Buffer lets you schedule your Tweets

Who are you? Hi, I'm Leo, Leo Wittrich. I'm co founder of Buffer.

Yeah. And we're here at Angel Pad, seeing a bunch of cool companies. So what does Buffer do? Sure.

So Buffer, in very short, is it allows you to queue up tweets for them to be posted at a better time. So sometimes people are reading news late at night or early in the morning and tweeting out the stuff then always puts it to waste. No one sees it. So by buffering it from anywhere you are, it just allows you to tweet out the stuff at a better time, well spaced out over the day, so that more people, you get more exposure for your tweets.

So we're going to see even more tweets @900times. We all know if you've done analysis of when the most likely chance is that there's going be an audience to listen to you, it's probably 9am on a Tuesday morning. Right. Which is why there's so many tweets. My tweet stream really speeds up right about then. And Guy Kawasaki even takes advantage of this, right. He found that he has a team that tweets for him, and he found that you should repeat your tweet, like four times over the next 24 hours because there's a new audience each time that will see it. Can you do that kind of repetition as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So, fortunately, Guy is close to us and he's pushing us a lot, lot to introduce that rotation feature. We don't have it yet, but we are thinking very seriously about it because.

That makes a lot of sense. It pisses a lot of people off because they see the same tweet twice. But to tell you the truth, on my screen, it just streams down. I see a new tweet every half a second. And so the chances that I'm going to see your really important tweet are going down and getting lower and lower and lower. Now, on Google, it's a different game because there's engagement there and things stick around longer because there's fewer people. But it's speeding up, too. I'm seeing a new post over there every 15 seconds or so, which is still pretty slow compared to Twitter, but it's speeding up. Right. And as that system gets used by more and more people and brands come into it, it'll speed up even more.

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

So you're totally about Twitter today.

Yeah. So at the moment we have Twitter. We launched a Facebook version, a soft version, very recently. You can get onto the beta, if you want right now, bufferapp.com Facebook and the next steps will be LinkedIn and Google. Just because it makes a lot of sense to kind of work in chunks. A lot of people can't be online all the day. They kind of do their reading at one time, they browse their Flipboard or whatever for half an hour and then they just buffer the stuff they find, which is cool. It saves them a ton of time.

Because if I'm reading in Flipboard, how do I buffer it?

Yeah. So at the moment we have an email function which makes it very easy send via email into your buffer. But we're working with Flipboard and with a lot of apps to get the buffering functionality inside their app because it helps them a lot to increase the retention with their app. Right. So you're not going to get distracted by your Twitter stream and leave Flipboard or the other app. Right. You just hit buffer. I can continue reading, continue browsing.

Here's something that I need because of NDAs. Sure. So like I just saw a Toshiba laptop this morning and it's NDA until Thursday at 9am in other words, I can't release any information about it. I can't put photos up, I can't put pictures up, I can't tweet about it, I can't put it on Google. But I want that all to happen automatically. Right. At 9am Is there any way to do that?

Absolutely. So we have something, a very cool feature which exactly would help you with that. It's called buffering pattern. And so you could have a separate pattern for your tweets going out, which you put into a separate buffer. Right. So you say this buffer should start tweeting only in a week's time. Right. But you can queue it up right now, both pictures and all the photos. Right. And then once the day arrives, well spaced out every now, every day, every two hours, you will drip feed those great tweets about now, that does it for the tweet.

But you have to go back and look at the photo because I'm not allowed to put that up on. I'm not allowed to make it public. So I can upload it to Flickr or somewhere else.

That's true.

In a private area.

That's true.

So I need your system to go and mark that photo from public or from private to public. And same thing with my YouTube video. I can upload a YouTube video, but I gotta keep it private until 9am Pacific time.

Got it. But if you buffer it with the link and it just turns. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, I need to go over to YouTube and turn it first.

Yeah, that's true.

Now, if I could automate all three of those things, that would be really cool.

That's a great suggestion, actually. Yeah, I like that a lot because. Yeah, it could just kind of be a lot more intelligent for you then.

Yeah. And then that gets beyond just trying to gain the social grasp, you know? In other words, put out stuff when people are there that actually is useful. And I would pay for that, by the way. It's really a pain in the ass. Some of these embargoes end right at five in the morning. I have to wake up because I don't have a good automated system to do that. So I have to wake up and mark the video public. Anyways, that's getting you off topic of what you're doing right now. How do you guys get paid and what's your business going to be? Sure.

So we have a very traditional freemium model.

So.

So there's a very decent free plan. So we kind of take the Evernote approach, right? We have a very decent free plan, which we know that 98% of our users will always be free. And we are happy to have them as free users because they help us spread the word. And if you want to use multiple Twitter accounts or multiple team members or you need more space in your buffer to store more tweets, then you get the pro or the premium version, which is either $10 a month or $30 a month.

Do you have any data on how many tweets per hour somebody can do without pissing off their followers? And do you warn people, hey, you're tweeting too much today. You're gonna piss everybody off?

Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, we have data on that. We have just put actually some actual research out. And so we found that in general, buffered users increase clicks on their links by 200%, they double their retweets, and they gain 100 followers within three weeks. And Cloud score rises as well, depending on how important that is to you. But coming back to the question, the data we found is that on average, you shouldn't tweet more than one to four times an hour. As soon as you hit more than four times an hour, your click through rate nearly drops to exactly zero, no matter who you are. So one tweet per hour gives you the highest click through rate, but two tweets per per hour might be even better because you don't have the click through rate of one tweet. But, you know, combining them. If you have 10 clicks on the one tweet per hour, but six if you post two, you still have 12. Right. So I think one to two tweets would be very optimal. One to two tweets per hour.

Yeah. There is a limit, by the way. And you'll hit this limit. If you're covering a news story and you're just flooding tweets with info about the news story. I think it's like 200 a day or 250 per day. Do you warn people that you're hitting that limit as well?

Yeah. So we just introduced a few of these things because these were problems we hadn't anticipated before. And we had, like, people who would set up. You can also manually set up daily tweeting times in your buffer, and people would have set up like 100 daily tweeting times. Right. And they would literally every few minutes, they would, you know, throw stuff to Twitter. And then Twitter told them, you can't tweet that often. Right. So they would stall their buffer. Right. But now we've put these systems into place telling people, hang on, stop, please post less. Your API limit is over the API limit for Twitter. So that's a really good point. Yeah.

Interesting. There are all these weird things you have to learn.

Yeah, yeah.

I just know. I think Andy Carvin or somebody like that who works at NPR hit that limit because he was covering, I think, the Egypt riots. Or if there's an earthquake, for instance, and you're retweeting too many times about an earthquake. We hit that in the Japanese earthquake. Right. If you are retweeting too much information too quickly, Twitter turns you off and says, hey, you're tweeting too much.

That's true.

So you have to sort of remember 200 per day or something like that. You have to be a little bit cautious about hitting the limits.

200 is quite accurate.

Yeah.

Cool.

Anything else we need to know? Actually, can you show me just the ui?

Yeah, sure. I can show you the product. So for us, it's really important that simplicity and optimal timing and sharing also comes with making it easy for you to share wherever you are. So we have this as a buffer dashboard, and you can put in tweets in here. We have suggest me tweet feature just to get you started. There's quotes in there. And then these are the tweets for today, which will go out for my buffer. And I can edit them here. I can rearrange them so you set.

Those times on the left.

Yeah. So the times can be set in your settings.

Does it tell you sort of when you should tweet? You know, does it tell you that on your history the best times to tweet are 9:04am and 1:02pm does it tell you that?

Yeah. So at the moment we have a general algorithm. So when you first sign up, you have default time set for you, which are based on Twitter peak Twitter times, when your tweets are most likely going to be read, just like you say. But we want to personalize that a lot more in the future. So it's saying that Robert Scoble's Twitter account, he has this type of following, therefore he should tweet at these times based on our findings when they online. That's what we're working on.

Now the other thing is this is a worldwide thing, Right. So while we're awake here in America, China's sleeping, Right. Or somebody's sleeping. I'm not sure if it's Kui China, but somebody in the world is sleeping. And so, you know, if you want to actually reach the Chinese market, right now might not be the best time to tweet. Right. It might be better to tweet late at night or something like that. Does it show you that like globally, if you want to reach Americans, tweet now. If you want to reach Chinese people, tweet now. If you want to reach Indian, you know, the Indian market, tweet now, that kind of thing. Yeah.

So actually at the moment we just give you the free opportunity to add these times yourself. You know, you kind of. These are the daily tweeting times.

You just have to think about it and then say, okay, I'm going to write a tweet for the Chinese market.

Yeah. So you can add more times in here.

You should put a little world clock on it. What time? Absolutely.

That's a brilliant idea. That's amazing. Yeah, just a clock on here and you will know. Oh yeah, I have a lot of followers from there.

You can actually do a Google lookup. By the way, a little trick with Google is if you ask Google what time is it in Moscow, it'll tell you, oh yeah, maybe Google.

But that's brilliant. So we can either do that, so give the user more control or just call it. We analyze it for you and you tell us what we want should take into account. Right. So this is what we are working on now, building a smart algorithm. But we've seen the basic one we have in place Already increases clicks tremendously.

Most of the market is still American. A good chunk of it's 50%. I don't know what the latest stats on Twitter are, but a good chunk of the American is a market is America. And that's usually who I want to reach speakers, English speakers. And, you know, that'll hit, you know, the tail end of England and Europe and the early window of Japan and China.

So, you know, it kind of makes makes sense.

Yeah. And then we're all up late, and they're all up late. So you can certainly see the traffic. The stream goes way slower, let's say at 3 in the morning, California time than it does at 9am Absolutely. Time. It really speeds up.

Yeah, that's what we found as well. Yeah, absolutely.

Cool. Where do I learn more?

Just a few things which I think could be very interesting is we have like here we have like a buffer button for your browser. And so you're reading anything. Right. And you just, you can hit the buff.

Oh, you're on my blog.

Okay. So for example, I'm reading the latest blog. Sorry, the Internet might be a little.

Yeah, that's right. So you have the bookmarklet.

So we have browser extensions and we have the bookmarklet. And I just wanted to show that we have like a twitter.com integration as well. So why the browser extension?

Oh, there's a buffer.

Yeah. So I find that cool. So I just go here and it brings up the buffer box and does an old school retweet of Scoville's tweet. Right. And I can tweet that now or add it to my buffer.

Now, can you schedule a new style retweet or just old style retweets at the moment?

It's all right. You don't like old Sky. You hate old. Should have not demoed that feature. But yes, you're right. We're working on doing the old style at the moment. Yeah, you definitely want. It's absolutely like you say, you need to know that the new style as well.

Very cool.

So we also show you, we have an analytics dashboard inside your buffer telling you all the. How many clicks you've gotten on your tweets, how many people have liked something. Let me just show you this here. It automatically like a tweet button and takes the title of the page and the shortened URL. And you can just edit your buffer.

That's cool. So you can go around, surf and find a bunch of things you want to share with your audience, put them in the buffer. And then spread them out over the day and they'll tweet every 20 minutes.

Or something like that. Exactly. So you spend like half an hour in the morning or even 10 minutes. Just find the cool stuff even on twitter.com and retweet Buffer or on sites. And then we show you all the analytics, how many retweets you've gotten, how many clicks you've gotten, how much reach and whose retweeting all in the dashboard.

Very cool. Well, thank you so much. Where do I learn more about it?

Yeah, just go to bufferapp.com bufferapp.com and.

You'Re on Twitter as well?

Yeah, I'm on Twitter. It's either Uffrapp or Eowid. That's my personal Twitter account. And if you have any questions, you can always email me leouffufferapp.com I'll be happy to answer any questions.

Very cool. Thank you so much.

Awesome. Thanks a lot. Robert.

Sam.