A #Social Experiment: What Can @Buffer Do For You?

Have you ever struggled to come up with new content? To post status updates? To just share in general?

I know that I have, yes me the twenty-something, beard flaunting, bow tie wearing, fun loving guy…this experiment is as much as to try and change personal habits as much as it is to document my experiences with Buffer.

What is this Experiment?

Use Buffer to share using LinkedIn and Twitter. These can and will include: ideas, experiences, thoughts, articles, pictures, and anything else that I come across.

Document my experiences, the good, bad, questions, and ideas. Both as a record for me as well as a base/guide for others.

Dave, why are you doing this?

I am the type of photographer to take 10,000 pictures in a weekend and post 2 shameless Instagram plug and quite frankly I want to get better at sharing more of my ideas. In order to do this, I need something to help simplify the process and keep me honest, so I decided to  see if Buffer can fill this void.

After checking out what Buffer can do the concept is relatively straight forward: make it easier to share across platforms and at the times that will get the most views. The data guy in me loves this!

Hoping to see if this is something that I would use as a paid version/enterprise at a later date.

Backstory:

Late one night I was surfing hacker news and came across this story about a completely dispersed company. They had shut down their San Francisco office and completely gone to the four winds, like travel across Asia while working dispersed here. As I traveled from one post to the next a couple things dawned on me one: first these people all seem really cool, and second what product are they working on to facilitate this? A couple of clicks later, I found Buffer’s service, decided to give it a try, and document the adventure.

First Impressions:

At first glance Buffer seems to be much more than just a service/app. As a whole, the company is very refreshing; they are very open and honest about what they are trying all the way down to salaries and financial breakdowns. They offer blog posts for Social (Media), Open (Transparency), and Overflow (Engineering), as well as Happiness (coming soon). I will Buffer some of my favorite posts throughout my experiment.

The sign-up was very simple.

It was easy to link accounts, while I wish I could have linked all my accounts from the same screen, I understand why they want to get the first shares in order to create customer habits. It also seemed like I had to sign up with my LinkedIn account and then re-sign up again.

 I loved the Optimization Tool's  graph that showed traffic across the social networking sites at different times of the day. This helps schedule up to sixteen posts per account per day. Now sixteen is a lot for most mere mortals, so I decided to start with just one. 

I did notice that there was no way to link an Instagram account. Although I have read that the Instagram API does not allow photo uploads and accounts have been banned from uploading from other sources.

The mobile via web was very clunky: the dashboard was not optimized for mobile and while it looks great on my computer, I do most of my posting via my phone.

So I downloaded the app, saw that there were more than 500,000 downloads on Android and decided to give that a go. My initial impression of the app is I like it more than the mobile site, but there is still some work to do. The link shortening works great on the web, but I have yet to be able to shorten a link on either the app or the mobile site, and posting pictures had to be done through the Buffer app, I could not share it from my Google Photos.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Buffer has a couple of additional services/features Pablo for pictures (which has been used for the main picture) and Respondly, which is coming soon, but I am not sure when it will be available. I look forward to giving these separate reviews when they become available and if they are added to the app or had have additional apps. 

As I have just gone down the metaphorical rabbit whole in this experiment, I leave anyone that has somehow managed to make it this far, here. If you have any questions, comments, or would like to specifically more about something in the next update please let me know. 

Until then, I leave you to check out the updates and posts that Buffer will help me share.

Note: I have been using Buffer for almost 2 weeks and will post an update soon on my initial experiences.