The 10th installment of  our “Preach what we Practice” series where we’ll give fellow small business owners a back-stage pass to how we do business. This week we’re covering Buffer and HootSuite.

– Seth –


Okay, so in my last post I stressed a the importance of not being a robot when implementing your social media marketing strategy.  Today, I’m going to introduce you to a couple robots that will help you behave like a human even when you’re off the clock.  

Think that sounds like a contradiction?  Don’t tell your pappy how to court the electorate.

No kidding, if you’re taking the “behave like a human” maxim seriously, you’re going to find these robots extremely handy.  Let’s start by taking a look at the extremely user friendly Buffer.


Buffer

That button alone is pretty slick, but the in browser window that pops up allowing you to compose a post for your connected networks is even slicker:

buffercompose

If your post is too long for Twitter, simply deselect the twitter option, click buffer, and then repeat to compose a truncated post for twitter alone.  Buffer will automatically populate your post with the post title and meta description on the website, so make sure you edit those with a bit of your own commentary to humanize/personalize the post.

Try it out at BufferApp.com


Hootsuite

Hootsuite tab optimized to monitor Twitter, G+, and Facebook for key terms
Hootsuite tab optimized to monitor Twitter, G+, and Facebook for key terms

While Buffer gets a lot of good things done while I sleep  (or lunch, or go camping, or whatever), Hootsuite’s ability to display your home feeds from each network all on the same page – in addition to better interactivity with each network – makes HootSuite pretty darn indispensable.  Give it a spin at HootSuite.com

So much for the introductions.  There’s enough to these two tools that I couldn’t fit a proper “how to” guide in five blog posts, so the best thing to do is to try ’em out (after a Levar Style Send-off of course).

2 Responses

  1. Great, in-depth article Seth! There are definitely some use cases for both tools.
    Thanks for sharing and the kind words.
    -Connor from HootSuite

    1. Thanks for the read, Connor! You and I both know this article could go a lot deeper of course. Maybe in a future post.