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There are few things that spark as much joy as being able to organize anything and everything by color. It’s an easy and visual way to lay things out, and in the world of content and social media, staying organized is one of the best ways to keep on top of planning. That’s one of many reasons that so many of us at Buffer were looking forward to adding tags to our Buffer posts. These handy, color-coordinated tags are like a breath of fresh air for anyone looking to add some visual organization to their content creation and planning.
Read more about our latest feature: Tags
There are plenty of ways to use this new feature within Buffer to keep scheduled posts and ideas all grouped together. For inspiration, we gathered up use cases from both the beta users who have been helping us test this feature and the Buffer team.
(P.S.: Join Buffer’s open beta anytime and pop over to our community to let us know what you think of the latest features.)
With that, here are 11 ways to utilize this beautiful new feature to its fullest potential, five directly from our team and community.
5 ways we’re using tags at Buffer
As with many things in life, we can all have access to the same things but use them entirely differently. Tags is one of those features in Buffer. The beauty of tags is that they are flexible and customizable to how your brain works and how you want to see your content, ideas, and posts. Here are a few ways that our team and community are already using tags:
To organize post ideas and drafts by topics
The most straightforward way to use tags is to organize social post ideas and drafts by topic or type of post.One of our beta testers, Andrea of Andrea Likes Birds has been using tags for just this over the last few weeks since she’s had access to the feature. “I have tags for trips I’ve taken, where I want to keep the posts grouped as a location-based story. I use tags to ID specific types of posts, like posts for specific days or focuses, or even by the type of bird!” (How beautiful are Andrea’s ideas and tags below? 🤩)
Buffer’s Staff Product Manager, Brandon Green, has taken the same approach. “I’m using Tags to organize post ideas (and drafts) by topic, mostly for LinkedIn content.” He’s organized his posts based on whether they are product-focused content, remote work content, work-life balance, and a few other topics.
Here’s a glimpse of Brandon’s tags:
To track post performance in analytics
Buffer’s Social Media Manager, Mitra Mehvar, has been using tags to get analytics reports for specific posts “so I can get a better look at how content is performing and make any changes if needed.” This is an easy way for anyone to keep close tabs on performance for various types of posts or topics of posts. Here’s the view Mitra is looking at when she’s tracking the performance of our Open Books content:
To organize AI prompts
Tami Oladipo, a Content Writer at Buffer, also happens to be one of our teammates who is the most knowledgeable about AI. She’s shared her approach for collaborating with AI in the past and has been using tags to “sort the custom AI prompts I share in the Social Media Newsletter” because she says, “it helps separate it from my more random spurts of writing in the Ideas section.”
To organize posts based on content pillar
If you have really specific social media goals, you might have broken down your content into content pillars. That’s what Kirsti Lang, a Content Writer at Buffer has done. “I’m using tags to organize all my posts and ideas by content pillar, in the hope of pinpointing what type of content resonates the most on each platform. I’m just starting out with this new system, so I’m looking forward to digging into the analytics for each tag as I post more on each of the pillars!”
To distinguish between ideas for different accounts
Another way to use tags is to differentiate between content ideas for different accounts as well as topics. Nathan Nannenga, a Senior Product Manager at Buffer, also runs a small business outside of work and uses tags to speed up his process for scheduling new content. “I use tags to help sort the content I want to post on different channels for my small business. When it’s time to schedule something new, it makes finding content for that channel a snap, as I’ve got a sortable repository of ideas and content ready to go.”
I do the same — I have posts for personal accounts but also for a podcast account that I run, and using tags, I can quickly distinguish between those ideas and filter them when I’m batch-creating content based on the account I’m creating content for.
Here’s what my tags look like:
6 more ways to use tags
There are tons more ways to use this new feature as well. A few ideas we’ve had as a team are:
Collaboration: You can use tags to work more efficiently with your team. Tag ideas from different teammates, add a status if a post needs to be reviewed, or add other context like “waiting on imagery” to any content within Buffer.
Repurposing: Clearly mark content that can be added to your Buffer queue again with a tag like “evergreen” or “monthly” for content to repurpose and share every month. This helps ensure your best content gets repeated visibility.
Track content sources: If you’re curating content from different sources, tags can help you track and credit the original creators or websites. You’ll also be able to see in analytics if content from specific sources is performing better than others.
Localization: If your audience is global, tags can help you sort content based on region or language, ensuring localized content reaches its intended audience.
Tracking goals: You might have several goals for your social content, engagement, brand awareness, web traffic — you could assign a tag to each goal and make sure that you’re both creating content across all of your social media goals but also track the performance of that content later in your analytics based on the tag.
Integrate with Zapier: Buffer has a powerful integration with Zapier. One way to use the integration is to connect a platform where you keep content ideas and have those automatically added to Buffer as well with the correct tag. For example, I have a database in Notion I keep of quotes from articles and books, I can connect it to Buffer via Zapier so that anytime I add a new quote to that database, it’s added as an idea to Buffer with the tag “quotes.”
Think we missed a great way to use tags? Leave a comment below with how you use it, and we might add it to this blog post. 😉
