🤳🏾Should you be scheduling content natively? Or using Buffer?

Hey folks👋🏽

I’ve been struggling with feeling like I can’t quite get the hang of my "niche". And operating with one is advice I’ve given before — the riches are in the niches, after all. But lately I’ve had to reckon with the fact that I’m not yet at a place where I can claim one. And that’s okay!

Instead of pushing myself to be a thought leader, I’ve made it my mission to take social a little less seriously and post what I feel like posting. And it seems to be resonating! It’s helped that a little project I’m testing internally (look out for it!) has forced me to create every day without thinking too hard about getting it just right.

Done over perfect is where I’m at, and I hope this helps if you’re in the same boat!

Let’s get into it!

💌 In today’s email:

• 🤳🏾More and more platforms have scheduling features — here’s an (unbiased, I promise) look at why you might use them or use Buffer 
• 📱Mitra shares a great tool for your short videos
• 📣 The latest social news, features, and bonus reads
• And as always, all the latest and greatest content from the Buffer blog.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you next Friday!

Warmly, 

Tami & the Buffer team

P.S. #Bufferchat is on Threads! Join us on Tuesdays at 12pm PT/ 3pm ET/8pm UTC. Give us a follow and hit the bell to get notified 🔔

🖊️ Deep dive – Ask Buffer: Should I Schedule Natively or Use Buffer?

For our most recent Ask Buffer article, we received this question: “I'd like for you to tell me what the value of using a social media tool like Buffer is compared to Meta Business Suite specifically.”

I thought it’d be interesting to examine why you might pick a tool like Buffer over just using the feature in the apps themselves.

Why use native scheduling?

The social media platforms are constantly rolling out new features, and native scheduling is no exception. Within the last few years, the big five (Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, then LinkedIn, TikTok, and X/Twitter) have added scheduling to their long list of tools to improve the user experience.

Here are some of the immediate benefits of using the native scheduling features within social media apps:

• Immediate platform updates: Scheduling directly on a social media platform ensures you can access the latest features and updates immediately.
• Access paid boosts: Native tools like Meta Business Suite enable you to easily boost your organic posts and offer in-depth analytics on paid performance.
• Reduce potential for failed posts: Integration issues might arise with third-party tools, leading to posts not going live as scheduled. This isn’t a problem with native scheduling features.

Why use Buffer to schedule posts?

We started Buffer because we knew it would be much more powerful, flexible, and simple than posting everything natively or using scheduling tools offered by the social platforms themselves.

Scheduling your social media posts in Buffer allows you to:

• See all your content in one centralized dashboard: Seeing all scheduled content across different platforms in one view makes looking for consistency and coherence in your messaging easier and allows for better strategic planning.
• Get more advanced analytics: By aggregating data across accounts, Buffer offers valuable insights into the best posting times, engagement rates, and audience demographics, helping refine content strategies.
• Work with your team more efficiently: With features like draft approvals, comments, and role assignments, larger teams or agencies can manage content without giving everyone the Instagram login.
• Avoid social media distractions: Working within a third-party app can help avoid the time-sink and distractions inherent to navigating social media platforms, allowing for more efficient use of social media as a business tool.
• Easily repurpose content across platforms: For example, with Buffer, you can identify a top-performing LinkedIn post and easily repurpose it into a Twitter post.

No tool is truly the perfect solution, but I believe there’s a happy medium between third-party tools and posting directly on your preferred social media platform. You just have to find what that is for yourself or your brand.

🪴 Four creators skyrocketing growing for fun with Buffer

We pride ourselves on being an excellent tool for entrepreneurs and business owners to grow on social media — and our users were more than happy to back us up.

• Michael Piperno on Linkedin: “What used to take me hours now takes me minutes. Easily 2 hours saved per week.”
• Nathalie Tran on Instagram: “My engagement has increased around 999% on Pinterest!”
• Jennifer’s Fading Memories podcast: “I’ve made over $8,000 in podcast sponsorship since using Buffer”
• Adriana on LinkedIn: “Buffer has been the player in my following growth on my personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, over 5,300 followers. I cannot imagine life without Buffer.”

Want to skyrocket your growth? Click the link below to get started with Buffer today!

👇🏽 The latest from the blog

• Instagram Customer Care 101 for Small Businesses: Val Razo discusses the importance of Instagram in-app customer service for small businesses, backed with real-life examples and actionable tips.
• YouTube SEO: A Simple Step-by-step Guide to Videos That Rank: The science of optimizing your videos for search on YouTube, plus some YouTube SEO tips from seasoned experts to help your videos rank #1.
• How This Car Rental Business Used Its Google Business Profile to Grow Online: Learn how this small car rental business optimizes its Google Business Profile so you can do the same for your operation.
• How I Repurpose Blog Content into LinkedIn Posts to Expand My Reach: Marketer Irina Maltseva shares her proven process for repurposing blogs into high-performing LinkedIn posts. Apply these strategies to increase your blog traffic, build a personal brand, and grow your LinkedIn following.

📱Social tip of the week from Mitra, Buffer’s Social Media Manager 

I know I’ve recommended CapCut in the past for finding fun memes, but it’s also an incredible video-editing app as well! It’s so easy to use too, and you can get everything you’ll need for your video to be ready to share on social media: captions, music, added text, and more!

The best part: it’s free to use! There are lots of really great advanced tools you can use with the Pro version as well. It’s also available on mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop so you can edit on whichever platform you feel most comfortable.

Check out this video we shared on Instagram, edited all in CapCut!

🤳 What's happening in social?

Meta showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time; Instagram’s experimenting with more frames within carousel posts; LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform; YouTube announces #WomenofYouTube mentorship program for Shorts creators; TikTok rolls out updated Creator Rewards program – here’s what you need to know.

Get these updates and more here!

Thanks for reading! 💟

What would you like to see more (or less) of in the newsletter? Give us all your feedback in this form or let us know on all our social channels @buffer!

Unsubscribe | Update my mail settings 

Sent by the team at Buffer
2443 Fillmore St #380-7163 San Francisco, CA 94115 USA