Am I Buffered?

Let me assume that you are already familiar with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc and have a few active social media accounts. (If not I'll try and cover these in later posts.) The question I have is how do you manage all these networks? Not only may you have your own personal accounts, if you are the guy or gal that everyone is looking to sort out your church, charity or business online social presence you've maybe got one or two Facebook pages, a LinkedIn business presence, a Google+ page and possibly (hopefully) a Twitter account specific to that church, charity or business.

Wow! It all soon adds up, but the fact is, and I can't say this strongly enough, particularly if you are part of a church set-up, you need to have a presence in these virtual places. Not only do you need to be there, you need to be seen to be active: posting, asking questions, replying, promoting, but in the midst of all this being human.

At present, including my own personal accounts, I manage 10 different social media accounts (and I'm not even including Pinterest or Instagram) and the tool I've found best to help me handle all this is Buffer. There are other tools out there that do a similar thing like Hootsuite for example, but for ease of use and its clean, fussy free, interface I opted for Buffer.

So what is it and what does it do?

Simply put Buffer enables you to do exactly what it's called - buffer your posts so they get posted at spread-out intervals so as to do two things: Firstly it stops you clogging up other folks social media feeds and walls with a sudden influx of your thoughts, quotes and links that you felt so desperately to post all at once! Secondly, it also enables you to schedule when your amazing revelations will get posted by letting you specify the date and time. This is a relatively recent feature which explains why it's called Buffer and not the possibly less catchy title of - 'Schedule Stuff More Specifically To The Time And Date You Require' or 'ScHedule In Time' (something dodgy about this last acronym anyway).

Tools like Buffer are invaluable in helping us connect and stay active online. If you're asking yourself why does this matter? Well the answer is that 1 in 4 people AROUND THE WORLD use social media. In the next five years social media use is expected to grow to over 2.2 billion users. The church in particular needs to be online, needs to be connecting, needs to be ahead of the game, and any resources you can get hold of to help you connect effectively you need to grab with both hands!

Buffer is free to use with it's basic package and this gets you three linked accounts (so maybe Twitter, Facebook - personal or page and LinkedIn). Or, if you're like me and a bit overwhelmed, you may find the $10 p/m (around £6 p/m) is a worthwhile cost. There's no contract and you can cancel this anytime. They call it the 'Awesome plan' and it allows you to add up to 12 social profiles (any combination of Twitter, Facebook, Linked In etc), as well as varied schedules per day and unlimited posts in your 'buffer'.

Buffer has recently introduced suggested posts (links, quotes etc) for you to peruse while you are accessing your account in a browser (doesn't look like the app supports this feature at this time). You have the option to reject or add the suggestions to your accounts. This is a nice touch as you get to read interesting new stuff and it keeps your buffer topped up and in the process you keep your online presence active and fresh.

Like I wrote earlier there are other tools similar to Buffer out there and you may want to play around with these too. Hootsuite for example gives you a lot more connected accounts before you have to pay, but personally I just found it a bit busy, and a bit more 'complicated' than it need be, but let me stress this is a personal preference, you may very well love it.

As with every player in the online world there are dangers of passwords and usernames escaping into the wild and Buffer did have an 'accident' of this nature last year. Now that may sound worrying, but because of this they have certainly tightened up security and have introduced an optional 2-step verification system. This means that if anyone manages to obtain your username and password and they log-in from a new device, they won't get access to your account as they'll need to input a unique identification code. This will have been sent to your mobile phone via text message that, hopefully, only you have access to. With pretty much everyone owning and carrying a mobile phone with them everywhere this is a pretty good security set-up. In fact I would recommend that you investigate all your online accounts and see if they support 2-step verification in some form and get it activated ... today, don't wait, do it now!

I hope this post is helpful and if you have any further questions I'd love to try and answer them. Are there any other tools / services like this I should be aware of? Have you tried either Hootsuite or Buffer? Let me know what you think.