“A Month With BufferApp” plus 1 more

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 01:01 PM PDT

This guest post is by Derek Land of ThisIsInspired.com.

On the recommendation of BufferApp from Misty Belardo I have incorporated BufferApp into my Twitter routine—my Routwine, if you will. It's been very useful, but also brought some interesting thoughts to bear. (In this article I may use 'Buffer' and 'BufferApp' interchangeably but they are same service.)

Now in case you don't use Buffer or haven't heard about what it is, here's a brief biography: Buffer allows you to load up tweets in a queue, and it tweets them out at pre-determined times of the day and week—what times and which days are up to you to decide. You save a tweet, tell Buffer when you want it published, and it tweets for you.

Key features

A service like BufferApp can be very useful in the strategies of bloggers and online marketers who are looking to leverage the social power of Twitter to share information.

The great thing about it is how easy it makes queuing up a list of tweets that can potentially reach more people with similar interests to you—which can, at the very least, increase your Twitter reach, drive traffic, and raise your social influence.

In this functionality, Buffer differs from many current and past Twitter services (I refrain from naming names) that don't let you queue tweets, or at least, don’t do so easily, and it's far and away better with the whole scheduling aspect.

This scheduling is key, because without it, you (a) flood your followers a few times a day when you happen to be online, and (b) miss out on visitors and potential customers (if you're doing any kind of online selling) because they may be on Twitter at a different time of day from you.

Certain features of this scheduling ability are only available to paid subscribers of Buffer—which also sets it apart from most other tweet schedulers. However, by supporting Buffer as a paid subscriber, you're also guaranteeing that the developers keep it running like a well-oiled machine. I appreciate the value of this, and am glad the Buffer people have, from the start, incorporated a monetization method to keep the service relevant and useful.

Since I've started using Buffer (and, granted, I am by no means whatsoever a Twitter power user), my follower count has gone up, as have the number of clicks on those links I've tweeted. Engagement has increased, but that growth has been slight. In Buffer's defense, I should note that I'm pretty straight-laced in everything I do, so building excitement and feedback is an ongoing struggle for me. However, to say the main benefit of Buffer would be driving traffic would be a bit self-serving, and also shortsighted: you can add followers in a big hurry, but this may come at the expense of conversation and interaction.

Therefore if you use Buffer or any tweet scheduling service to tweet your tweets for you, it is important to balance your feed with engagement and pleasantries. I'll probably say this once or twice more in this article.

Who uses Buffer?

Buffer can fit into just about anyone's "Twitter Life." The app is not made for certain people, and its creators don’t exclude anyone by using jargon or confusing settings. Everything is straightforward, and even Twitter novices can begin using it fluidly in a few minutes.

I can see folks using Buffer for one or more of a few reasons:

to drive traffic and increase link sharing
to expand social influence
to inform/educate people otherwise unreachable (offline)
to increase the consistency of your Twitter presence
to solidify corporate presence or brand.

If you are the "I ate a pickle omnomnom" type of twitterer, Buffer will probably hold little value for you. However, if you’re in a business looking to better leverage social media, you’re a designer wishing to increase the visibility of your projects, or you’re a blogger wanting to increase interaction and visitors, BufferApp will be the perfect fit. I'd venture to say there's no reason not to use it, and the longer you delay, the more benefits of the service you’ll forgo.

How to use Buffer successfully

I've gathered a few pointers to keep in mind that may help you to make the most of Buffer as you incorporate it into your online social life. These pointers have been honed a bit to apply to Buffer but they apply equally to any social scheduling service, and by extension, to any online interaction.

Avoid letting traffic become the sole, soulless purpose of using Buffer; balance those tweets with meaningful interaction, DMs and @-replies. Be more engaging the more you tweet; don't stagnate or sacrifice conversation for content.
Avoid queuing up time-sensitive information, like giveaways or news flashes. BufferApp tweets in ascending order the tweets added to you queue, and if you queue up a lot, it may be many hours or a couple days for those tweets to get out.
Avoid sending highly popular tweets to your Buffer queue. If Smashing Magazine has a WordPress theme giveaway (which, as you can guess, are always highly popular), queuing the tweet will likely cause it to fall on more deaf ears if you have a longer queue and/or fewer scheduled tweet times.
Balance Buffer with real-time tweets. The power of Buffer comes from setting schedule times when you are not online or actively using Twitter, or to tweet more on the popular days (Monday-Wednesday). Do not let it become the only way you tweet.
Adjust the frequency of your Buffer tweet schedule—make it more often if you tweet more, and less if your queue is shorter. This way, what you say is spread more evenly and consistently to your followers and readers.

Pros and cons … Wait, what?

In short, Buffer is a fantastic service. It does one thing, and it does it very well. Are there ways the Buffer People could tweak their app? There are a (very) few. And, Buffer People, if you are reading this, keep doing what you're doing—these are thoughts others may not share and are, at best minor points far removed from my Scale of Irritation.

An option to randomize the queue prior to each tweet: This may seem a bit inane. However, consider that both content and tone may fluctuate through the day or week. Also, you may find yourself queuing up a few tweets in a row on the same topic. An option to go random would resolve these minor issues.
A faster pop-up for the bookmarklet (which sometimes does not work) and browser extension: However this may be the result of a slower server, server cache settings, and the like. My high speed connection is just fine, and the pop up still lagged a bit.
Possible cooperation with app developers to incorporate send-to-Buffer in apps like Tweetbot, et al.: This would easily put the use of Buffer on a par Instapaper, and possibly replace the need for email-to-Buffer. Cross-app services like these have both stability and practicality in our increasingly busy social and work lives.

These problems, as you've already read, are exceedingly minor. And one additional point about the browser extension and bookmarklet: If you click it once and nothing happens, give it a few seconds before you click it again.

Is BufferApp for you?

I would very much like to see Buffer establish itself as a regular online service, much like Tweet Marker (but with wider support than Tweet Marker). As I write this, the team is preparing to roll out Buffer for Facebook.

For casual twitterers, there is no real con in using Buffer, and by that same token the pros are significantly diminished also. I'm not trying to be mean; if you use Twitter to simply catch up with friends or as a chat tool, then using Buffer will be counterproductive.

For businesses and bloggers, the key con of using Buffer rests on the one using it: not correctly balancing community interaction of a few personal tweets with the stuff you save in your Buffer queue. Don't leave the social aspect of Twitter behind, or get so caught up in the mere act of tweeting that you forget why you started using Twitter in the first place. As with everything in life, balance is key.

Twitter is a place for sharing information; I've come to rely on Twitter for news more than CNN.com (my old standby), and for the latest trends, tips, and tricks in web development and design. To me, Twitter is a wonderful tool for learning, and for engaging with other writers, designers, and potential clients. And Buffer has put a “functionality polish” on the way I use it.

Twitter is a social place, even if for some there is a distinction between "casual social" and "business social." Let's make it more friendly by using it smartly, whatever app or service we use.

Derek Land has designed and developed websites for clients around the world and written on blogging and social ethics for several widely read online publications. You can follow him on Twitter at derekland or visit his website at www.ThisIsInspired.com.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Month With BufferApp

9 Lessons I Learned from Running a Sweepstakes

Posted: 11 Oct 2011 07:05 AM PDT

This guest post is by Jonathan Thomas of Anglotopia.net.

A common way for a blog to build its newsletter and traffic base is to hold a contest. My blog, Anglotopia, has been around for over four years now and we’ve had various successes and failures with contests. Eventually we basically just stopped having them, as they really weren’t worth the time.

Image copyright Yuri Arcurs - Fotolia.com

Then earlier this year, an opportunity presented itself, thanks to the generosity of one of our airline partners, to hold a sweepstakes—this time the prize was a free trip to London. The airline would provide the tickets, we roped in some other partners to provide other aspects of the trip, and then covered the rest of the costs ourselves.

What followed was a huge lesson in how to manage a major sweepstakes—something we’d never done before. It was a true trial by fire. Here are some of the key lessons we learned.

Lesson 1: Prepare infrastructure

Take what you think your server will need, and double it. We moved to a new server right before we launched the sweepstakes, but when the competition really started to get traction, our server couldn’t cope and crashed several times.

A major organization plugged the contest to their email list of 300,000 subscribers and the server just collapsed under the deluge. This leads to angry entrants who won’t hesitate to email you and complain, but it also hurts your credibility.

Lesson 2: Find a good third-party data collector

The biggest problem we had off the bat was finding a way to gather what we hoped would be thousands of entries. Because of compliance issues (explained below) and the types of data we had to get from entrants, we couldn’t use a simple Mailchimp form.

We needed a custom form that collected all the data into a database that we could download in Excel format to share with the partners, as well as automatically add to our mailing list. We also needed a service that would send entrants right into Mailchimp, rather than have us import the list (which creates more compliance problems). And we had to balance cost as well.

In the end we chose Formstack as we could easily scale their pricing to work with the number of entries we were expecting, and then scale it back down when the contest was over.

Lesson 3: Canadians get cranky

Because of the nature of the prize, the contest was only open to US residents in the lower 48 states. I got several dozen emails from Canadians who were cranky that they couldn’t enter the contest. They usually get a raw deal when it comes to contests like this. I wished I could have opened the contest to other countries, but realistically we just couldn’t.

Think about your target audience, and also think about who you’re going to offend when putting together the prize. We didn’t suffer any long-term damage from mad Canadians, but it wasn’t pleasant getting their angry emails.

Lesson 4: No matter how simple you make it, people just won’t get it

People by and large are not easy to reach—even when they enter a contest. They’ve got lives, they’re busy, and most of the time they just don’t read the pages they’re looking at.

Keep entry to the contest as simple as possible—all we had was a form that people filled out, and even this proved too much for some people. You may be tempted to make a complicated process, but if you do this, you’ll just get more angry emails from people who just don’t get it. The KISS principle applies here: keep it simple, stupid.

Lesson 5: Provide several ways to enter

A custom contact form feeding into a database is a simple enough solution to allows people to enter a contest. The problem we ran into that situation was that people using older browsers (*cough* IE6 *cough*) couldn’t see the form, period. I would get very angry emails from people wondering why they couldn’t see the form, despite instructions telling them it was there. Telling someone to use another browser just made them angrier.

So, my advice is: provide the form entry, also provide a hard-coded link to the form, and also have buried in the terms and conditions a way for people to enter manually. Also, it’s fine to use Facebook to generate entries, but I would not recommend making a Facebook-only contest, as this makes people who hate Facebook angry (and there are lots of them, I now know!).

Lesson 6: Understand compliance

The biggest issue you face with running a contest is complying with various laws and regulations which vary from state to state. I am not a lawyer: I am a small business without the resources available to hire a sweepstakes lawyer. So, I did the next best thing—I grabbed the terms and conditions from a similar contest, then just edited them to fit my site, and put everything under my LLC (in the USA, a Limited Liability Company).

Don’t even think of holding a sweepstakes if you’re not incorporated, as you can open yourself up personally to lawsuits. You’ll also need to check with your local tax authority about how to deal with the value of the prize. Most companies pass off the tax liability to the winners—something they’ll have to understand when entering.

Lesson 7: Your email list will not be golden

When all was said and done and the sweepstakes was over, we added 15,000 people to our email list. We were at 1,000 before, so this provided a massive amount of growth. Good things happen when we deploy our weekly newsletter to that number of subscribers.

The problem, though, will be with the quality of your list. Sweepstakes listing sites picked up on our contest, so we got a lot of entries from people who wouldn’t normally visit our site and weren’t interested in our niche or our message. When we deployed our first post-content newsletter to our email list, we got hundreds of unsubscribes and spam abuse reports from people who couldn’t figure out who we were despite the fact that the only way they’d be on the list was because they entered the contest.

This is all well and good except that if you use a third-party service like Mailchimp and you have a high abuse rate, you’ll have your account suspended—no matter how much you’re paying them. The lesson here is that sweepstakes lead to a low-quality email list—we’re still shedding subscribers weekly three months on—but the list is still going strong and it’s been very worthwhile. There will always be list attrition, especially as your list grows.

Lesson 8: Choose a winner the right way

To choose a winner—even if you have thousands of entries—is simple: go to Random.org and have it generate a random number between one and the total number of entries you have.

Choosing the winner takes five seconds. Contacting them and letting them know they won is a whole other matter. Set out in the terms and conditions that if they don’t respond within a reasonable window, you’ll choose another winner. Once you’ve contacted the winner, it’s your duty to make sure they are able to claim their prize, and that includes hassling sponsors. If your sponsors pull out after the fact, you’ll have to provide the prize instead to avoid a lawsuit.

I think this is the most fun part of running a sweepstakes—making someone’s day (or in our case, their year) by telling them they’ve won a major prize. The winner of our sweepstakes was very responsive and grateful for everything we were doing for them.

Lesson 9: Manage costs

Despite the prizes being provided for free, it cost money to run our contest, and your costs may vary. We had to invest in server infrastructure, Formstack for data collection, and so on. When the contest was over, we had to upgrade our Mailchimp account to a much more expensive tier due to the size of our new email list.

You may also want to consider marketing costs—we got a lot of free promotion for the contest, so we didn’t spend much on marketing, but we had to have graphics made, and it’s not a bad idea to do some Google Adwords or Facebook advertising to get the attention of the right people. Ideally, the costs of running a contest will lead to direct growth in your business, so that it won’t matter too much.

Have you ever run a sweepstakes? What lessons did you learn?

Jonathan Thomas runs Anglotopia.net—the website for people who love Britain—it started off as a hobby blog and turned into his full-time job thanks, in large part, to advice from ProBlogger. He also runs Londontopia.net—the website for people who love London. You can connect with him on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

9 Lessons I Learned from Running a Sweepstakes

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