What I Learned using Buffer for my own Social Media Marketing Strategy

If you are one of my followers at Twitter (@marcosluis2186), you should note that I’m a Buffer fan. This incredible tool and its ecosystem has allowed me to grow my personal brand in every major Social Media platform using its clean UI and its powerful analytics dashboard.

I’ve been using Buffer for a while since I returned from my previous work in Venezuela, where I was a HootSuite Ambassador for LATAM. Don’t make wrong: HootSuite is a great Social Media Management platform, but it’s not made for my country, for the characteristics of Internet connections here, and HootSuite is based in Adobe Flex and ActionScript, which is very heavy in terms of network data use and speed here; instead Buffer which has a clean and simple dashboard with a small fingerprint using HTML5 and CSS 3 mainly, united to they use Amazon CloudFront like its CDN to distribute its static files around the world, and it’s works great. But these are not the unique features why I use Buffer everyday now; there is more benefits if you get in this boat. Keep reading.

Customer support is an inherent thing for every member of the Buffer’s team

They understand that Customer Loyalty is important to grow a business; and Joel and Leo have encouraged to every member of their team to work in customer support using the same @Buffer account at Twitter, where you will obtain almost a Near Real-Time answer.

Buffer´s button and Buffer extensions for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are key growth drivers

The team has been selecting key features for the future of Buffer, and two of the critical key growth engines for them are precisely the Buffer Share button and Buffer´s extensions for browsers.

The first one allows to create a quick widget in your site to share the link using Buffer; and the second one is the most used feature by myself: it give you the chance to share a link with Buffer without to let the site.

If you read some of the case studies from Buffer’s clients (like Business Insider and Fortune), you will see that this is the favorite feature of several of them:

Buffer’s Analytics Dashboard is the Golden Gem

When you begin to use the platform, you won’t see the importance of Analytics; but after your first week posting consistenly using Buffer, you will see why this is the Golden Gem of the platform.

In the dashboard, you can see which are your Top Posts in the week, what headlines or hashtags are performing better than others; how many clicks, shares, comments and likes you obtained from certain posts and how many users you reach.

This last part is important because this could allow you to combine for example several relevant Twitter accounts in a Tweet and to see the reaction of it. In my case, in one of the my last posts about the benefits of a partnership between among Red Hat, Docker and Databricks; my reach was very high, because I combined these three Twitter accounts which has a lot of followers, and create an engaging image for it:

I think Buffer’s Analytics is the main reason why the user growth rate of the platform has exploted.

Buffer by Email

You should be thinking why this is one of my favorite features of the platform, and the answer is simple: I’m in Cuba, and the Internet connection is limited in so many ways that you can’t imagine; so Buffer by Email allows me to be consistent with my posting in major Social Media networks using precisely my email account. This is why I love Buffer and Wordpress, because both platform allow me to post from my email:

The other Golden Gem: Buffer’s blog

Buffer’s blog is compiting with my blog for the first place to visit in Internet every morning. The quality of every article (Kevan and Courtney are doing an amazing work here).

The Social Media guides, Productivity articles and every post is full of great insights, so I always keep coming every morning to see how I could improve my own personal brand using the tips of Kevan or Courtney. I have several favorite posts, but I will let you some of them you will enjoy inmediately:

• The Big List of IFTTT Recipes for Social Media
• The Best Content Marketing Tools to Help You Work Smarter, Not Harder
• How We Manage a Blog with 700000 readers per month
• The Mega Guide to Ideal Image Sizes for Your Social Media Posts: Guidelines for All 6 Major Social Networks

Bonus tips: If your company is in massive growth mode, and you are using Amazon Web Services for your services; you must read Overflow blog, the technical blog of the company where Joel, Sunil and more members of the technical staff write about how Buffer manages its services delighting to every customer; or if you are defining the Culture Code of your company or you want to make a change on it, check out Buffer’s Open Culture blog; which is full of amazing posts about this topic.

Conclusions

It doesn’t matter if you are an user or a company, you will see inmediately the benefits to use Buffer for your Social Media efforts !!! So my friends, don’t wait a second and schedule your first post in the platform.