Managing your social media can be frustrating and time consuming.. who am I kidding, it's time consuming regardless.
Finding suitable content and then distributing it in a timely fashion is nigh impossible without either a professional taking care of it, phenomenal organizational skills or some magical app to help us.
I've got number 3 for you, in comes Buffer.
Buffer's goal is to help you stack all the articles you find and consider worth sharing with your audience into a scheduled release itinerary, so that you can enjoy the task of sharing quality content.
It works like this.
You have a Twitter account, Facebook page and a Linked in Profile. All three have a different audience, relatively speaking. As you're working, you come across a great article you would love to share but you have one of three problems.
1. You want to share it, but it's 3 am
2. Where do you put it so you can remember to post it later
3. The post suits your Twitter & Facebook crowd but not LinkedIn
These 3 things can ruin providing consistent content for most people and understandably so. A lot of us don't have time to allocate an extra 'schedule' process into our daily lives.
However with Buffer, you just click on your browser extension (shown to the right) which produces a wonderful window, allowing you to add your post to the Buffer queue.
This will post said article to your choice of social media networks and at whatever time you deem most beneficial.
As you can see in the image above, I have 3 main social media networks I use. I found a great article on landing pages that I want to share with my networks.
I can click on the networks I wish to share this article with in the top left and rewrite a blurb to explain what it is I'm sharing. (I can edit this in my account later if I want)
I can either share now or add it to the Buffer queue and best of all, you can stack as many articles into the queue as you want. Yes! You can spend a day finding great, quality posts and stack them for days to come, freeing you up to concentrate on other tasks awhile still engaging your audience.
Another great feature is that I can re-arrange the order of the posts within the different networks. An example being that I may have article A then B post on Twitter in that order but have them release on LinkedIn as B then A.
This helps to avoid the dreaded same content saturation on all your social networks. Again, since each audience is different, they have to be treated differently. Such an important rule that one.
In my my account, I can change the scheduling each social network will release on, as you can see above, for Twitter, I find a morning, mid-afternoon and evening approach works best for that audience. Each network can be scheduled differently and I do indeed have them set differently, they are after all, a different audience.
Of course there are analytics, which offer you a better idea of when your posts are being interacted with or not for that matter. Gotta love the stats!
All in all, Buffer is a god send. A simple app that comes in the 3 forms.
1. Web application
2. Chrome browser extension (seems the firefox extension has been removed by buffer?)
3. Mobile app
Personally, I take 30 minutes out of each day to add to my Buffer. I stack 4-5 articles I believe my general audience would benefit from and that I would love to engage in conversation with, and I go about my day.
If you like a more in-depth look at the app itself, Buffer's Blog has a great article available, aptly titled:
