This is a guest post by Alyssa Aldersley. You can read more about her at the bottom.

I’m a bit of a cheerleader for Buffer. I’ve been a user of the app since it was first finding its feet so I feel a bit like a proud mama watching so many people realise how helpful it can be.

When Alicia wrote her awesome post How To Save Time On Your Twitter Marketing by using Buffer, I wanted to share with you some of the new tips and tools that are making my experience of tweeting with Buffer even simpler and faster. Here goes.

Sharing Is Caring

(image: Patrick Herrera)

I wouldn’t consider myself a curator or prolific tweeter; I’m a small business owner who can’t help but love reading about productivity, getting things done and any geeky tech/apps/processes that help with that.

When I find an awesome article I want to share, I’m aware it might either be the wrong time of day for anyone to notice, or I risk flooding my followers with a bunch of links in quick succession.

I therefore have two choices:

• be invisible and/or annoying, or
• try my best to reach my followers in the best way possible by using a scheduling tool of some kind

Some people consider scheduling to be spammy and robotic, however I think it’s kind of smart.

I don’t want to be that annoying person who floods you with retweets, and I also want to know I stand a chance of being heard. I’m close friends with my social alerts so conversation is never too far away should you respond to something I post!

If This, Then Buffer

If you’ve reached this far and agree a little scheduling could help you to manage your online presence a little better, let me share with you the newest app in my Buffer toolkit: ifttt.

ifttt [like ‘lift’ but without the ‘l’] takes the simplicity of Buffer one step further by allowing me to create actions for triggers – if I do this, then that happens. Something ifttt refers to as recipes.

Here’s just one example:

I’ve created a recipe so each time I mark a tweet as a favourite, ifttt responds to that trigger and gets busy with the action of loading the tweet into my Buffer as a ReTweet (RT). So now, when I want to RT something I’ve seen in my own timeline, I simply click on ‘favourite’ and job done.

Have a peek here for even more ifttt recipe ideas – the possibilities are nearly endless.

How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

As well as being a geek for productivity, I’m also a bit of a geek for analytics (can you sense a theme here?).

Another new bit of kit I’ve been tinkering with lately is SocialBro. Only this morning I tasked it with analysing when my followers are online and pushing those refined timings to my Buffer settings at the click of a button. Perfect integration.

There are certainly many apps and many Twitter clients out there but wins it for me right now. It’s super simple and it’s evolving with new features and collaborations all the time. Happy Buffering!

About the author

Alyssa Aldersley is a sidekick to superheroes and uses her superpowers to virtually assist other small business owners through her business, sidekickva. She’s passionate about productivity and getting things done and works hard to ensure her clients are able to swoosh their capes. Connect with her on Twitter as well as on Facebook.