“No man is a brand.” — John Donne, probably

I’m sorry your life coach sold you the $499 “personal branding” bonus package instead of just handing you a piece of paper that said “be nice and awesome in public and good stuff will happen.” Because even though the robots may soon replace us all, brands are learning that it pays to act more like individual humans and less like sterile branding monoliths.

“Brands — they’re (trying to be) just like us!”

But seriously: let’s all agree to stop applying the language of branding to an interpersonal concept as old as post-industrial society.

:::climbs off of SNOOT-y high horse:::

When I first started using Buffer, I was a bit confused about how the product could be useful to me. As much as I would enjoy tweeting “Taco Bae is on fleek” from a corporate account, I am not employed as a social media manager. And I am not a content marketer publishing multiple times per day hoping to discover what my audience likes and when I should be posting it in order to reach the most people.

Buffer’s social media scheduling and analytics are very obviously useful to a large subset of folks, but it was not immediately clear that I was one of them. As an unaffiliated practitioner of the social media arts, you may be feeling the same way. Why would I need to schedule my tweets for any time other than IMMEDIATELY RIGHT NOW LET THE FAV’ING BEGIN?!

As I’ve gotten to know the product and think more deeply about how I use Twitter, here are my 3 favorite uses for Buffer for the lone wolf dude or dudette looking to tweet better.

Time-Travel Networking

Twitter is the greatest thing to happen to networking since humans invented tapping someone on the shoulder. If you do it tactfully — more on this in another post — there is no better way to get the attention of people you want to get the attention of. Nowhere else can you be funny or smart or charming in front of more people more easily.

But sometimes the people you want to talk to are sleeping. Or they’re out with their friends and have pushed their phones in a neat pile on the table so nobody can rudely check their email in between bites of mozzarella stick. Or maybe they’re being good corporate citizens and not checking Twitter every 35 seconds during work. They might only tweet in the morning and after dinner. Or maybe, like tech analyst Ben Thompson, who’s burst onto the scene in a big way over the past 12 months— partially thanks to his excellent Twitter account — they live in Taipei!

With Buffer you can schedule your tweets so they have the highest likelihood of getting a response. If you have a great response to one of Ben’s posts in the middle of the day Mountain Time, you can use Buffer to compose a tweet and have it send during Ben’s morning, which is maybe when you’ve observed he’s the most active on Twitter. If you want to make fun of one of your friends while he’s sleeping but his Australian arch enemy is awake, you can do that too. But let’s try and keep this positive.

Instead of keeping an unwieldy “Drafts” file like this:

you can just compose your tweets in Buffer and schedule them to tweet out whenever you want. Maybe you know from experience that your hilarious observations about artichokes are likely to be received most enthusiastically on Wednesday afternoons EST.

Tweeting Excerpts

Because I often refuse to Read The Flippin’ Manual, I had to discover this feature on my own. But if you’re reading an article and have come across an excerpt you want to tweet, using the Buffer browser extension you can just highlight the text, click the extension icon, and it will prepare a tweet for you with the excerpt and a link to the post. If you use it in conjunction with Paul Ford’s “Save Publishing” bookmarklet, which highlights all tweet-length sentences on any webpage, you will be an excerpt tweeting machine. Everybody will know you are smart and well-read and will want to hire you for your Dream Job.

Become the Johnny Appleseed of Retweets

If it is not your job to be in front of Twitter all day, you likely have a block of time in which you do most of your Twittering. This is definitely true for me. And as a result I found myself doing a lot of asynchronous interacting with people — reading and responding to mentions or tweets all at once — and a lot less retweeting of content. But both of these activities, interacting and retweeting, are made better and more effective with Buffer.

This behavior of mine was partially personal preference — I like interacting with people more than I like tweeting out links — and partially because I didn’t want to retweet a cute animal gif or wonky piece of David Foster Wallace criticism when my predominantly East Coast followers were off Twitter.

But if you use Buffer’s scheduling tools, you can retweet or manual retweet to your heart’s content, from the bathtub, from your bed, from a boring date, and have those tweets go out during business hours. This is also a good way to avoid saturating your timeline with retweets, which I am told is annoying but would have no idea about because I would never engage in a pre-bed, post-glass of bourbon retweet blitz.