1) Fully automated (Bad)
2) Fully manually managed (Time consuming)
That's what we believe at http://beatrixapp.com and we designed our workflow with human participation in mind. In other words our job is to show you great ideas for content - which you then approve or tweak. And not just "auto posting" things endlessly.
We did start off with an "autopilot" feature, but soon realized that although there is demand for such a thing, it's not really a part of the industry we want to participate in. We want to be known as a way to create great content easily - not as a way of enabling spam account. We ended up removing that feature.
More info on our findings here:
http://beatrixapp.com/blog/5-social-content-rules-we-have-le...
I don't think you need a huge Twitter presence. It's nice to have a handle to include when I want to give feedback, but I don't follow any companies, and unless they're directly helping me solve a problem (which is rare), I mostly find it kind of annoying when they try to talk to me.
I'm no marketing guru, but I thought the whole point of social media was that word-of-mouth moves much more quickly. You shouldn't need to try to manipulate that to get attention; just build something neat enough that other people want to talk about it.
It's also sad to think that people might believe they're getting ahead at social media somehow by essentially running a robo-link service. But maybe I'm missing some part of the equation with this new offering. Perhaps the robo-links weren't relevant enough in the past, and these are extra relevant robo-links.