As a social media manager, you likely spend a good chunk of your day scheduling content for your brand’s social media profiles.

We understand the challenge. Social media scheduling can be a time-consuming process.

So we would love to help!

In this post, I’ll be sharing some ways you can save time while scheduling content for social media using Buffer.

How to Save Time While Scheduling Content for Social Media
How to Save Time While Scheduling Content for Social Media

6 ways to save time scheduling content for social media

1. Create a posting schedule

Buffer posting schedule
Buffer posting schedule

Instead of selecting a time for every single post you’re scheduling, Buffer (and several other social media management tools) allow you to create a posting schedule that can help take all that hassle away.

Your Buffer posting schedule is a schedule of your preferred posting times. Whenever you schedule a post (i.e. “Add to Queue”), the post will fill up the next available time slot on your posting schedule.

For example, for the screenshot above, imagine that we have posts scheduled until Sunday. The next post we schedule or “Add to Queue” will fill up the Monday 7:47 AM slot and be posted on that day and time.

So rather than having to select a time every time you schedule a post (which can be quite troublesome), you can simply hit “Add to Queue”. Hassle-free.

You can find your posting schedule in Buffer by going to Settings > Posting Schedule.

Pro tip: Your posting schedule is unique to each of your connected social media accounts. As your best times to post for each social media platform is likely different, this will allow you to create unique posting schedules for each social media accounts.

2. Use a browser extension

Buffer browser extension
Buffer browser extension

With our browser extension (available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera), you can easily schedule any great content you come across online.

The browser extension will enable you to do three powerful ways of scheduling. (There’s a fourth way for advanced users. See pro tip below!)

Schedule from the web

Whenever you come across an article that you think your audience might like, click on the Buffer extension button on your browser. You’ll see a Buffer composer appear in the middle of your browser. From there, you can select the social media accounts you want to share to and customize the post for each social media platform.

Schedule from within an article

Here’s an even faster way to schedule a post once you find an article worth sharing.

If you want to attach an image to your post, hover over the image and you’ll see a button appear on the image. When you click on the “Share image” button, the same Buffer composer will appear. But this time, the image will already be attached to your post.

Buffer share image
Buffer share image

If you want to share a quote from the article instead, highlight the quote, right-click, and select Buffer > Buffer Selected Text.

Buffer selected text
Buffer selected text

This time, the text will appear in the Buffer composer in quotation marks, with the link appended to the post.

Buffer share a quote
Buffer share a quote

Schedule retweets from Twitter

Finally, you can even schedule Twitter retweets from the platform directly.

When you have the Buffer browser extension installed, you’ll see an additional button at the bottom of tweets.

Schedule retweet
Schedule retweet

When you click on it, you’ll see the Buffer composer again but this time with the tweet you want to retweet. You can add a comment (optional) or the retweet will appear as a native retweet on Twitter.

Buffer retweet
Buffer retweet

You can also click on the retweet button on Twitter and select “Buffer Retweet”.

Pro tip: The…