Tag Archives: social media optimisation

Tool of the week for journalists – Buffer, for scheduling tweets

Tool of the week: Buffer

What is it? A tool that allows you to schedule tweets

How is it of use to journalists? How many of your followers saw the last tweet you sent? As Twitter is a scattergun approach to sharing news, it is likely that most followers will have missed it.

Buffer is a tool that allows you to schedule tweets, posting them at selected intervals throughout the day. You can select Buffer’s suggested tweet times, which are based on research, or you can choose your own times.

Buffer could be helpful to news organisations who want to post a story, such as a feature or blog post, several times. It could also help in crowdsourcing, tweeting a request more than once.

According to Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich, who spoke to Journalism.co.uk and is quoted in this guide on how to: best post news on Twitter and Facebook, news organisations should tweet each story three to five times: for example once when the news story goes live, once a couple of hours later and then a third time the next day.

That’s very much a use case of why we built Buffer, but this is what we do for our news stories and blog posts. We drop all the stories we have into our buffer and they get well spaced out over the day and get posted so that we always have a different audience that will be able to see the tweet.

There will be a session on social media optimisation and how to best time tweets and Facebook posts at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired – media in motion conference for journalists. The news:rewired agenda is at this link.

This entry was posted in Social media and blogging, Tool of the Week and tagged buffer, leo widrich, social media optimisation, Twitter on December 6, 2011 by Sarah Marshall.

Tool of the week for journalists – WhenToTweet

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Tool of the week: WhenToTweet

What is it? A tool that allows you to work out the best time to tweet

How is it of use to journalists?

Automated tweets or those reporting breaking news cannot be timed. But when is the best time to engage with your followers and get noticed on Twitter?

In a recent interview for a podcast on how to best time your tweets, Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a platform that allows you to queue up tweets and post them at optimal times, explained that it is best to tweet when there is a lot of chatter.

When the most traffic happens and when the most tweets go out its the best time to tweet, which is sometimes counter-intuitive.

This tool works by both by monitoring the performance of your past tweets and tells you when most of your followers will be online. The best time for @journalismnews to tweet is 11am, according to this tool.

For more Twitter advice see 10 technical Twitter tips for journalists.

This entry was posted in Handy tools and technology, Social media and blogging, Tool of the Week and tagged buffer, leo widrich, smo, social media optimisation, Twitter, whentotweet on November 15, 2011 by Sarah Marshall.

Mashable: Five tools to better time your tweets

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If you are trying to work out the best time to tweet about a news story and get maximum attention, it is worth making a note of the free applications listed in this Mashable post on five tools to help you work out the best time to send out tweets.

The post has been written by Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, an application which enables you to schedule tweets.

The five tools are:

1. WhenToTweet

2. TweetStats

3. Tweriod

4. TweetReports

5. TweetWhen

Add your Twitter handle to the various websites and the five tools will provide an interesting insight and help in your planning of social media optimisation (SMO) – (although we are not convinced 8am GMT on a Saturday is really the best time for @journalismnews to tweet).

This entry was posted in Editors' pick, Social media and blogging, Traffic and tagged buffer, mashable, smo, social media optimisation, Twitter on October 31, 2011 by Sarah Marshall.

Mashable: How to work out the best time to post on your Facebook page

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Social media optimisation (SMO) has joined search engine optimisation (SEO) as a term that journalists and news sites need to read up on.

SMO – as the name suggests – is all about how to work out when to time your tweets and Facebook posts so they get the most attention.

Mashable has an interesting post by Jeff Widman, the co-founder of PageLever, a Facebook analytics tool, which can help you work out how often and when to post news stories on Facebook:

I get asked all the time, “How frequently should I post on my Facebook page? When is the best time to post?”

Answer: Post whenever the most recent status update for your page stops showing up in your fans’ news feeds.

If you post often, you will see an immediate spike in news feed impressions, but it’s generally not worth the cost in lost fans. When your fans see two status updates from you in their news feeds, they’ll likely get annoyed, and will consequently unsubscribe or un-fan.

He goes on to explain the exceptions to the rule and how to calculate the lifetime of a post.

The full article on how to time your Facebook posts to reach the most fans is on Mashable.

You can also become a fan of Journalism.co.uk here on Facebook.

This entry was posted in Editors' pick, Social media and blogging, Traffic and tagged Facebook, pagelever, smo, social media optimisation on October 27, 2011 by Sarah Marshall.