What Is Buffer?

After writing about how to keep your social media updated while you’re busy doing other stuff, we found out about Buffer and thought we should share it with you because it’s so much better for keeping your Twitter and Facebook updated!

Bufferapp.com allows you to create an autotweeting queue – ideal if you’ve got lots of links to share but don’t want to overwhelm your followers with them all at once, or if you want to tweet out old posts automatically.

You can get different plugins for your browser and various other sites you might use (see a list of apps, extensions and extras over on the Buffer site) to make adding new items to your queue even easier – you can even schedule retweets into your queue!

So, after signing in with Twitter, here’s what the dashboard looks like:

Click the box next to the Buffer logo that says “What do you want to share?”. If you want the status to go out on a specific social media account, click it so it is highlighted (you’ll know it’s highlighted because it won’t look faded)

Fill in your status update! You can choose whether to shorten URL’s with the Buffer service, with bit.ly or not at all.

Click “Buffer” and the following will appear:

Hooray! You’ve scheduled your first update! You can change when the updates go out by clicking “Change schedule” – the following screen will appear

This is where you can set the times that your posts will go out – if you know most of your followers are most active in the evening, you might want to set more tweets to go out then to get the best chance of being viewed.

We also tested out the iPhone app – as you can see, it already has our queue ready, and we can easily create new tweets/updates. The Buffer app ties quite neatly in with other apps and allows you to update with links in Safari – perfect if you’re out and about but still want to queue things up! (Maybe update your queue while you’re on the bus?)

Do you use a service like Buffer to keep your Twitter tweeting while you’re busy?