Social Media scheduling is crucial to the writer. You have to have some kind of front end to store your tweets and posts in advance, so that you can avoid having social media creep into your writing schedule.
I’m probably not going to give my writing the focus it deserves if I have to keep one eye on the clock so I can put my latest tweet up at 7:45 pm! So, authors and screenplay writers need to select a social media scheduling service.
Buffer, Hootsuite and CoSchedule are the three industry leaders. CoSchedule does not have a free plan, which rules it out in my book at this time. The many features it has make it almost a sure thing choice if you’ve got $70 a month to spend on it.
For almost all writers, a social media curator has to offer a free plan. I had to search a little bit, but both Buffer and Hootsuite do offer free plans. Buffer allows you to curate 10 posts at a time, Hootsuite 30.
That almost sounds like a sure conclusion which service to go to, but wait – Buffer has spent a great deal of time in designing the experience to be as un-complicated as possible.
When you’re dealing with writing schedules and deadlines, that is crucial – keep the service as easy as possible to use. So I used Buffer up until March 2.
Buffer recently changed its features for the free plan. Now all you can do is write and schedule the posts – you don’t see how well they do any longer. Is this tweet doing well, or did it just get crickets?
You also cannot any longer re-buffer on the free plan. This is finding your post on Sunday Morning at 10:34 didn’t do well, let’s try it again on Wednesday at 5:31 pm. That could be done with a click. Now it requires an upgrade.
That made my choice for me, since I need to be able to see how my tweets are doing. So I moved over to Hootsuite on March 2, and began curating tweets.
I’d set up my Hootsuite account a few months ago, to learn at the Hootsuite Academy (see below). I didn’t know at the time, but enrolling at the Hootsuite Academy automatically gives you the Hootsuite free plan. I ended up using Hootsuite a few weeks ago when I was going to be away for a few days, and didn’t have any way to set up my day’s tweets in Buffer.
Learning the Hootsuite interface is a little confusing, but they offer Hootsuite Academy, which teaches you how to use their system, and additionally how to use social media. That may seem like a gimme, but if you’re trying to reach an audience of a particular demographic, which social media service is the right one? Hootsuite Academy explains the demographics, and lets you choose between Pinterest, Facebook, etc.
You can choose auto-schedule for your Hootsuite. Unless you have a list of times to post your tweets, Hootsuite will do it automatically once you choose auto-schedule. Then it’s a simple matter of writing your tweet, and clicking “auto-schedule.” Your tweet or post will now be automatically scheduled for you. I now can curate 3 days worth of tweets all at once. This is a wonderful thing, and lets writers do the thing they most need to do – write.
To see how your tweets are taking off, create a feed for “re-tweets” and another for “likes”. It will now show how your social feed is doing.
Hootsuite (as far as I can tell) also doesn’t let you re-buffer (re-hoot?) tweets on the free plan, which is a disappointment. And the Hootsuite browser plugin only works on Google Chrome, so if you use Opera as I do, now you can’t find interesting articles to tweet.
Conclusion
I recommend Hootsuite to my fellow authors. sign up for the free plan. Once you have two or more published novels that are doing well enough to go tell off your boss at your day job, spring for the paid plan ($20 a month).
