Last week we kicked off a new series, in honor of the 2012 Olympic games titled, “My Five Favorite Social Media Tools and How to use Them.” Today we will focus on quickly adding great content, which we will accomplish with both BufferApp and Google News.
We all know that our social media campaigns should be informative, entertaining and useful for your potential clients and followers. One of the easiest ways to add some real-time “informative” information is to broadcast some news very specific to your industry. This can be found through a variety of sources but one of my favorite is Google News (http://news.google.com). Not only can you type and search a category that potential clients in your business would follow, the results can be added to your Google News home page or reduced to a daily email for your simplification. See examples below.
Example of Adding a “Parenting” News Alerts
Example of Adding EMail Google Alerts
With content at our finger tips or at least emailed to us daily, we need a very quick way to get applicable news into our social media streams. That’s where BufferApp comes in. This little web enabled program let’s you capture what your read through your browser and intelligently turns the article into a tweet or post, complete with a shortened link. But the real beauty of this application is it stores and queues these posts for scheduled distribution. For example, in about five minutes of scanning your Google Alerts, you can have interesting articles staged or “buffered” to automatically broadcast in the future.
Example of BufferApp’s Capture Screen
In the example above, I could quickly add to several different campaigns the tragic news of the Colorado Shooting. However, this could be the latest custody law changes if you were an attorney, or the latest housing prices if you are a realtor, or what ever the current news is in your industry. I love BufferApp with Google Alerts. I use them about once a week to sprinkle news related articles into my feed.
How have you used BufferApp? What type of content do you buffer?
Fred Campos is Chief of Marketing at FunCitySocialMedia.com. Like this post? Make sure you subscribe to our blog!
