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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

I'm far from the best social media marketer and maybe that explains what I'm about to say, but I can't figure out for the life of me how to effectively use tools like Buffer. I manage Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for my small brand, and the three places are so different, with different audiences and different methods of interaction, that trying to do it in one tool is crazy. I end up writing the same post three times in three different ways anyway, so opening the Facebook app or Twitter app is the least of my concerns.

If usernames and hashtags were the same across the different platforms, it might work. But what you should say on Facebook won't translate to Instagram or Twitter so what's the point?

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I have been in the same boat for my baking website. Used Buffer and didn't see that many results. Then I abandoned Buffer and came up with a strategy that worked for me.

I realize that twitter was a place where I could get a lot of conversions to the website, but not the greatest for engagement. So I created twitter bot using the Wordpress REST API [1] to just pump out links to my recipes. Instagram, on the other hand, is all hand written and takes me some time. Although instagram barely gets anyone too my website, it has been the best tool for me to build a community around. So much so that I am thinking of abandoning the website.

I can't figure out Facebook for the life of me...

[1]: https://github.com/kylevalenzuela/python-wordpress-twitter-b...

I'm pretty similar. I let Wordpress push my new posts to Twitter and that's about it. No one engages, no one comments, they just click through to my site. Sometimes I use Twitter to talk to other related businesses, but real actual people don't interact with me there.

Instagram, I get real actual people reacting, but there's no good way to drive people directly to my site from Instagram. I use it more to engage with the audience and not to drive clicks.

I held off on using Facebook for the longest time, but I've had more engagement there than anywhere else. At this point, 90% of my clicks come from Facebook, and about that much of the social media engagement too. My secret? I have a $1/day ad sitting out there generating about 20 likes per week. Once I hit 500-600 likes from the ad, it because self-sustaining. Enough people would engage with posts that their friends would see it and like or follow as well. Sucks that I had to pay to see any benefit, but I paid Twitter and Instagram too and didn't get squat from it.

Thanks for the insight. I know I am losing out not engaging on the platform. Need to start getting serious about it.

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