Tuesday 5 April 2011

Status syncing in social media: Seamless or silly?

Prompted by a conversation started in Social Media Today on LinkedIn, I found myself thinking about the syncing of facebook and twitter updates; seamless integration of content vs boring blasts of information.

Content generation for social media is time consuming and at the end of the day who doesn't desire an easy life? A social media portal or a new app such as Sociable enables you to send the same generated content to all your social media platforms at the click of a button and to its furthest possible reach  - what isn't attractive about that? You think brilliant - simultaneous status updates - I'm sure to gain maximum coverage and reach now.

What would you say to the idea that such a strategy for a personal account is boring at best, and for a brand it is nothing short of detrimental?  Simply 'feeding' the same content to all platforms runs counter current to Web 2.0 interaction and engagement. It moulds an image of 'I know I ought to be involved in social media but I'm not quite sure what to do so I'll send everything to everywhere. At least this way I'm doing 'it.'' The element of dialogue goes out of the proverbial window. Hardly social then is it?

More importantly from a marketing stance I'd also argue that brands who operate such a strategy are actually providing a discentive for the for their customers/fans to follow them on their various social media platforms. Why bother if everything gets sent to all accounts? May as well just be a fan on facebook and that's it, you'll be always up to date and you needn't check out any other of their online activity. Is it not obvious that the knock on effect of such a choice would mean less re-tweets, less youtube sharing, less social media engagement and consequently less coverage, reach, exposure and identity for your brand.

So really on a cost benefit analysis scale, perhaps spending the extra 30 minutes generating some more unique content for each of your social media sites might not be such a tiring prospect after all.

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