I can honestly say that Buffer is THE most important social media tool that I use. And I use it EVERY DAY, many times per day.
If you’re not yet familiar with Buffer, it allows you to schedule content for certain social media platforms with a click or two by adding to a queue that posts throughout the day based on whatever schedule you set up.
I love and depend so much on
Buffer and it is so deeply integrated into my subconscious movements, that it’s almost difficult to explain how I use it.
Buffer is incredibly simple to use, yet it is also incredibly powerful.
But of course, I also have tons of advice and so many power tips that I want to share with you, that I will have to spread
them over a few emails.
Let’s start with a quick overview of Buffer’s plans…
Buffer has a Free Plan, a $10/Month
Plan and then more expensive Business Plans.
On their free plan, what they call the “Individual Plan”, you can connect one profile for each social account… one Twitter, one Facebook, one Google+, one LinkedIn, and one App.net. Note that means for Facebook you can only have your own personal Facebook profile or your
brand page connected at one time. You can also store up to 10 posts for each profile at any given time.
If blogging and social media are your business, you’ll probably want The Awesome Plan so that
you can have up to 100 posts in your buffer and you can connect up to 10 social profiles. (That’s NOT an affiliate link, btw.)
It’s $10/month.
With the Awesome Plan you can also have different times for different days in your schedule. So you can have 12 posts go out every Monday, 10 on Tuesday, 13 on Friday, etc. at whatever times you set.
Buffer Is How I Use Twitter
I use Buffer so much, I can’t even remember the last time I logged into HootSuite or any other Twitter tool other than the main Twitter website.
I even schedule all my tweets when I’m hosting a TWITTER PARTY through Buffer. HootSuite and many other platforms limit the scheduling interval to every 5 minutes which makes it impossible to schedule your tweets for hosting a Twitter Party.
Currently, I only use Buffer for Twitter and Google+.
Getting Started with Buffer
Chrome is my preferred browser, so I’m only familiar with the Chrome extension. But they have extensions for Safari and Firefox too.
Installing the extension is a must!
2. Set your Posting Schedule
You can set up the number of tweets you want to send per day and exactly when you want to send them. If you have the paid version, you can even vary that schedule for different days of the week.
Don’t get too hung up on the exact times, just get some times scheduled and get
started.
First the Basics
When you install the extension, you’ll see an icon in your browser toolbar. Whenever you’re on a webpage, you simply click that icon to bring up a Buffer window.