Ahh, the early days of a TikTok account — so innocent, so fun. At first, you’re just trying to connect with other like-minded people online or share a little joy via your creativity. Then, as your account starts to catch fire, you get thrust very quickly into a rat race to grow exponentially while retaining all the homegrown charm that won you followers in the first place,
It sounds like a great problem to have, right? After all, who doesn’t want to be the belle of the TikTok ball and reap rewards from being an online personality (or, dare we say, influencer)? However, the reality is that humans are designed to deal with stress in short spurts and usually with a deadline.
Oh no.
For example, getting a surge of adrenaline while being chased by a bear is super useful when it helps you get to your car and drive away. But feeling that stress and anxiety nonstop because the demands of social media require you to be on 24/7, constantly create new stuff, and engage with your followers? Yeah, that’s not great for your health, mind, or dog (who definitely needs to go out for a walk, btw).
Countless content creators have found themselves between a rock and a hard place: How can they stay genuine and continue to grow without getting burnt out?
Enter from the sky above, swooping in on deft wings: TikTok automation.
The Curse and Blessing of Automation
What do you think of when you hear about the automated, computer-generated, greased-lightning future of social media? It’s ok, you’re safe, the robots aren’t listening (yet). You’re not alone if you’re thinking about those horrific orange cat soap operas; they’re behind half the new therapy appointments in the country.
Automation is a whole world of contradictions. Yes, while we have it to blame for the nightmare-fuel images with fifteen fingers, we also have it to thank for tools, like Manychat’s automated responses, designed to make your life a heck of a lot easier, especially when it comes to your work on TikTok.
It’s a little like how your math teacher made you memorize all those equations because you “wouldn’t be able to lean on calculators forever”, only to have them on our phones a few years later. Does that date us? Whatever — just believe us when we say we weren’t always glued to tiny supercomputers. And now look at us embracing technology!
Learning how to wield automation tools will actually help to keep your creative self sharp, and will keep you in league with some of the top content creators (you know, all those people who seem to be able to do it all without losing their minds). But, with great power comes great responsibility, and it’s important to know when to automate — and when to put it down and slowly back away.
Automate Away!
Being a TikTok content creator requires two things: constantly being online while simultaneously being offline and heads down, creating all that content. Unless you have some strange clone situation going on it’s an impossible situation.
Think of it this way: If you’re a fan of, let’s say, Beyoncé, you don’t think she’s amazing because she cranks out hits, puts on a fantastic show, and yet also responds to her business emails in a timely manner. Sure, you’re not Beyoncé (yet??), but let’s do as Hootsuite suggests and list all those annoying things that are getting in the way of putting on an inflatable shark costume recreation of Single Ladies in your living room.
Maybe it looks something like this:
- Scrolling through TikTok and scanning analytics for hints of trends
- Responding to your comments
- Making a schedule
- Posting on that schedule
- Sorting through DMs
- Writing captions with all the right keywords and hashtags
- Running different A/B tests to figure out what hits best with your audience
- Falling to your knees, begging the sky to tell you when is the best day and time to post
All of these tasks are the perfect fit for the automation tools sitting on your workbench. Computing, analytics, reporting, and even auto-responses are all things that don’t require your special human touch to do manually. Pass them off to your automated personal assistant! (Because Beyoncé can afford staff, but you can’t.)
Yes, some programs (we’re not too shy to promote Manychat here) have gotten so good that they can respond like you. The trick is to set up the parameters of your preset responses to match your voice and brand. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Manychat also offers features that can personalize messages for the sender.
Besides the obvious benefit of taking this work off your shoulders, having automation take care of your messaging means it can happen almost instantly. Let’s face it, as amazing as you are, considering our attention spans now operate at the speed of the scroll, your followers might just forget they ever reached out if you don’t get back to them in time.
Additionally, automation tools can compute much more information faster than you ever could. Large companies like Chipotle are using a combination of automation and analytics to turn around quick responses to get in on the ever-shifting online cultural conversation. If automation can help a large marketing team like Chipotle’s track shifting trends, just think about what it can do for lil’ ol’ you (unless you are from Chipotle, in which case…hello?).
You’ve probably picked this up by now, but using tools to automate aspects of your social media business doesn’t remove you from the equation altogether. You are ultimately responsible for setting up your messages to make it sound like the person your audience knows and trusts, just like you are responsible for taking any reporting information and turning it into goldmine posts.
When to Put it Down and Back Away
There are some things that automation tools shouldn’t touch unless you want to alienate your entire audience. While many societal ills are brought on by spending too much time on social media, there are some good reasons why people still seek it out. A 2020 Harvard study on the effects of social media on mental health suggests that spending time online can bolster people’s sense of connectivity, especially when quality IRL time can be hard to come by.
With that in mind, you can see why people can sniff out obviously computer-generated content clearly. Sure, some people might think the orange cat melodramas are funny, but if you’ve built a reputation on your lovely personality and suddenly people can sense you’re phoning it in, they’ll scroll right by. Creators like Joshua Starkman and Sarah “Scarah” Webb connect to their communities and share a few truths:
- Focusing solely on social media’s endlessly changing goalposts only kills your passion for creating.
- Fellow creators or fans who’ve spent enough time online can tell if you’re faking your follower count, or taking other shortcuts.
- Committing to your passions and the community around them can pay off and not just monetarily; it can help keep the love for creating alive.
On the surface, the two creators couldn’t seem more different. Starkman is a jazz musician and a proud representative of all that New Orleans has to offer; Webb takes inspiration from Elvira as a horror movie producer, show host, and rock ‘n roller. However, Webb and Starkman share similarities: backgrounds in performance and music within niche communities and using social media as a means, not an end.
They see TikTok and other apps as a bridge to their followers. While social media offers multiple income streams, they always seek to expand and experiment with different opportunities. They are the irreplaceable element in the equation.
That’s something that the most advanced automation tool can’t touch (cue the M.C. Hammer song).
That Human Touch
One automation tool does not a TikTok star make. Those scrolling through TikTok want to make genuine, human connections, even if they know they’ll never meet that person IRL. Your distinct voice, humor, ideas, opinions, or whatever you share online can’t be authentically replicated. Our innate humanness gives us the power to sniff out things that feel “off”, hence why Chubby the orange nightmare cat cannot and will never replace our beloved Garfield.
But having automation tools at your disposal can help you eliminate the hours you used to spend on the more administrative or tedious tasks and redistribute them to the more creative, human-intelligence tasks.
As we mentioned before, you’ll still need to manage and oversee your automated efforts, whether adjusting your auto-responses or changing the targets of your analytics. With TikTok automation, you’re not giving up the captain’s chair, you’re only adding more buttons to your dashboard (and they light up and make fun sounds).
If you’re curious to try it out for yourself but don’t want to commit to a subscription quite yet, Manychat offers a free tier that lets you get a feel for how automation tools can make your life on TikTok easier, and finally give you back the time to get your Single Ladies dance down.