Monday, August 6, 2018

Changing My Social Media Strategy

Starting today, I've made some changes in my social media strategy.

Effective immediately, I've deleted my Buffer account. I'd started out on the free Buffer plan and found the interface useful. I liked the idea of having a queue where I could arrange my scheduled posts in a certain order at consistent times. So I took the next step and went to their Pro plan.

The Pro plan offered a couple of things that looked attractive. First, the ability to schedule up to 100 posts a day rather than 10 (although I never intended to do more than 20). Second, the analytics. I liked the idea of being able to see, without having to log on to Twitter, what impacts my tweets were having. After a while, I also discovered the content buffer, which offered something similar to what I've been getting from Feedly. (I'm still using their entry-level offering, and will probably continue to do so.) Although there were occasional failures to post, on the whole I thought that Buffer was much more reliable than Hootsuite.

So why did I leave? The short answer is that at the moment I have more time than money. One thing that's hurt all of these services with respect to Twitter is that Twitter now does not allow multiple posts. Looking at my Twitter followers through Followerwonk has revealed that the plurality of my followers are located on the east and west coasts of the U. S. A lot of them are on at the noon hour Eastern Time and at the noon hour Pacific Time.

One of the things scheduling used to allow was to post duplicate tweets at different times of the day. so I would get impressions from West Coast followers who might not otherwise see tweets the East Coast folks would see (unless they hunted for it). Under Twitter's new rules that's now impossible without changing the tweet so it isn't identical. (Of course, that defeats the time-saving purpose of being able to click a repost button that schedules the same tweet for a later time.)

The other problem was a flaw in the analytics. I would post an article, then look back at it and find it had received 30-40 clicks. Stunned, I would find my Twitter analytics and find that it had been clicked once, or not at all. It finally dawned on me that it was aggregating clicks based on the shortened URL across all users' tweets, not just mine. If I wanted to see the reactions my own tweets of the article generated, I ended up having to go back to Twitter anyway. That's something that Buffer may be able to easily fix, and some point they may do so. In the end, I felt that I was spending as much time on the "automated" process than just scheduling tweets in TweetDeck. And Twitter makes up the vast majority of my social media effort.

Don't misunderstand. I like Buffer. I like the interface. It just didn't work out for me. It could be that those who have more money and less time would find their team management and sharing capabilities very valuable (I am literally a one-man band, so I did not try out those capabilities myself.) I suspect the folks at Buffer will continue to improve their offerings, and I wish them well.

So, for me it's back to TweetDeck and live posting on Google Plus, at least for now.

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