It was early fall, 2009. Our family was enjoying an incredibly beautiful view of the mountains in northern New Mexico. Antelope, elk, buffalo, trout of every kind; magical cloud shadows intermittently cooling the frugal warmth of the altitude, and then …
all of a sudden …
DID I LEAVE MY AUTO TWEETS ROTATING WITHOUT ANY WAY TO TURN THEM OFF??
YES. Yes I did. I had a brilliant plan to test a group’s response to my various tweets for a 12 hour spell. Two and a half days later, I realized I had forgotten to turn it off before I left town. Something that rolls off my tongue when explaining how easy and effective auto-tweets can be for businesses everywhere desiring to reach audiences that vary their attention spans between hours of the day, immediately became an opportunity for me to lose my entire reputation due to the risk that I had become – Twitterspam.
AW, CRAP.
No wireless in the cabins we were occupying. Since my husband, the Greatest Fisherman Of The Mountain, was quite a ways down stream (yet with the car, go figure) when I came to my realization, I had to bum a ride from a local to the civic center several miles away and work out my wireless muscle to see if I could remedy this mess.
Guess What I Learned About Tweet Automation?
NOT easy to remedy!! I use Social Oomph Professional for keyword research on the businesses I’m interested in following, and also for their somewhat simple method of rotating tweets. They allow several tweets to be posted in a certain format that causes random, rotated tweets that only need to be drafted in once, and from there you can schedule the frequency and pauses as necessary. Sounds groovy, right?
Trying to get a wireless connection in the back seat of a Ford Taurus with the excruciatingly bright, early morning sunlight–defying your ability to even see the screen let alone follow instructions, made for an irritation much like I imagine the chaffing of the buttocks after an eight-day, showerless excursion into the Arctic. But I digress…
Once in, having never been in this situation before and assuming an ‘off button’ would exist, I realized with trepidation that alas, it did not. EVERY SINGLE SCHEDULED TWEET, even though they were in the same family of tweets, had to be deleted from the text box where they originated, and from the published posts that had already gone out.
After an hour and a half, I was able to go through each and every one of the 22 published tweets and get rid of the origin, and then the published tweet. My logic being there would be nothing to recur if the tweet was deleted–right?
Even so, when I returned home to check the results of this mess, many of those tweets still existed in cyberland. What a booger.
I’m just telling it like it is. It’s one thing to schedule and monitor your activity on Twitter, but a brand new pain to leave your words un-escorted through a cyber-realm that possesses the right to tell you that you talk too much about the same thing.
I never meant to annoy, but where the heck was that ‘off button?’
If you’ve found one, will you please share with the rest of us?
FOLLOW-UP
Evidently there’s a pause button …
