The office dog, my husband and I spent the long memorial weekend taking long hikes and enjoying the sunshine.
We had such a lovely time.
But as I’m writing this blogpost it’s Tuesday and I’m back behind my desk here at My Brand Buddy HQ and I’ve been struggling to get organized all day.
You know the feeling after coming back to work after a long weekend – it just takes a little while to get back into the swing of things.
It’s like your brain just decides to stay in vacation mode!
Save Time on Social Media for Your Pet Business
Today it was time for me to organize this month’s social media content, and that’s not a small task because I do social media for three sites including My Brand Buddy.
I usually use a tool called Hootsuite to schedule my social media posts, but even though it’s quicker than manually scheduling the posts on each social media account, it still takes time and effort to get all the links, and dates and times the way I want it.
(You can translate that to boring, repetitive work that sends you to sleep. And that’s not the way social media is meant to be!)
Then today someone in one of my Facebook Groups mentioned Buffer, and I was in the mood for trying something new so I signed up.
Buffer – does what it says on the tin
Holy woof – did Buffer make my life easier or what!
The idea is that Buffer saves all the messages you create in a queue, and it schedules your posts to go out once, twice, or up to 25 times a day according to how you set up your schedule.
So you can create a lot of messages in one sitting (including links to articles, fun quotes, images, before and after shots of grooming dogs, or anything else that you want to share on your pet biz social media) and then Buffer spaces out the messages according to your publishing schedule.
Here’s what my schedule looks – I decided to go for two updates a day:
They have a free service, but I opted for the basic paid for account, and I installed the Buffer Google Chrome extension so I could schedule posts straight from any website by the press of one button.
This is what it looks like when you share a blogpost to your social media queue via Buffer. You click the Buffer extension button, and a window pops up and you simply say which accounts you want to share the post to, and then you click add to queue.
I keep all the pet business websites and blogs I follow organized in Feedly so I can keep on top of their latest posts.
So all I had to do was simply to go through the last month or so worth of posts, clicking the Buffer button on the pet business articles I thought you would enjoy, adding a little intro text, and clicking the big shiny ‘add to queue’ button.
Scheduling 3 Months Posts in one Sitting
And before I knew it, an hour had passed and I had scheduled social media posts all the way up to August.
This is what the post queue looks like in Buffer:
Crazy easy right?
You can also upload your own photos or just share simple text only messages.
What would you use your saved time for?
Of course there’s much more to social media than scheduling content this far ahead – actually engaging with people for example (no one wants to talk to a computer after all!), but it just makes me feel so relieved to know that even if I don’t have time to touch Facebook for a day or so, my messages will still reach your newsfeed.
Scheduling posts ahead, and saving time on social media also gives me more time to work on blog posts and products, actually talking to people live on Facebook and other social media and, of course, taking the office dog out for a game of fetch.
Imagine what this tool could do to your pet business – what would you spend your saved time on?
Speaking of saving time – if you feel a little stressed about creating clickable, likeable and shareable images for your Facebook page, then be sure to check out my ‘done for you’ social media images that you can use straight away for your pet business!
Oh my gosh this is GREAT! I just learned what Feedly is and I now LOVE Buffer! Thank you! 🙂 So easy and SO useful!
Scheduling social media posts really is tedious, I use Hootsuite but I’ll have to try Buffer, being able to simply schedule a certain number of posts each day sounds awesome. Have you tried it with LinkedIn? My biggest problem with HootSuite is that LinkedIn posts always end up with all the content in the subject line, so frustrating.
Thank You Linda! Never heard of Buffer, will absolutely check it out! I’m really enjoying your blog posts and all the other wonderful tips. Keep it up! 🙂