This article will provide you with a thorough discussion of what Buffer brings to the table and answer the question “is Buffer any good”. It can be what is best for your company and the journey you will be taking. But it will certainly give you a perspective on how this tool delivers and how it has helped us with our social media presences.
One of the most difficult aspects of starting an online business is relying on algorithms to maximize audience engagement. However, one has to consider the day and time to post. This can become troublesome, especially when posting on different social platforms.
Without any tool, you need to manually post to different accounts every day until you reach your goal. This feels like a lot of work, right? Good thing there’s Buffer. A social media management software that answers your worries for your startup business.
What is Buffer?
Buffer is a multipurpose social sharing tool that aims to help brands and businesses engage more with their audience through drafting and scheduling posts across different social network channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Who Created Buffer?
Buffer was created by Joel Gascoigne in October 2010 in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Buffer was founded after a year and a half of using Twitter. He noticed how his followers liked his shared links to blog posts and quotes.
He liked how he was able to connect with smart and interesting people and decided to do it frequently. However, he realized that manually scheduling the tweets was tiresome, and after numerous mistakes and a long year and a half of building his startup business, he got interested in the work of Eric Ries and his writing on the Lean Startup methodology, which birthed his key realization: if he wanted his idea to be more than just a hobby and tool, he needed to test whether other people would find the idea useful.
From there, he took a lean approach, making use of his 1,700 followers on Twitter, and surveyed and piloted whether the said product would become a need in the future. After several experiments and multiple feedbacks, he was given the go-ahead to build out the full product, which resulted in Buffer.
Top benefits of Buffer
The top benefits that Buffer provides are the following:
- Select multiple times to schedule posts throughout the day.
- Choose the desired action for posting from options such as “share now,” “share next,” or “schedule post.”
- Allows cross-posting of one image with different captions to various social media platforms
- Analyzes data from a specific range or by comparing custom sets of detailed analytics. It also allows data to be exported.
Best Features of Buffer
Buffer has three main features that collectively promote a smooth journey into the online business world. These are:
- Buffer Publish
- Buffer Reply
- Buffer Analyze
Buffer Publish
Buffer Publish allows a user to directly create posts and schedule them across different social networks from its platform.
Buffer Reply
Buffer Reply enables an efficient way to respond to all social interactions, such as comments and messages, from one central inbox. In addition, it promotes team management by allowing users to assign a conversation to different members and has “collision detection” wherein it notifies any member who is replying, preventing any confusing replies.
Buffer Analyze
Buffer Analyze is a built-in social analytics dashboard that presents actionable insights on which type of content performs best on each channel against specific engagement metrics.
Buffer Pricing
Buffer offers a 14-day trial period. Once it ends, there are three pricing plans with a free option available: essentials, team, and agency. The prices range from $6 to $120 and no credit card is required. You’ll be able to choose to pay monthly or yearly; if you decide to pay yearly, you’ll be able to receive a discount of 15%.
Buffer Pros and Cons
Now that you understand what Buffer offers, let’s delve into its pros and cons to reach a final verdict on whether this can be a good product for you. Consider this section to be your group of friends who would express their feelings about a guy you’ve been dying to introduce to them and watch their reactions to how they’d see him as a potential someone to be with.
Buffer Pros
- It has an intuitive and straightforward interface that can smoothly perform its main actions, from posting to scheduling.
- Provides the best times to post and automatically schedules them to get maximum management.
- Buffer has Pablo, a free graphic design tool to help create social media images for different social networks.
- It has good integrations with other software, which includes Canva, Zapier, WordPress, and much more.
- Offers a free plan with a limited number of posts per channel that small businesses can utilize, and once they need to increase the number of posts, they can opt to pay for the subscription fee depending on the plan they choose.
Overall, Buffer is an amazing product that ensures all your scheduled content is posted at the right time and day to ensure maximum engagement. Moreso offers a free image editing tool to promote the working all-in-one application. Usually, the majority would want to hear the bad news first. But we decided to switch it up a notch; now let’s get into the cons of this product.
Buffer Cons
- It does not have monitoring tools for activities such as mentions, searches, and hashtags; hence, you need to do this manually or with another tool.
- Buffer Reply is not integrated into the Buffer platform itself, so it requires a separate payment plan.
- It needs more involvement in AI and ML technologies to create a better content recommendation algorithm
Since Buffer focuses only on scheduling content, it lacks a few attributes that any other robust software has, including advanced analytics or social interactions. As a result, this product can only fit marketers looking for a tool that mainly schedules and posts content. As a result, we have provided a list of alternatives that may be appropriate products for you to use with your business.
Buffer Alternatives
Here is a list of alternatives:
- Hootsuite
- Post Planner
- CoSchedule Marketing Suite
- Semrush
- Localize
- Marketing 360
- Feedly
- Atomic Ai
- Yotpo
- Asking Franklin
My Experience Using Buffer
Buffer is a remarkable tool that is very easy to use and can be a great tool for campaign management as well. It can easily measure and analyze each channel’s performance for a better and deeper understanding of what content favors the audience. As follows, it presents audience demographics to determine whether it has reached its target audience or not.
Buffer is a great tool for posting and scheduling content. It has reduced the workload of many tasks, especially with manually switching between different platforms to post content or research what time perfectly reaches our target audience.
Conclusion: Should You Buy Buffer?
As a final observation, Buffer delivers on its promise. It provides a direct-to-the-point platform that can easily post and schedule content. Based on what the founder, Joel Gascoigne, envisioned it to be, it is meant to remove the hassle of manually posting content across different platforms.
Additionally, Buffer offers affordable pricing plans and is great for startups or small businesses that are searching for a great start for online exposure since Buffer schedules content based on the time consumers are most active.
You can never go wrong with a social media scheduling tool, especially with Buffer. If you’re looking for a tool that automatically schedules your posts, then this tool is for you.