Social Media Automation Series - Part 4: Buffer


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Buffer is one of the social media automation tools that everyone knows about, talks about, and uses.  I am definitely an avid user.  It is the ONLY tool I've found so far that really lets you Retweet a post within Twitter and with its Chrome Extension.  Anything else I've used treats the tweet as an original tweet unless you add "RT @handle" to the comment box.  In my opinion, this is BEST FEATURE of Buffer.


The main use of Buffer is to schedule your tweets.  You choose what days, what times, and how many times a day.  This means you can also schedule your Retweets!  I love this.  I see lots of great articles and want to share them.  However, if you are browsing Twitter and retweet everything you see at one time, then your followers get a bit of information overload.  There isn't a limit on the number of tweets per day you can send, but you can only have 10 scheduled tweets at a time.  Therefore, you can schedule 1 tweet per day for 10 days or 10 tweets for 1 day or some combination in between.  You can keep topping up your Buffer as long as there is room in the queue.  This is a notable difference between Buffer and other platforms.  Most limit you to X number of tweets or interactions per day (like Dlvr.it and Crowdfire).

You are allowed 3 social accounts (no Pinterest unfortunately).  The number of posts is not per account i.e. you can't have 10 twitter posts, 10 facebook, 10 insta posts all scheduled at once.  Analytics are also not available for the Free plan.  You can also only view your posts in list form in the Free plan.  You can't curate content or re-buffer.  You also are limited to the scheduled times you've previously set.  You used to be able to "share a post next", but that feature has gone by the wayside as well.


All in all, I still think Buffer is useful purely for the RT feature and being able to top up all day long. OH - I forgot to mention that Buffer recognizes Twitter handles and allows you to choose from a dropdown list!  No more misspelling or leaving someone out!  


Quick recap:  

Paper.li - great for finding content and you get to create your own paper!
Crowdfire - makes it easy to schedule posts, follow/unfollow people, and curates some useful content
Dlvr.it - allows you to follow your favorite feeds/blogger and automatically post their content and create a queue of tweets from 


What are your favorite tools?



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