Why Automated Content Falls Short in Building Meaningful Growth

Automation almost always pays dividends in the long run. Let’s say you spend about 5 seconds every morning checking your email for new messages. If you check your email every day of the year, that adds up to:

5 seconds x 365 days = 30 minutes

That’s equivalent to one episode of your favorite TV show spent just opening and checking your email. If you continue doing this for a decade, it amounts to about 5 hours of your life spent on something trivial. And that’s just one small task — think about all the other things you have to do.

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” — Bill Gates

As a software engineer, I’m inherently lazy. If there’s a task I have to do more than once, I always try to find ways to automate it. I don’t manually clean my desktop; there’s a script for that. I don’t type the same commands repeatedly; there’s a script for that too. In almost everything I do more than once, I’ve found a way to automate it in some form or another.

My latest challenge was social media. I created new Twitter and YouTube accounts and automating their growth became my next goal. I didn’t want to manually upload videos or create Twitter posts every time, so I decided to automate these processes. Along the way, it became apparent that this was not something you can automate.

Photo by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash
Start with ‘Why’
I realized that no matter how much content I put out there, mindlessly automated content never helped grow my social media platforms. In today’s modern world, people don’t appreciate faceless corporations forcing one-way communications on them. Social media has shifted towards real and genuine individuals who have control over what they consume and how they consume it. It was more casual and fluid, influencers might talk about a product they’re selling in one post and share their dinner in the next.

It’s all about vulnerability and revealing your true self to others. When people can relate to that, they will be drawn to you because of what you believe in. Take a vegan restaurant, for example. We support it because we embrace its values and strive for a more sustainable future. However, there are those who try to undermine such establishments by attacking the idea of veganism and claiming it’s not truly sustainable. But the focus was never on the restaurant itself; it was on the principles it stood for. Automated content production simply couldn’t achieve this because it lacked depth. It could churn out content, but it failed to convey meaningful values that people could connect with.

This is why people resonate so much with figures like Manny Pacquiao, who came from humble beginnings, overcame all odds, and became a world champion. It’s also why Ellen DeGeneres faced backlash when it was revealed that she created a hostile work environment — people felt betrayed because they thought they could relate to the person she appeared to be.

Changing Your Mindset
Initially, I believed that social media was all about being as loud as possible and constantly promoting what you’ve built or produced. I thought spamming links and telling people where to buy your products was the way to go. However, I soon realized that this old-school approach didn’t work anymore. It was akin to a cheesy car salesman trying to coerce people into visiting their showroom. People didn’t relate to it — in fact, they found it annoying.

Instead, social media is about sharing your journey and what you stand for. People resonate with authentic stories and experiences; they want to follow your journey and show support. At the end of the day, social media serves as a mirror reflecting people’s values, and automation can never capture that essence.