Recommend me a (better) social media tool
August 21, 2018 2:15 AM   Subscribe

I've ended up having to juggle a large number of social media accounts, for myself, work and other ends. I've used Buffer for a few years but functionality is actually decreasing (not due to Buffer's). What tools will let me: (a) schedule posts across different services & accounts, (b) use a browser extension to clip webpages (e.g. "look at this" posts) for post, (c) do this for a Facebook personal profile?

The accounts I manage include:

- My personal Facebook profile
- My LinkedIn profile and professional Twitter account
- Facebook & Twitter pages for a professional association
- Work twitter account

That's a lot, and Buffer has been a huge help in wrangling this, especially using their browser extension to share webpages and posting the same content to multiple accounts (e.g. post a meeting announcement to personal & association & work Twitter accounts at once). But features have been slowly disappearing, making thing more awkward:

- The ability to post to multiple Twitter accounts disappeared about 6 months ago (due to a policy change from Twitter?), meaning I have to post announcements separately to separate accounts
- The ability to post to my Facebook profile vanished at the start of this month. (Facebook says they are restricting that ability to "select partners", whoever they are.) I liked the ability to queue personal posts, so I think about them and meter them out, not just vomiting multiple posts in a short period.

So Buffer has become a lot less useful. What's a better solution or tool here? Is the answer two different tools, one to post to multiple accounts and one to buffer posts to Facebook? If it matters, most accounts will be one posts a day, if that.
posted by outlier to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would bet GDPR-related stuff is what caused all the reductions and changes. Are you sure there isn't any sort of opting in that needs to happen?
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:13 AM on August 21, 2018


TweetDeck will let you schedule posts across multiple Twitter accounts. It won't help with the other stuff, obviously.
posted by grouse at 3:42 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hootsuite, but you're gonna have to pay for it for that many accounts.
posted by deezil at 5:33 AM on August 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


Unfortunately, a lot of places have been GUTTING their free scheduling tools. Hootsuite is shutting down their Twitter DM feature for even Pro accounts.

I use Sprout Social for work, and it's a really powerful tool, but it is also kind of expensive for personal / non-business accounts.

If you are okay with a jerry-rigged solution, one thing that might work is to use TweetDeck to schedule posts, then use an IFTTT recipe to automatically post Tweets to your personal Facebook account. This would limit your max character limit and mean some post redundancy, but otherwise, it's pretty set-it-and-forget-it. There may be some other useful recipes in there as well for cross-platform management.

Facebook Pages have built-in scheduling tools. It'd be more labor-intensive, unfortunately, but if you know you've got something you want to post to all of your pages, you could schedule it in Facebook Pages and then just share the post to your other pages once it's live.
posted by helloimjennsco at 6:46 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


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