friends support you. Friends could care less about the origin of your tweets.
But you gotta be a friend to become a friend and becoming a friend often involves manually engaging human beings on social media sites for 10 minutes or 5 minutes or 30 minutes daily, to build those bonds, to prove that you are human, to gain trust and to aid folks in building their blogging readerships, and in solving their problems too.
Practical Tips
- stop by each social media site where you are automating for at least 5 minutes daily; preferably 10 minutes
- share other folk’s content; Retweet, Facebook Share or G Plus Share helpful updates related to your blogging niche
- thank folks who shared your content via engaging, personalized chats
- chat up folks in your main stream or through your list, naturally engaging people, about both your blog and offline stuff, to form bonds
Persistently following this practice on a daily basis did wonders for my automating campaign. If I sent out 40 automated tweets daily a fair amount got retweets, Likes and link clicks, boosting traffic to Blogging From Paradise, because I did the manual leg work we all need to do to gain the trust of your social media buddies.
People love humans. But they cannot stand a bot.
Manually engage folks. Add the missing ingredient to the blog automation secret sauce.