I haven't posted in a long time. I kind of got hung up on this "Thing" -- Not because I was having so much fun playing with social media management tools but because all of the obsessive sharing of everything is getting to be a little too much and I wasn't sure I needed to increase the amount of social media I do. I just read Dave Eggers new novel The Circle which is about how all of this sharing of everything we do is slowly eating away at our real lives and our freedom. Great book, I highly recommend it and I can tell that it is making me stop and think more about how much I share and how freely I hit that 'accept' button when I download an app and it wants access to everything on my phone.
I'm not saying I don't like social media. I really enjoy Facebook. I use it to keep up with friends and family as well as following different news sites. I also use it for communicating with various groups I'm involved in such as my kid's 4H club and my church.
I love sharing and talking about books with Goodreads.
I'm on LinkedIn, although I'm not very active on it.
I got an Instagram account but I haven't actually posted anything. I just wanted to see what it was all about. My teenage son tells me that is what all of his friends are doing and it seems to be the way librarians at HCL are sharing pictures of what's going on throughout the county.
All that being said, I'm not sure I need a Social Media Management app for my personal use. I do see it as being very handy if I was running a company's social media or my job required me to be posting on line frequently.
For this Thing I downloaded the Buffer app. I chose Buffer because I thought it could help me manage my multiple different groups I post to on Facebook. For example, I sometimes post updates to our local food shelf page and sometimes to our church page. Other times I want to post something on various neighborhood groups I belong to but not on my personal account. I hoped Buffer could help me write one post and then send it to three different FB groups. So far I haven't figured out how to make it do that though. I could only get it to post to my general FB page. If I had multiple Facebook accounts it could handle that but I don't. It also doesn't work with Instagram.
It is pretty neat in that you can write all sorts of posts, save pictures in a queue and then schedule when you want them to be posted and to which accounts. While you are browsing the web you can hit the share button and save any posts, links pictures etc to your Buffer and then go back to them later and generate your own posts about them. You can also monitor the stats of your various posts. Certainly a useful app if I was doing more posting for a business or organization.
