Using Buffer to Extend Your Twitter Presence

If you’re like most busy people (and like me) you probably grab small slices of time to engage in your social media accounts.

As a result, you may find yourself posting three or four tweets in relatively rapid succession, which can have two negative effects:

  1. People who happen to check Twitter around that time might unfollow you because they think you’re spamming, or
  2. Others who miss your five-minute outburst won’t see your post at all.

Buffer provides an easy, elegant solution to both potential problems.

Of course you can use Tweetdeck to schedule some of your tweets into the future, but with each tweet you need to decide the day and time you want it to be published, which is an extra step.

The nice thing about Buffer is that you can set a schedule of publishing slots once, and then when you add a new tweet it just goes into the queue.

Here’s the schedule I set up:

When I run across a post I’d like to tweet, I can just add to my queue, and it will be published in the next available slot. Any spontaneous tweets I post outside of Buffer will fill in gaps among the 2-4 regularly scheduled ones.

With the free Basic account you can have up to 10 posts in the queue. For most people that’s probably enough. I upgraded to Pro to increase the limit to 100.

Buffer works with other platforms besides Twitter

In conjunction with a curated source of content like our Mayo Clinic Champions newsfeed or the one we have on the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, Buffer can make it easy to have a solid presence on Twitter in just a few minutes a week.