Testing publer.io & Buffer FREE plans for growing Twitter (X)

Introduction

I always have lots of plans and usually many projects are running in parallel.

That is not always a good thing, because it is hard to keep up with everything. Priorities should always be set and adjusted accordingly.

One of my future plans is to grow my Twitter account, and potentially monetize it. It is not easy to keep a social account active on a frequent basis, let alone more than one! (I am managing some social media accounts on a daily basis, and trust me, it is very time-consuming).

---

If you are thinking to monetize your twitter account, check out this post. You will need to be an X subscriber (appx 10$ a month), to have 5 mil views in 3 months and to have more than 500 followers

---

As I am working on creating a strategy, I was thinking of using hootsuite so that I could easily listen to, and monitor specific keywords etc. But as I tried to log in today, after a long time.. I saw that the free option is not available any more.

So I started researching more tools, ideally with a free plan (which can potentially be upgraded in the future)

What would I want to do with it?

• Schedule Tweets
• Have Analytics
• Connect other accounts? (instagram etc)
• Social Listening

Main Topic
Ideally we are searching for a tool that will be able to create, schedule posts and also have analytics, potentially also perform social listening (monitor tags, brand etc).

Let's check out the below tools and see what we can do with them

Publer.io

I enjoyed the fact that you can simply sign in with twitter and authorize the app - simple as that.

Confirm your email address and you 'r in!

Answer a few questions, create your workplace and ..

Simply connect the accounts you want.
You can connect up to 3 accounts with the free plan

You can see here more information about what is included: https://help.publer.io/en/article/what-is-included-in-publer-free-dliovh

Now let's go to connect Buffer

Buffer.com

https://buffer.com/pricing

To join buffer, you need to sign up with email and password.

Then, you get to choose your next action (I will choose 'connect account')

I was impressed to see that they include mastodon in their connected channels

This is the publishing dashboard, but I must warn you.
Do NOT click on Analytics, Engagement etc .. because you cannot use those with the free plan.

---

Overall, these are my observations from testing out these tools.
First of all, define what channels you wish to grow and make sure that the app you choose has them.
After that, make a research on your content. What will you be posting about? If you want to post threads, you need to know that they are not yet available in publer.io (this feature is supposed to be added later on as they informed me). It is available with Buffer though.
On the other hand, you can schedule many many posts in publer (but only up to 10 every time can be scheduled at the same time), but on Buffer you can schedule up to 30 (It is not clearly stated if this is on a per month basis)

Unfortunately, analytics or engagement are not available in the free plans.

I tried many different apps, but I could not find any other free options. Especially after the change to the Twitter API, the user can no longer get easy access to their statistics. However, you can always check your analytics by visiting https://analytics.twitter.com

My suggestion?
Make an account in both of them and see which one is better for you according to your needs and style!
In the meantime, feel free to follow me and let me know your twitter handle below!

TL;DR

With the recent Twitter API changes, not many free tools can support services such as users' analytics, social listening etc. If you are on a low budget and you are just testing things out like me, you can check out the below tools and use their free versions to publish your posts, polish your content and get some extra ideas for new posts.

If you want to use more twitter features, twitter invites you to become a subscriber and pay $9,92 per month or $104.16 per year.

I would love to know more about your thoughts on how you use twitter at the moment and how you plan to use it in the future. I keep seeing more and more users subscribing, and it feels like a one-way street at the moment.

Thank you for visiting!