Buffer And Feedly: A Social Media Tag Team That Will Help You Dominate

 

Last week I wrote about a content scheduling strategy I use by combining Buffer and Feedly. But that's not all these two apps can do. They're both packed with helpful tricks and shortcuts that can make your process of curating content easy and efficient. When you combine them together, they become a tag-team threat that can help you save time and generate more interaction on your social channels. Here are some of their best moves.

Queue up Buffer straight from Feedly

This is the most straightforward combo feature, and it's a great excuse to switch to Feedly from whatever RSS reader you currently use.

Count characters with Feedly and quote to Buffer to double your content

One of the smartest things I've read in the last year came from Buffer's blog. Belle Beth Cooper wrote that you should post content more than once to your social channels in order to test different headlines, different time zones and different content sharing types. Doing this has effectively tripled my output and my incoming engagement.

Feedly makes it super easy to do with its character counter. Let's say you've already Buffered a blog post you like by posting the headline and a link. Go and highlight a quote you like from the post (Twitter loves quotes), and watch what Feedly does:

Now you can see what will fit on Twitter, and what will fit within the optimal number of characters for your other social networks. Plus, you'll have just doubled how many posts came from the content you just found. That gives you more chances to be seen and retweeted/shared.

'Buffer this image' to triple your content

Here's where shit just gets crazy. If you've got the Buffer extension for Google Chrome, you secretly have a feature on your right-click menu called "Buffer this image." Find an image you like in that same found-content in Feedly as before, and you've suddenly tripled your sharing output:

Best of all, you've created three completely unique posts—all from the same piece of content.

(Side note: You're probably noticing that "Pin It" button in the top-left of the image. Yeah, you can pin images straight from Feedly, too.)

BONUS: Stack the deck with IFTTT

One of the things that made wrasslin' tag teams like Edge and Christian so successful was having an ace in the hole—a partner who could sneak into the ring and give them an extra hand when needed. For E&C that was usually Rhyno or Kurt Angle. For you, that partner is If This Then That (IFTTT).

With IFTTT, you can build "recipes" that automate actions across social networks and apps. For instance, I can tell IFTTT to save every link I tweet to Delicious so I have it saved for later. That saves me the step of having to Buffer something and then save it to my Delicious account. Or I can tell it to post a headline and link to Buffer every time I bookmark something in Feedly—now I don't even have to use the Buffer sharing button.

IFTTT can be an insanely useful tool, especially when trio-ed with Buffer and Feedly. Play around with it a bit, check out some of the recipes other users have created, and see what you can implement that works for you.

Put everything together

Again, dovetailing off my scheduling post from last week, here's an example of a morning workflow that could help save a ton of time throughout the day:

• Check Feedly for shareable content.
• When you find something good, bookmark it, and make sure you have an IFTTT recipe set up to Buffer your Feedly bookmarks.
• When you find something really good, Buffer the link with the headline, a quote and an image. Optimize those three types of posts for each of your social networks.
• You're done!