“Be Awesome on Twitter” say the folks at Buffer. Buffer helps you be awesome on Twitter by giving you a dead simple way to collect the things you want to tweet about and then share them with your followers throughout the day.
I’ve been using buffer (bufferapp.com) for just over a week now and I love it. I typically catch up on my reading early in the morning. Before buffer, if I found things I wanted to share I had two choices; 1) tweet them immediately or 2) cut and paste a link into a tool like Hootsuite and then schedule it to go out. While this doesn’t seem like a lot of work, it really interrupts the flow of reading.
With buffer, when I find something I want to share via Twitter, I simply click on a toolbar icon on my browser, or select the “Send to Buffer” feature in Google Reader. When I do, I get a dialog box like the one below:
From here, I can edit the description, add hashtags, etc. When I choose “Add to Buffer”, it goes into my queue where it will be posted on at on of the preset times in my schedule. Here is a screen shot of the dialog box that allows you to set your buffering pattern:
You can even have a different pattern for different days (i.e. weekend vs weekday) by using the “New Buffering pattern” button.
Another feature I really like is the ability to rearrange the items in your buffer using a simple drag and drop interface. Because I organize my Google Reader feeds by topic, I may have several tweets in a row in my buffer about a similar topic. Using the drag and drop feature, I can spread these out throughout the day.
In addition to using Buffer in your browser and Google Reader, you can even add items to your buffer via email. It looks like the folks at Buffer are also working on adding the ability to update Facebook as well.
Use this link to sign up for Buffer and we will both get some extra space in our account.
We hear a lot about using social media for listening, starting, and participating in conversations, but how do we actually get a conversation started?
