If you use Twitter a lot, sometimes it seems like your stream is feast or famine. During the day you tweet about what is happening, have conversations on various topics or report on your surroundings. Yet, during the evenings or weekends, you hardly tweet at all. Smart professionals, brands and media organizations schedule tweets throughout the day to maintain the façade of an “always on” Internet presence.
A new application has been launched by a couple of young men in England that tries to make scheduling tweets as painless as possible. Buffer App is a clean and simple freemium tool that allows users to load tweets into the “buffer” and have them sent out at pre-scheduled times, determined by the app.
Sponsor
It is not the most groundbreaking idea on the block or the only tweet-scheduling tool out there, but it certainly is interesting. Essentially, you pick tweets and tell Buffer to schedule them. The service will automatically figure out what time zone you are in and create a schedule. Time zone works in theory, but it thought I was on U.S. Central Time, when I am in the Eastern Time Zone. You can change it manually in the settings, though.
Power Twitter users tend to use services like TweetDeck and HootSuit, both of which allow for manual tweet scheduling. There are also tweet scheduling services from Twuffer, Later Bro, Twaitter, Future Tweets and Tweetsqueue.
As a bootstrapped operation, Buffer is freemium based on number of tweets you load into the buffer. Up to 10 tweets is free, 50 tweets is $5 a month (with three Twitter accounts and two team members per account) and unlimited is $30 a month (nine accounts, four members per account). You might ask why anyone would need an Buffer plan that supports multiple Twitter accounts but the option may be good for media organizations that have automated accounts and community engagement accounts and topic-based accounts (sports, business etc.).
What is nice about Buffer is that the service is neatly organized and intuitive. There is not a lot of clutter on the page and it can be used outside of the Buffer website. It offers extensions for Chrome and Safari as well as a bookmarklet.
Buffer App is the product of 20-year-old Leo Widrich and coding founder 24-year-old Joel Gascoigne of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Widrich is currently enrolled at Warwick Business School there and Gascoigne is a recent graduate who has also started a service called MyOnePage. They have been working on Buffer for about five months and have completely bootstrapped the operation on their own, according to Widrich. After his upcoming exams, Widrich plans on taking time off to work on Buffer and said the team may be moving to Palo Alto, Calif., this summer.
What is Buffer? from Joel Gascoigne on Vimeo.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.