To Buffer, or Not

“Just be yourself” sure sounds like a good motto to live by. It’s essentially why Buffer, the tool to automatically Tweet on a schedule, seemed like a crazy idea to me at first. After all, if something’s automatically Tweeting on your behalf while you’re asleep, that’s not really authentic and being yourself, is it? Sure, all my followers aren’t online whenever I tweet, but at least the ones that are online at the moment I post something know it’s genuinely me saying what I said right now.

But how real is social networking, anyhow? On Facebook, your stream of updates typically shows the stuff Facebook think you’ll want to see, and I’ve noticed posts from my siblings showing up above far more recent posts from friends I rarely talk to. Twitter, on the other hand, is a stream of consciousness of the whole world, and unless you go back and read older posts you’ll only see what’s posted right when you open your Twitter app. Either way, you miss far more than you see, either by the network only showing what it thinks you want to see or because you aren’t watching the stream of messages 24/7.

Let’s stop pretending social networking is authentic. It’s not. We post the updates we want people to see, the doctored pictures we’ve taken just to showcase our most interesting lives, and like the pages that we both authentically like and think will appeal to our peer group (and avoid liking those we secretly like but don’t need to make too public). That movie that you love but was a bust on Rotten Tomatoes? Eh, just leave it off — no need to get ribbed over liking that one.

We’re perfecting the picture-perfect idealistic versions of our online identities in our own fictional online world, and then have the audacity to complain about certain ways of using social networking not being authentic.

Making it Meaningful

But then, something about the whole idea of scheduling social media posts still strikes me as wrong. After all, if we’re supposed to be building friendships online — if that’s the whole point of social networking, to start with — then what on earth does automatically posting gain you? Sure, we’re already not being authentic — whatever that really means in reality — but shouldn’t there still be something sacred about our conversations? Or have we already let our robotic overlords take control of the conversation for us?

Perhaps that goes back to the very core of the idea behind social networking. See, there’s a bit of a fallacy we’re living out every time we login to Facebook: humans can’t really be friends with hundreds and thousands of people. Dunbar’s Number says we can have at most 150 stable relationships, and in reality, I doubt many people have more than a half-dozen or so close friends, especially if you have a decently large extended family already. The rest end up being acquaintances you know but aren’t really close to — and the ones beyond #150 or so are people you at best occasionally broadcast to and at worse are a meaningless random number on your profile.

You’ve got to pick how you use social networking. You could use it to keep your friends in the loop on what’s up in your life. If you and your limited group of friends only use one network — say, Facebook — like that, then there’d never be a need for tools like Buffer. You can afford to be authentic, posting only when you really want to post, and everything will just work. You’ll likely wonder what the rest of us keep complaining about with social networking.

But odds are that’s not enough. We want to share ourselves with the world, and our buddy list isn’t enough. Plus, our interests change, and we want to make new connections, and increasingly in this global, flatter economy we have to market ourselves.

Ah, goodness. Just give up and embrace it. You can be authentic in DMs and emails and private messages — that’s where my real friend conversations take place, in 900 word treatises. Facebook, even, is my censored authentic “personal” self, where I share pictures of picnics and vacations, and (very) occasionally write updates, but sharing my tech articles and promoting myself makes no sense there. It does, however, make sense on Twitter and App.net, where I’m trying to build new connections and broadcast myself.

Your public updates can be authentic if you’re treating your network as just your friend group. That’s Facebook, for me — and even still, it’s filled with people I don’t really know, but whatever. It’s where family and people that know me in real life are, so it works for that. But if you’re trying to broadcast yourself, trying to share with the world (or a thousand followers), nothing’s really authentic anyhow. Embrace the broadcast mode — that’s all there really is.

So Buffer.

And so I came around to the idea of Buffer, enough that called it “the best social networking tool today” in my Web.AppStorm review. I wasn’t joking, either: if there’s one social media tool you need to post to a number of social network accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and App.net daily, then Buffer’s the one tool that beats them all. It simplifies things by letting you broadcast posts on a schedule to all the networks you use, without taking more than a few seconds of your time. That’s valuable.

I still think you shouldn’t use it indiscriminately, just to post witty quotes and other filler content. But when you’ve got something to share, and want to make sure all of your followers see it, why not use the best tool for the job? Scheduling posts is just another tool, one you should put to use if it makes sense for you, and one that can free your time for better things than worrying about whether your followers see what you wrote. It’s a tool I’m glad I started using.

Originally published on September 10th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 5

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.