There are a ton of apps out there to help you boost your Twitter efficacy, some of the biggest being HootSuite, TweetDeck, Spredfast and CoTweet. Most of these tools either help you schedule future tweets or provide useful analysis and metrics on your reach and engagement. These sorts of applications enhance usage while making it less of a chore and provide feedback that helps you tweak your strategy, but you’re usually stuck combining platforms to get the right balance of feedback and realtime usage that you want.

That’s what makes Buffer — a new web app we’ve been testing — different. Buffer allows you to schedule tweets and measure feedback and relative success of each message within a single platform. Buffer suggests times of day for posting based on when you’ve received the most retweets, mentions and click-throughs, too.

You can check out an example of some of the feedback Buffer provides on the tweets you’ve posted through their platform below. There you can see the icons for the accounts that retweeted you, how many retweets you’ve received, number of click-throughs, mentions and favorites.

You can post through Buffer without scheduling ahead of time and you’ll see utility in comparing suggested times against other times.  You’ll find that certain times of day really do work better than others when trying to maximize your reach and engagement.  I’ve found that the 8:10am and the 4:49pm times do really well for our content when compared to other times throughout the day.

While Buffer is useful and we’ll continue to test the service, I’d like to point out that automating your posts isn’t necessarily the best way to engage your followers.  I would suggest a mix of buffering important tweets but continue to monitor feedback and engage your audience with sincerity.