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I'm done with robots!
(Here follows the little Twitter lingo I know, so I'm not giving the dictionary explanations.)
First off, I did this too. I also used an automated retweeter and thought; 'Hell, this is nice, I'm getting way more followers'. But that I stopped, the moment I realised that the people I wanted to follow me, began unfollowing me, because I was flooding their feeds. I always thought they don't get why I did it and whiney boo-hoo. I also thought that maybe it helps not only me, but those 'I' retweet(RT) as well. Well that is bullshit, because between you RTing the post and the ten others you already had in the past hour (for instance), the post becomes a hydrogen bond, not only on earth, but in the universe. Because the increase of impressions lasts an hour to three hours, where in a normal situation, it could actually have a better impression over a longer period, when the robots are shut off and the feeds aren't flooded.
Don't believe me? Test it
The first is a tweet that got great impressions and then nearly completely 'died out'. I checked the people who RTed and guess what? It was automators and just on their profiles alone, I needed to go back about an hour, sifting through close to fifty RTs, just to find mine. There was at least 3 link clinks and same on hashtags. (the hashtags being the personal ones I've made related to my own books - this is a tip to use yourself). Notice also how I actually used a RT group hashtag, which could've also been clicked, making this data a little unsanitary. But we'll get back to those.
Now the second, is quite intriguing. After I'd seen how well it performed, I pinned it (not where the second increase is, I pinned it due to this second pick up). But, this tweet was RTed by someone real, no robots. There was more impressions and since it was just my hashtag, we know these 3 clicks were clean. There was one more link click, but the permalink actually came into play as well, which is a true no-robot click. Oh, and for not mentioning the favourite, we all know they are not worth too much, so you get my point.
I'm aware of my days having an influence, but I tested this three times, with the same outcomes.
Now, my point in the end is, that these two examples won't fully cover that as an indie, we are supposed to be more personal and due to the lack of PR in most cases we need to be real. That is what I believe in, because I also RT, but what I believe in supporting and what I stand for.
Paper.li is something many of you know, and it is a nice little thing I thought I could use to help others. It takes tweets from a list you create, mine was Author Associations, and makes an online 'newspaper'. Nice! No, not so nice. Mine went on and did its thing and posted things I personally do not stand for. So in turn it made me look like someone awful. We're talking 'racism is okay' type stuff, that I'd never agree with, but it was on something of mine, so I had to okay it according to everyone who doesn't know it is automated?
The point I'm attempting to make?
The most important point is that, your automater is RTing things you don't know of when it is running 24/7 and starting to give you an awful name. More followers is not worth you becoming labelled as something you don't even support. These robots are ugly and while we who know of them, might think it is just an automater that made a mistake, your biggest readers might see it and take offence, and then you'll lose a lot more than the extra followers.
And that is not worth it enough.
The following pic I found when I was looking for Goodreads' logo.
See? The amount of followers you have (be it from 50 to 50k) should be regarded as diamonds. I know this is the stats for Goodreads, but I myself took part in the survey and it is clear that as an indie, your social followers are so precious that you shouldn't lose them, because you don't have time to tweet too often and went for the robot.
Even websites that allow you to multi-post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, wherever; are evil. I can't tell you how many times I've unliked or unfollowed an indie author due to this. I rarely follow any known or famous authors, because it is important to me to follow fellow indies and support them.
That is why it aches me, but it has to be done, to state that I'm unfollowing, unliking and removing everyone who uses a robot. I connect with a person to learn more about them. If they are eating a cookie then I want to know how it tastes, even if it is silly. If they got a new book coming out, I want to know more about it.
BUT I CAN'T, because my feeds are flooded with automated things I never wanted to see. I don't mind real RTs, that helps a community grow. The reason I'm infuriated is below, where it shows that in less than a minute, the addition of tweets are far too high to keep up with (which are more than 70% RTs by people using automators). Note, I follow less than 2k people, now drastically falling due to the spring cleaning I'm doing.
And...
Could you get more impersonal?
Seriously, all these things flood the feed so you aren't helping fellow indies, and this might just be my personal opinion over this, but it feels like the RT groups are there to provide the support (less they not use automators).
Have you seen how many RT groups there are?
I only realised they existed like a few weeks ago, but that is the people who help you. Because this is going to be a hell of a lot harder with our route, than traditional and we need to support each other. There are RT groups for every genre and they really work, just be careful with the bigger ones that are clearly using automators.
So excuse for partings that might take place if you are using an automator, but I really just want to look at tweets, without worrying my page would reload before I have finished reading a tweet of 140 characters.
If I wanted to interact with robots, I will go buy myself an iPhone, get the Tamagotchi app and pretend I need to keep Siri alive. I might even call it Siri-gotchi...
See you on the other side...or not depending on where you stand with this.
Chevoque
