Polish Up Your Tweets with Buffer

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Good Morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

I started last year to use Buffer, it’s a cool widget that lets you tweet when you visit a web page.  You might think yeah yeah, you can do that with lots of other apps, and indeed you can – Marginize is one that I looked at recently and love, but I love this more :)

What is so fantastic about Buffer is that….

  1. It’s free – you know how I love free
  2. It can be used with Twitter or Facebook (but only personal Facebook accounts on the free version)
  3. You can schedule content with it – by this I mean that rather than me surfing about and sending tweet after tweet of cool pages I’ve found in the space of an hour and then nothing much for the next 23 hours I can space it out….
  4. There are analytics on the tweets you send
Below is my Buffer account, when you first join you decide in your settings when you want to send out tweets and what your time zone is.  You can see that I have chosen 7 times during the day to send out tweets in the Sydney time zone.  There is also the option to use a link shortener of choice.

schedule tweets with buffer

I then downloaded the widget onto my browser toolbar and when I visit a page I like I click on it, I have the option to edit the message and it goes into my Buffer stream.  So if for example I buffered a tweet at 8am it would actually be sent out at 9am as that is my first tweet of the day.

I now can have tweets being spaced throughout the day rather than bombarding people and potentially not reaching very many by tweeting in a short time.  For me this saves lots of time as I often do concentrated surfing when researching an article and now I no longer have to copy paste, schedule etc.  Love it!

There is a downside….  Buffer won’t let you buffer the same tweet say 5 times in a row, it will come up with a message in your online dashboard to say that the content was too similar to content sent earlier that day.  I find that rather annoying particularly when I want to spam you guys with my fabulous offers every hour for weeks – joking :)

Finally I discovered that Buffer has a really easy to read analytics package which comes with it.  Below you can see in the screen shot the date the message was sent, what it was and the number of clicks, retweets, potential people reached, mentions and favourites.

Buffer shows you what your tweet stats

I don’t know about you, but to be completely honest I have never really analysed my tweets like this in the past, it has always seemed to be far too much work – I mean I monitored retweets and @ mentions, but that was it.  Now in a glance I get all the information I want and can drill down as needed.

I think that Buffer will be my tweeting toy for 2012…. has anyone tried it?

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