Nowadays, people are trying so hard to develop their networks online. Although this platform diminishes the geographic limitation so that people can communicate and share with everyone all around the world, the time zone conflict is somehow cannot be solved. Imagine you are living in the U.S., and you want to collaborate with professionals in an Asian county (i.e., Japan). There are 13 hours of differences. That means when you just back to the office at 9 a.m., People in Japan just finish work, and ready for dinner. It is inconvenient that the time you are posting and sharing on social media may limit some people to get notifications immediately.
Fortunately, there is an app called Buffer, which belongs to the workflow and scheduling category, helping you to schedule posts. Buffer is a good tool that you can link it with your different social media, such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can pre-type all the contents, pre-embed all links and images on Buffer, then schedule a date, day of the week, and/or specific time to post automatically. For example, you want to share a research article on Twitter in the morning time in Asia, which is your sleeping time in the U.S., you can schedule your tweet to be posted in the midnight of the U.S. time zone. Therefore, you can be active on social media anytime that you can then reply to any comments once you wake up or when you are free.
A social media educator, Mattew J. Kushin, introduced Buffer to his social media collage class. With the use and comparison of two Apps (Buffer as one of the two), he wanted his students to learn the importance of scheduling, as well as the ability to analysis the best time to post to maximize the viewers. Here are his ideas for this classroom project:
“1. Students schedule content they’ve created as part of a campaign (e.g., original Tweets, Tweets sharing their blog posts, etc). using Hootsuite.
2. Students use Buffer as a compliment to Hootsuite – setting up their Buffer to post ONLY at those times that they are not posting their original content via Hoostuie. That way, when they find relevant and timely content to share, they can add it to their Buffer. If there’s no content, nothing is posted.”
Mattew Kushin (2013)
Details of Dr. Kushin’s lesson plan: USING BUFFER IN THE CLASSROOM TO TEACH STUDENTS SOCIAL MEDIA SCHEDULING.
A college student, Katherout, also shared her own experiences using Buffer for her Internship during the semester. She also mentioned the time zone problem and the characteristics of Buffer – being able to share the same/different post(s) to one or more media account(s) at the same time.
In her video, she talked about Buffer from 4:08 to 4:52.
I also used Buffer before to manage my Instagram account. I had a planner account sharing my planner decoration ideas, calligraphy practices, and any other kinds of writing stuff. I wanted to regularly post as much as so I could boost my number of followers. However, I was too busy with my class schedule that I did not have break time between classes. Therefore, I scheduled posting on Buffer to help me post on Instagram while I was having classes, and even during my sleep. I found it useful that I could keep my account active even I was not online every day. As I remembered, I had about 20 followers more within two weeks, which was a great increasing ratio to me when comparing to the past.
Finally, hope you all find this post helpful, and feel free to share your ideas or toolbox with me!
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Twitter: @PoYeeWong4