One of my pet hates are automated tweets.

They dehumanise Twitter. When I interact with someone on Twitter I want to know there’s an authentic human voice at the other end of the conversation. Not a bot that is responding with pre-programmed tweets that have about as much interest for me as whether or not the UK will win the next Eurovision Song contest (spoiler alert – we won’t…).

I was having a chat about this with a friend from work the other day and I couldn’t help but get the image of Soundwave, the Decepticon from the 80s’ Transformers cartoon, out of my head. Soundwave was the one with the really cool voice synthesiser who often threatened the Autobots with the menacing “Prepare for OBLIVION!”  taunt, before blasting them with a sonic cannon.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a lover of 80s’ cartoons to see the connection. Automated tweets make you look like a robot (and not in a cool way); you lose your human authenticity as a result and, ultimately, they “prepare you for oblivion” because your audience will switch off.

Here’s the top three automated tweets to avoid:-

1) “My week on Twitter – I gained four followers and a gazillion people unfollowed me because of tweets like this.” – Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point.

2) “Thank you for following me. I hope you enjoy my future tweets.” (or similar). These tweets can be set to send automatically to anyone who follows you. Enjoy your tweets? Sure, because who wouldn’t enjoy tweets that have no thought put into them whatsoever and are the same regardless of who it is that has followed you?

3) “The [INSERT NAME OF TWEETER] daily is out! Read my collection of randomly collected links that I’ve probably not even checked myself properly to see if they are any good.” Okay, I’m getting a little cynical now 😉

There are many erroneous claims that these Twitter automation tools will save you a ton of time, or that they’re used by social media “experts.”

Really?

In my experience, anything done well takes time and anything worthwhile has a little bit of yourself in it too.

Automated tweets take both of those things away.