On the bright side, I like today's photo. That's two in a row. This blog is headed to pumpkinland for sure if I'm not careful.
Um, for anyone new to the program: blog comes to point = blog turns into pumpkin. And I really don't want an orange blog.
Anyway.
I've been musing about autos today. Not cars, no. Auto, as in autofill, autocorrect, autopost... Ok, mostly autopost. Autofill I never use, and autocorrect mostly amuses me. Autopost and scheduled post, though, have me a bit conflicted.
The host of our work website, like most hosts nowadays, offers the option of automatic posting to facebook and twitter any time the website is updated. A couple of the staff who are involved in the website use the autopost regularly, but I never do. I hate going on to twitter and seeing that the last thing posted by our account reads something like I've just updated my website! Check it out: (insert automatic link here).
You know, I almost loathe that rather than hate it. It's so... bot. So obviously an autopost, and really doesn't go with the way we as an organisation usually post. Those who use it think it helps drive traffic to the website, but I'm just so not sure. For me as a twitter reader, when I see something that looks like an autopost I tend to ignore it. Too many autoposts and I stop following the account altogether, and I don't want to see that happening with our work account because it's become a pretty valuable marketing tool (and I never, never in a million years thought I'd be using the words twitter and valuable in the same thought). Heck, I worry about ticking people off on the days when I've been retweeting too often, and I only retweet things that I think would be of real interest to our followers. If (if, though. I honestly don't know if anyone does) they get miffed by that, wouldn't they get completely pissed off at repeatedly being told by a bot to check out the website?
I dunno.
Scheduling posts is another issue. As it stands now, we don't do any scheduling. I did an interview last week for the local cable community channel -- which, since the evil that was Canwest Global managed to kill our tv station, is the only tv outlet for local events -- and the producer and I got talking about social media. She regularly schedules tweets, because she's often out in the community shooting and may not have time to tweet live. If she knows she has things that need to be on twitter, she'll schedule them to come out at various times during the day. That has its advantages, for sure. It means she's not doing batch tweeting (which in my mind is almost as bad as bots. No, news organisations, I don't want to see twenty tweets from you in a row on my feeds. At least spread them out a little), and it means that she doesn't have long periods when she doesn't tweet at all. On the other hand, if someone replies to a scheduled tweet she might not see it for a while, and lack of replies can frustrate people who are interested in a particular tweet.
We, on the other hand, are pretty patchy with our tweets. If I'm in the office all day I've got time to have the twitter feeds on in the background and keep an eye on things. If I've been out on the trails with the camera I'll tweet sightings, or if I've blogged my photos I'll tweet the link. Sometimes we'll live tweet events. And then... if those of us who handle the tweeting happen to be out of the office or on holidays (ahem Wheat), we may not tweet for days.
Which strategy is better, do you think? Do we maintain a steady presence that may make it obvious that a person isn't always doing the tweeting at that particular moment, or do we stay with the Bay of Fundy style tidal tweeting that we're doing now? I'm sure I don't know, but what we're doing seems to be working enough to keep it going.
I have no way to end this. Tired, remember? Maybe in honour of pointlessness and all the royal babyness that I never mentioned we should just have a little Prince George? Sounds like a plan to me.
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