Using Buffer to Promote Your Posts

Are you using Twitter to promote your website or blog posts?  This is a tricky area; you want to promote your posts, but you don’t want to overwhelm your Twitter feed with clumps of tweets that are self-serving.

I’m taking the advice of Tom Ewer and using Buffer to schedule my posts throughout the day.  He suggests using Tweriod to determine when your Twitter followers are most active, then scheduling your most important posts (i.e. promote your blog post) at those times.  Tweriod analyzes your followers and their tweeting habits to determine when they are most likely to be online.  Once your report is generated you can send it over to Buffer with just a click – very slick.

Buffer is the key here – it allows you to schedule tweets for certain times of the day and certain days of the week.  You set up a schedule of when tweets will appear and then just add tweets to the queue.  In your dashboard you can re-order tweets by dragging and dropping:

To promote my blog posts I’m using Tom’s suggestion to  tweet each three times:

• Once when the post appears: New Post @ LWB: [Post Name] [Post URL] Please RT!
• Once later the same day: Today’s Post @ LWB: [Post Name] [Post URL]
• Once the next day:  Yesterday’s Post @ LWB: [Post Name] [Post URL]

While there are some WordPress to Buffer plugins, I had trouble getting them to work!  It also doesn’t seem like you can change the body of your tweets – and each post tweets just once, so your best bet  is setting everything up manually in Buffer.  Since I have a morning routine I just added Buffering my tweets to that routine.