Comment by fookyong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fookyong | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think there's definitely an optimal medium between:

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 really have much sympathy for a company that expects to reap the rewards of social media engagement, but thinks it takes way too much time to... engage socially.

But it is too much time when you're a one person or small team. Twitter is 24/7 and can be incredibly hard to crack where you're audience is. I run http://www.ugtastic.com and since I'm focused on tech and tech people tend towards Twitter than other platforms I put my effort there but getting insight into which Tweets get any sort of interest feels nearly impossible.

Which tweets get interest is just whatever catches people's attention that day. I can't tell what snarky quips are going to be popular either.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com