Evan Carmichael walks through Buffer, a tool that schedules tweets at optimal times. He uses CrowdBooster to find when his audience is most active (2 pm, 3 pm, 11 am), sets those times in Buffer, and uses the Chrome extension with Alt + B to quickly queue articles. Buffer's free plan allows 10 scheduled tweets; paid plans run $10 to $100 and unlock more posts and multiple accounts.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. Today I want to talk about another one of my favorite tools that I use to run my business, and it's called Buffer, and I use it to manage my Twitter account. Now, when I first started using Twitter, I got a little frustrated in that I don't want to be on Twitter all day long and I wanted to be able to share the content that I wanted to tweet about over a period of time. So I didn't want to have 10 tweets go out all at once and kind of bombard all my followers and then have nothing for the next 24 hours. So a solution that I found for this was called Buffer, and I'll give you a quick tour about how it works and hopefully how you can use it for your business as well. So this is my favorite tools page, and I'm just going to go find Buffer. And we'll click on it to load it up. So this is Buffer, and what Buffer basically allows you to do is set times for when you want to send out your tweets. So I used another tool, a free tool called CrowdBooster, which maybe I'll talk about in a different video. But what that does is basically tell you what time people are looking at your tweets. So it helps you optimize when you send out your tweets. So you might be, you know, really good at working late at night and that's when you find all your best stuff, but maybe your readers are reading it mostly during the afternoon, so you can schedule it to go out at the times that work best for you. So according to the CrowdBooster analytics, the best times for me are 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 11 o'clock in the afternoon, and then 7, 8, and 9 o'clock in the morning. So what I've done with my buffer is set up all of my tweets to go out at those times. So you can see here that I have 5 tweets that are scheduled to come out And right now these are different articles that I want to highlight. So they're coming out at 2, 3, 11, 7, 8, and if I had another one it would be 9. And it just goes out automatically, it's synced with my Twitter account, and at those times it's gonna automatically go out to my audience. Now, the great way to use Buffer is if I find an article that I wanna promote, so here's an example of one that I wanted to tweet out. It's called Death by Sitting. I use a stand-up desk, something I've talked about before. So I like reading about stuff that supports my cause here about standing up. So there's an article that talks about sitting down and how it can really harm you. So I have a button up here that's in my Chrome called Buffer for Chrome, and it's an extension. And if I click on it, it'll load up the buffer. And what this does is pull the title of the article and it shortens the link. And if I add it to my buffer, it'll automatically go and be put in for the rest of my schedule. I can change the text to whatever I want, and I can also post it right now if I want to go out immediately instead of waiting for it to go out at a different time. So for me, I can either use this button here, or there's a shortcut that I recently learned. If you type Alt+B, the same thing happens. So if you don't want to put the browser in, you can just do Alt+B and the same thing loads up. So I can either just use the article title here Or another thing I could do is if I really like a sentence in the article, I could highlight the sentence here and click buffer. And what it does here is use that sentence as my tweet. So this could be my tweet that goes out, tells me I have 5 characters left to be able to use. Or I can also just type whatever message I want. So I could put in, you know, "Still happy with my stand-up desk." for example. And I can click Add to Buffer, and you can see now that if I refresh my dashboard, I have 6 tweets, and that one's scheduled to come out at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning. So I really like that. It's an easy way to add to my Twitter. I have a constant stream of things going out to my Twitter account at optimal times, and I'm not having to worry about always being online at those times of post to myself. Another cool thing you can do, so this is if you have articles that you want to send out, you can also retweet articles. So if I load up, I'm loading up Maria's account here, who works with me, and if I wanted to retweet something that she posted, for example, I could click on one of her articles here. So she posted Article of the Day, Setting Goals to Achieve. Right here there's a little buffer button that I can click on that and retweet it from here. Or I can actually click on the tweet itself and you'll see a little buffer icon here as well. I click on that buffer and the same thing happens. So it says retweet, the account, again I can enter in my own message if I want, and whenever I'm ready, add the buffer. And so now that's been added, and if I refresh here, you'll see that that's gonna be set at 2 o'clock the next day. So I really find this a useful system, helps me manage my Twitter accounts. Way more effective than if I was doing it manually. So how to update those settings, that's kind of how to add articles to Buffer. If I want to update the times that it goes out, I can click on my settings and I can pick the times that I want it to go out. So I've set it up for 7, 8, 9, 2, 3, and 11. Those were the times again that were the highest impact for me, but you can add a new time, you can modify these times, whatever you want to do basically. You can update your own time zone, you can add team members if you want. Right now I manage my own account, but if you wanted to add somebody else, you can You can use your own shortener if you want different analytics on the links that go out. And again, you have an overview here. So I have 7 tweets currently in my buffer, and I've sent almost 500 from my buffer, so I like to use my buffer. Then if I continue on, I can look at analytics as an example. So if I go back to my buffer, it doesn't only show you all the ones that are pending, you can click on analytics, and what it'll show you is how many times each one has been viewed, retweeted, clicked on if there's a link. So it gives you detailed analytics for all the tweets that you send out, but that has to be through the Buffer system. And for the account, this is free. So what it does is it gives you 10 free tweets to go out. So as soon as you use up those 10, that's kind of your maximum. If you find you're tweeting very often you can either increase the pace at when they go out. So I'm only doing, you know, 6 a day. You could boost that up if you wanted to, or you can also upgrade your account. So right now I'm just on the free account because I find that that's enough for me, but you can click on your plan here, upgrade, and you can see that for $10 or $100, there's different options. So the main benefits of upgrading, if you wanted to, were to be able to post more, so 50 posts versus 10 posts, and to add more accounts. So here you can only have one Twitter account, where you can have multiple on the other ones if you want. But I use the free version. I find that it's enough for me, and hopefully you guys can start testing it out and using it and improving your Twitter efficiency and effectiveness as well. So I hope you guys liked it, liked this video, found it useful. If you did, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. If you want to leave a comment below, your comments are what really drive all the new videos that I create. So I really appreciate them, I pay attention to them, and I try to respond. So please leave a comment below, please give it a thumbs up, and if you have any questions as well, let me know and I'll create new videos. So hope to see you soon on the next episode.
