Posting content to social media networks to engage with one’s target audience takes commitment and is harder than might be assumed. There are various factors you should consider to catch and hold the interest of your chosen demographic successfully.

Among the crucial ones are ensuring you could post content consistently and efficiently as well as understand how users engage with your selected content. Buffer is one of the available online tools that enable posting to social media channels with remarkable ease.

Overview and Brief History of Buffer

Buffer is a powerful yet affordable application for posting content to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and, as of this writing, Pinterest channels. For as low as $50.00 per month, it gives you access to its suite of features that enable you to generate and manage content more effectively than ever before. Using it is so beneficial to building one’s online presence that as of January this year, there are 2 million registered Buffer users.

Buffer has come a long way. It was far from becoming the widely successful online content generation tool users have come to know and trust when it was launched on November 30, 2010. Indeed, its first version had limited features that only allowed content to be posted on Twitter.

It took four days for Buffer to gain its first paying user. Fortunately, the lukewarm reception was unable to deter the eponymous company behind the application from becoming successful around the world. Within nine months following its launch, registration for it increased to 100,000, motivating founders Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich to take their start-up to the next level. In July of 2011, they moved their fledgling company from the United Kingdom to San Francisco, where they succeeded in converting it into a corporation.

Both Gascoigne and Widrich had problems with their visas, forcing them to move their company to Hong Kong and Tel Aviv, Israel. They had resolved those problems and have been providing their customers premium service from their headquarters in San Francisco unencumbered.

Buffer’s Features and Benefits for Small Businesses

Buffer is now a greatly expanded online content generation tool for businesses. The features small businesses are sure to find most useful include unlimited scheduled posts, team collaboration, RSS feed integration, and rich analytics of your posts.

By scheduling as many posts to your social media accounts as you want, you won’t have to log in just to publish content, allowing you more time for doing other things, like growing your business.

To generate and manage content even more effectively, Buffer has approval features, lets you give admin privileges to users assigned as managers of your contributors, and allows more members of your team to access and manage your social media accounts. The more people there are who’d help you craft and manage content, the richer it becomes. The more engaging your content becomes the richer it is, improving your chance of catching and holding the attention of your target audience.

To share your content even more easily, you may connect your favorite RSS feeds with Buffer and use its mobile apps. Being able to publish content on both desktop computers and mobile devices increases your reach significantly, improving your chance of engaging with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users. The more targeted users you form relationships with, the better chance you have to grow your customer base.

To improve your chance of engaging with your target audience even further, Buffer allows you to track how netizens respond to your posts (e.g., clicks and re-tweets), sort the data you’d obtain according to your preference, and accumulate statistics easily. Having such information and being able to analyze it effectively enables you to learn the types of content your target audience find interesting.

To better analyze the data you’d obtain on your chosen demographic, Buffer lets you export the data to any report or document you’d choose. You’ll be able to analyze the information you’d obtain in the format that best suits you, as well as share it among your team members easily, enabling you to always make well-informed decisions for your business.

To Wrap Things Up

Social media is the new arena where businesses vie for customers’ attention. As of March this year, there are currently more than 1 billion Facebook users, more than 300 million Twitter users, and more than 350 million LinkedIn users. There are sure to be more users next year. Arm yourself with the best online tools, like Buffer, to come out on top.

About the Author

 

About Ira Zagala

Ira is a freelance writer-editor. He was the copy editor of a classified ads paper published in the Philippines; one of the technical editors of an independent publishing services firm; and the 'Web content' writer of one of the country's leading publishers of educational textbooks. He has a BA in Journalism from the Lyceum of the Philippines University-Manila.