Buffer is a software designed to manage social media accounts, which has both a free and paid version. The free version gives you limited access to scheduling posts (ten scheduled posts per channel). The paid version expands the options of scheduling and gives you access to a range of analytics from the scheduled posts. Ooligan has a paid version and access to two channels, which currently are being used for Instagram and Facebook. Buffer is very convenient for planning out social media campaigns and other ongoing content, but there is definitely a learning curve to using the platform. Here’s some tips I’ve learned from managing Buffer’s quirks.
Use Buffer’s Features
Start Making One Post for Facebook and Instagram, Then Customize
Buffer lets you make the same post for Instagram and Facebook. Use this feature! It’s very convenient if you want to promote the same thing across platforms at the same time. It saves you from repeating a lot of information and a lot of copy/paste. However, don’t get too comfortable. Different platforms have different requirements. Facebook doesn’t focus much on hashtags, but allows you to link outside of the post. Instagram doesn’t allow links and requires an image, but often has greater visibility. Make sure you customize for each specific platform after putting in the basic information.
Save Your Hashtags
Hashtags are the oft forgotten language of Instagram. While Instagram’s (and indeed, most platforms’) algorithms emphasize keywords rather than hashtags nowadays, they’re still useful at the very least as a quick overview of the main points of the post for a reader. They can also be nefariously tricky to make consistent, especially when multiple different people are creating posts for the same material. Thankfully, Buffer has a feature for that! Save the hashtags you particularly like as a hashtag group in the Hashtag Manager, and when the time comes, add them in with a click of a button.
Avoid Buffer’s Pitfalls
Triple Check Your Work
What I’ve found working with Buffer is that posts can break in the transit from draft to final product when going through Buffer. Often there are quotation marks in weird places when copy/pasting into Buffer, and changing a post after it’s already been posted is often a no-go. You can’t edit a post after the fact on Buffer, and Instagram will revert to Buffer’s version every time you open a post to edit, if you can even make changes at all. (I’m also currently dealing with a link issue on Facebook that I don’t fully understand, so we’ll see if that’s ongoing.) Point being, it is so much easier to make sure that a post is correct before it’s posted on Buffer than trying to change it after it’s already gone out.
Be Aware of Added Restrictions
This tip is going to be my catch-all for quirks Buffer has that you should know about. All of these are going to be geared towards Instagram because that is the platform that Ooligan currently focuses most of our posts on, and I have also had the most issues with posting to Instagram. First, despite Instagram allowing GIFs, Buffer doesn’t currently allow users to schedule them for Instagram. If there is a GIF you want to use, you need to change it into a valid file type, such as an MP4 or MOV file. Second, Buffer has a minimum frame rate of 23 fpm and a maximum of 60 fpm. If you had a file you wanted to post that was, let’s say, a GIF with 10 frames, you need to up the frame rate before converting the file, or Buffer won’t post it. (Not that I’ve ever dealt with this. No siree.) Third—less annoying but more relevant to my day-to-day—is that Buffer doesn’t allow for alt text to Instagram posts. You need to add it to the copy if you want alt text to definitively be part of the post, given the previously mentioned tip. Finally, Buffer won’t let you post images to Instagram if the image dimensions are too different from Instagram’s recommendations.
I could go on, but these are the most prominent lessons I’ve taken away from my time on the app. I hope I have helped you even a little on your way to becoming a Buffer pro!
-AJ Adler