3 Ways to Get Even More From Your Buffer App
It is no secret, I'm a huge fan of the service Buffer. I tweet about it constantly and I use it for most of the content I share through twitter.
If you aren't familiar with Buffer, the service lets you stagger out tweets to go out at specified times rather than whenever you are reading the content. I typically do my blog reading in chunks and will have about 5 to 6 different posts I want to share but don't want to take the time to schedule them out or I'm on a mobile device where scheduling tweets is painful.
Buffer was the solution. It lets me reach my audience at peak traffic times and not over-tweet my followers at any one time.
I recently discovered an app called ifttt, that enabled me to supercharge Buffer, amongst other web services, to the next level.
Using Buffer and Ifttt together can help you streamline a ton of tedious social media minutia, get shit done, and get back to your day.
Below are the top 3 Recipes I've found to make Ifttt and Buffer a dynamic duo.
Ifttt Puts the internet and Buffer to work for you
Ifttt, short for "if this then that", is a magical web services that allows you to tie together a myriad of web services that you use on a daily basis and puts them to work for you.
You can then mashup a number of web services without having to know anything about code at all via the premade recipes in ifttt.
One of the services, or channels as they call them, that ifttt can mashup with is your buffer account. Yipee!
There is a growing number of buffer recipes on ifttt, but I'm just going to cover the most useful ones that I have found and use on a regular basis.
Buffer Recipe # 1 - Every tweet I favorite gets added to my buffer
This recipe is super handy for quickly and easily adding tweets to my buffer while on the go.
Enabling this recipe means that anytime you favorite a tweet, be it on the web or via any mobile twitter client, it automgaically gets added into your buffer.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/10653Buffer Recipe # 2 - Feed an RSS through Buffer and Spam less
This ifttt recipe will allow you to feed an rss feed through to your buffer account to stagger out the posts to peak times.
I've set this up for blog rss feeds and for a custom yahoo pipe that aggregates a number of sites I read.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/8512Buffer Recipe # 3 - Feed an RSS through Buffer and Spam less
This recipe I made myself (pat on back). With it, any tweet that I send out with the hastag #RT will get added to my buffer to be sent out in a couple of days.
Very handy for automatically re-sharing some content (like this post) that I spent time creating at a later date to get the most leverage out of it.
I choose the #RT in the hopes that people would also retweet the post.
The great thing about all of the recipes in ifttt is that you can customize any of the steps, which means you can change the hashtag to whatever you want.
http://ifttt.com/recipes/23065