A New Way To Manage Twitter & Facebook When You’re Away

At some point, we all have to take a break. Whether it’s for a day or a week or longer, it’s good to get away from work and the daily routine, and just recharge. Sometimes, travel requires you to be away from work or marketing for a day or two, also. When you go away, you usually set up an auto-responder for your email account to make sure people know that you’re gone and not just ignoring their messages.

But what do you do with Twitter and Facebook while you’re away? Hire someone just for the week to manage your account? Probably not. You could leave a single status update that you’ll be back after awhile, but people forget about you pretty quickly in social channels. Or, they forget that you said you were gone. Status updates don’t stick around for very long in your followers’ pipelines.

You could leave everything be, and risk people getting annoyed that they asked you a question and you ignored them. That would be very bad. Or, you could keep up with your social networks on vacay, but maybe it’d be better to focus on having fun and relaxing.

Taking a Break: An iphone app that acts as your away message for Twitter & Facebook

Released just this past week, the Taking a Break app allows users to schedule breaks from Facebook and Twitter, and it politely sends auto replies to all incoming communications on behalf of the user. As the creators suggest, Taking a Break “introduces a new standard in social networking etiquette.”

While there are auto-DMs and auto-replies that people use right now for Twitter, they are generally frowned upon. But sending a message that you are away and will respond when you return is actually desirable, rather than fake. If you really are gone, you have a good reason to auto-reply. But if you’re still around and just lazy, that’s a different story!

Who Can Benefit

Everyone. If you value your relationships with fans and followers, why not be able to leave while still replying to them as a courtesy? This is especially useful for customer service departments during holidays or long weekends, or anyone else who actively connects with customers on social media and wouldn’t want them to misinterpret non-response as neglect.

Limits

This app is available for iphone only right now, so those of us with Blackberrys or Droids will have to wait. It would also be nice to see this as a desktop application, because as more and more businesses integrate social media into customer outreach and customer service, there will be a number of people using social media for business right there at their desk. Social media is not just for mobiles.

Where to Get It

Taking a Break became available in the Apple App Store on July 14, 2011, for $0.99. Click here to download it.

If you have questions about the app, leave them here and I’ll notify them to come and respond to your questions!

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