Ideas for social media material can strike at any time (does anyone else get them right before bed?) But they’re rarely completely formed or ready to share right away.
You could need to make a new video, write a new copy, or run your concept by someone else. There are about a hundred different ways to save postings for later: spreadsheets, word documents, notes applications, post-it notes, handwritten notes, you name it.
You would then copy the content to a social media management platform or directly to your social accounts after it is polished and ready to go.
There are two issues with this:
- It’s inconvenient and time-consuming to download and upload media from one location to another.
- When you’re copying things over, there’s potential for error. Is it correct that it was copied over? Are you sure you scheduled it for the right time?
We’re on a quest at Buffer to make this process easier for you, starting with some significant enhancements to our draughts functionality.
Buffer’s new draughts experience
You’ll be able to do the following with the new and better drafting experience:
- Plan and save content ideas across all of your devices for later. You can make draughts on your phone or computer, and they’ll all be synced.
- To plan out your social schedule ahead of time, add draughts to certain periods on your calendar.
- Any Buffer account, including our free plan, allows you to save and schedule draughts.
Our goal is to make it easier for you to scribble down ideas, revisit them, revise them, and schedule them all in one location, on your own time.
Continue reading to learn more about how it works!
Create draughts from any location.
Whether you’re writing a post in the Buffer mobile app, the desktop calendar view, or the standard queue view, you’ll choose to save it as a draught or add it to your queue.
Drafts can be saved or scheduled.
Sometimes you’ll want to schedule a draught for a specific time, and other times you’ll want to save a draught to a backlog of ideas. Drafts are scheduled in the same way as postings are. You can establish a draught for a specific time window in your queue or calendar or create a custom time for your draught. Scheduled draughts operate as “placeholders,” meaning they won’t be published until they’re added to the queue as a completed post.
Creating a final post from a draught
You can look over a channel’s draughts by heading to the queue and clicking the Drafts tab. Simply add a draught to the queue after you’re satisfied with it and it’s ready to be published. This “confirms” the draught as a completed post, and it will be published at the time you choose.
As a group, we collaborate on draughts.
You can specify permissions for your team members to submit draughts for approval before they’re published if you have a Team or Agency plan. All draughts can be edited, deleted, and moved to the queue by account owners and team members with full posting ability. Team members with restricted access can make changes to their draughts, remove them, and request their permission.
Drafts are available for free.
While collaboration processes are only available to Team and Agency customers, you can still save, modify, and schedule draughts if you’re a “team-of-one” on our Free or Essentials plan.
There will be more to come.
The most difficult component of a successful social media strategy is content development, and generating material is just one minor step. This year, we’ll be focusing a lot on assisting you in creating high-quality content, so stay tuned for more features and upgrades.