Using Buffer to streamline your church’s social media
I love efficiency. I’m all for anything that will make a task quicker, more efficient, and less labour-intensive. Especially in a church, where there’s every chance a task is taken care of by a volunteer who is managing church responsibilities on top of a job, family life, and other obligations.
That’s why, at Gospel Powered, we love Buffer.
Buffer is a social media manager — an app (both mobile and web-based) that allows the user to schedule and manage posts to any combination of social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest). Once your social media profiles are connected, posting is so ridiculously easy.
The user decides the specific days and times they want posts to be scheduled, and then it’s just a case of filling up the queue and letting Buffer do its thing. At Gospel Powered, we have Buffer configured to post at 11:00am each day, as well as an additional post at 3:00pm on Monday to Wednesday. You can include images, videos, and links, which are automatically shortened to save your precious 140 Twitter characters.
Buffer also provides analytics for each social media platform, providing you with stats about user engagement, likes, retweets, clicks, comments and more, helping you to see which posts best engage your audience.
So how should you fill your Buffer queue?
Fill it with whatever you like! But here are some suggestions for posts your audience may enjoy seeing:
- Links to interesting or relevant online articles
- Quotes
- Bible verses
- Main ideas from Sunday’s sermon
- Photos
- Throwback Thursday images and memories
- Friday funnies
- Latest blog posts
- Promote older blog posts
For an app that saves so much time and does a great job at keeping your social media fresh and active, the pricing is extremely achievable. The Awesome Plan, which allows you to connect 10 social media profiles and schedule 100 posts, is $10 a month. Pricing increases if you want to increase your number of profiles, posts or team members, but The Awesome Plan should be more than enough for most churches.
It’s crazy to think that using a social media manager like Buffer will allow your church to have more engagement with social media, while investing less time into making it happen. But that’s what Buffer does. It allows you to access the full potential of social media while reducing your workload. Imagine if every church had one volunteer sit at the computer for one hour, once per week, filling up their Buffer queue with awesome links, quotes, images, tips and general posts to their community. For the rest of the week, that church’s online community will continue to be engaged, attracting traffic to their Facebook/Twitter pages, website and blog, completely automatically! Think of the impact you could have with you local community through social media without even going online!
Is your church using a scheduling tool to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of social media?
Originally published at gospelpowered.com.
