How to Manage Your Social Media in Under an Hour a Week [Podcast]

[smart_track_player url="https://soundcloud.com/ticktockpodcast/1-how-to-manage-your-social-media-in-under-an-hour-a-week" social="true" social_twitter="true" social_facebook="true" social_linkedin="true" ]Ever wonder how successful brands get their act together on social media?In this episode, James and Sean review a social sharing tool called Buffer.They do a deep dive into the app and explain how they use it to schedule their social media posts, measure analytics, and curate great content.

Show Notes

Things we mentioned:

• Buffer - Social sharing tool that helps you schedule your updates ahead of time, giving you a... wait for it... Buffer! (link)

Social Links:

• Tick Tock Podcast- Facebook | Twitter
• Sean Blackburn- Twitter | LinkedIn
• James Carbary- Twitter | LinkedIn

[Tweet "How to Save Several Hours a Week on Social Media. @TickTockPodcast reviews @Buffer."]

Transcript:

James:All right, welcome back to the Tick Tock Podcast. You're listening to Episode One and today we are talking about Buffer, a social media sharing tool. Sean, what does Buffer say about itself?Sean:Basically Buffer says that it helps you share to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. I can say that it’s a social sharing app.James:I love stinking love Buffer. I've been using it probably for a couple of years now and it’s just the interface is really clean. The app is super easy to use. One particular function in Buffer that I really like is the feeds feature. Sean have you ever used that feature?Sean:I have, yeah. I'm a newer user to Buffer as far as newer consistent user. I'm convinced as well and feeds being one of those actually.James:Basically how the feeds work, if you are … so for us at Sweet Fish, we’re a content marketing agency. We can hook in to up to 15 different feeds from a variety of topics.Sean:Feeds being an RSS feed.James:An RSS feed. We can hook into Jay Bear's Blog. We can hook into Buffer’s blog. They have a great blog as well in addition to a really cool tool. We can hook in to the co-schedule blog. We can hook into all of these RSS feeds and then Buffer tells us every time one of those blogs has a new post. I can scroll down those feeds and right within that tab, either on the mobile app or the desktop app, I can say add to my queue and then I can add that post directly to my Facebook queue, my LinkedIn queue, my Twitter queue, whatever queue I'm wanting to add it to. That to me is just a really invaluable part of Buffer.Sean:Buffer is great and it’s a social sharing tool and by that I mean it helps you to be more consistent with what you're sharing on social media. It’s great for any entrepreneur, it’s a great for a business owner, even a marketer, even podcast hosts. It’s good for anybody who has a consistent message that they want to share on their social media channels consistently.Why I love it like you mentioned, the food section, it really helps you aggregate around a specific topic. To really save you the time that it takes to go out and search out all these blogs and all these different websites and all these different articles, Buffer helps you just add it straight to that process of hosting by just making in a couple of clicks which is awesome obviously.I really do love the functionality like you mentioned. The mobile app, I have an iPhone and mobile app for it fantastic. It automatically shortens every URL that you're posting so you're not losing any character space whenever you're posting to Twitter, doing cleaner posts in general when you're posting to something like Facebook. Having that shortened URL is great. The other part that I really like as well, each URL is shortened in a way that it tracks the tweets, tracks the re-tweets and a lot of different social measuring tools allows you to see your analytics basically of what you're posting that your audience is actually responding to so that you can post more of it.James:I can see for every post that’s gone out with Buffer. I can see how many people engaged with that, how many clicked on it. Really, really interesting to look back through a week’s worth of stuff and just like, “Oh man, whenever we talk about productivity and engagement skyrockets.” We’re getting 40, 50, 60 clicks on a Tweet.When we talk about content marketing, not so much or you should whatever. Really, really helpful to dial in what your audience wants to read from you. Another thing that I really like about it is the robustness of how you can schedule your social media updates to go out so you can literally pick a schedule for each day of the week. If I wanted to post at 9 AM, 2 PM and 10 PM on Mondays and then 7 AM, 3 PM and 11 PM on Tuesdays, so on and so on or if I want to have keep the same schedule during the week Monday through Friday but I want to vary my posting schedule on Saturday and Sunday, I can do that as well.They make it really easy to do that. In addition to the product just being really, really great, the pricing is also really affordable and it’s pretty straightforward too. I think you’ve got the pricing right in front of you. What’s the pricing for Buffer?Sean:Well you can get started with an individual three plan and you can connect one social profile for each account that you have. Basically with your Buffer account for free, you can hook up your Twitter account, your Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn and then as well they have a Pinterest option as well that then just came out with.You can do all that for free but you have some limited premium model and you have some limited access to a free account obviously. If you go up to $10 a month or you can pay yearly and get it for $102 per year, you get up to 10 social profiles for each channel. You can have 10 different Twitter accounts hooked up, that sort of thing. You can get 100 posts into your Buffer queue which means you could load up 100 different posts, have them ready to go and have a week, a month, however long. A hundred will last you and that all depends on like you said, how you set up your queues.Then with that you also get the RSS feed function where the feeds that are giving you constant suggestions basically as to what to post.James:Awesome, Sean. I love you Buffer, you love Buffer, we all love Buffer. It’s a really cool tool. Really interested to see what our listeners think about it. If you want to connect with Tick Tock on Twitter @Ticktockpodcast, let us know. Have you tried Buffer? Do you plan on trying Buffer? What did you love? What did you hate? We’d love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening to the show. Until next time.