I Hate Triggers: When Not to Automate Your Social Media

This past week, the New England Patriots of the National Football League were embarrassed when an automated social media campaign prominently tweeted the racist Twitter handle of their one millionth follower.

If you are interested in the details, Deadspin caught a screen capture of the now deleted tweet and imagery.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to automate marketing. It is what allows many thousands of emails to go out to customers at an affordable CPM. It is what can allow a small team to monitor many social media channels around the clock.

The issue here is that an automated campaign sent out unvetted content. That is the no-no, and something an automated campaign should never do.

Automated Social Media No-Nos

No Scheduled Posts of Variable Content

One of the strong values of using a product like Hootsuite is the ability to queue up an entire series of tweets to be published at set times. This allows a team to line up content well in advance and have it post when desired without the need for someone to sit at the controls and hit a button.

This content, however, should never be variable. It should not rely on event and should not draw from a wide open set of variables.

Know exactly when and what content is scheduled for automatic posting.

No Automated Inclusion of User Generated Content

A corollary to only scheduling fixed content is to not automatically include or reference user generated content,

You would not reblog anything on Tumblr that mentions your brand. You do not know what the sentiment is.

Well, user handles are also user generated content, as the Patriots found out to their dismay.

Do not do things like blindly tweet the names of new followers. You have no control over those names.

No Automated Posts Based on Triggers

This is the other half of how the Patriots got into trouble. They relied on an event (follower number 1 million) to trigger a post.  Even if the post is static in nature (and in this case it was not) there is still the possibility of posting something at the wrong time: a false alarm.

Even if they had not posted the racist handle in the message, would the Patriots have wanted people to get notice "We have our 1 millionth follower!" only to check the timeline and see that racist name?

No. They would have blocked the follower, let the countdown reset, and wait for a better candidate.

Any event based trigger should generate an internal notification rather than a post. Let your team verify the event and then act.

Had the Patriots done that we would not be talking about it.

Let's learn from that mistake and use triggers wisely.