Social media is by definition about being social; interacting with other people through the internet whether they be friends, work colleagues or people in your area of expertise or geography.

With this comes an element of time.  If you wanted to go for a drink with someone in real life you’d need to invest the time in going to the pub, sitting down and having a chat.  The same also applies to social media; if you want to truly interact with people you have to invest the time in building dialogue through whatever platform you are using.

This is where the syndication comes in.  Platforms like Hootsuite will allow you to schedule tweets or ping them to other networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook.  The obvious positive of doing this is to free the time you spend each day on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.  You can schedule you tweets, select which networks they are going to and sit back while you focus on other things.

Now the downside…

Many people use this as a replacement and not a supportive tool to their social media activity.  You’ll probably have them too, people that have the same sales tweet going out repeatedly day after day.  Whilst social media should provide you with additional avenues from which to promote your products and services you’ll be doing the potential benefits you can gain a disservice by using this methodology.

Lets draw an equivalent comparison to direct marketing.  This type of syndication would be akin to a direct mail campaign where you sent the same piece of marketing material to the same householders time and time again.  Would you expect to gain results from this? You might get one or two leads but by and large there will be a growing level of apathy or even irritation to your marketing methodology.

The same principles apply to social media.  It’s also worth bearing in mind that if you’ve scheduled all of your tweets in you won’t be reacting to, commenting on and showing an interest in others.

Ever been to a party or a dinner with someone who only wants to talk about themselves? How long were you willing to listen to that person.

We’ve touched on reacting to tweets above and it’s also vital you are able to respond to questions, queries and comments that arise from your own posts.  Are you able to do this as efficiently if they’re scheduled in?  Do you even know when they are going out? Perhaps or probably not.

At MiHi Digital a key focus of our social media work is always to ensure that people are making the most of their time and the value they gain from that time is being maximised.

Syndication can add value when you are using it to support activity.  It is however, not a substitute to time.

For more information on how we can help you gain more from the time you spend on social media please give us a call or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk