Same as many of you, everyday (especially in the morning) I read lots of Internet news, blog posts, and tweets. If I find any good ones, I like to share it with my friends in Facebook and Google Circle; my followers in Twitter; as well as my peers in Linkedin. With so many to share and so many different social media networks as the destinations, it is not easy to manage this task. For examples:
- I need to log-in to these websites one by one to post. Yes, there are some utilities to help out but none of those are really intuitive;
- If I post all the morning stuffs in one go, it not only annoys all my friends and followers; but all my posts also will disappear in my friends’ wall easily;
- Browser is no longer the primary way to read / share news, therefore there is a need to share also directly from apps like Flipboard and Zite;
Then I came across a very neat solution – the Buffer. Buffer let you first, with a centralized dashboard, create a queue for each of your social networks. And then you can create posts to put into those queues.
Then those posts in the queue will be posted orderly to the designated social network automatically according to a sending schedule. For example in the following screen you will find that I have created four sending times for my Linkedin network.
These two features alone, have solved the first two issues above. The next problem to solve is how to share your posts from other apps. Buffer created Chrome Extension, Safari Bookmarklet (for your iPad and iPhone) and even a special secret email address such that you can send your post to the queues via email.
Lastly, Buffer even includes an analytic screen to let you see how your posts perform – e.g. number of click-thru and retweets etc.
All in all, it is a very good tool to manage your sharings. If you are serious about social media sharing, I suggest you to give Buffer a try and it is the best solution for now.
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 