As simple and straightforward as it gets for social media scheduling
May 21, 2018
As simple and straightforward as it gets for social media scheduling
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Buffer
We use Buffer for social media scheduling and management within my unit, as part of a shared account across several units in the organization. After our Hootsuite Enterprise contract ran out, we were looking for a cost-effective solution that could help with basic management of about 20 social accounts total. We reviewed a few different tools, including Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Tweetdeck, before deciding that Buffer was the simplest solution at the best price.
- Simple to set up, add accounts, and get started. The barrier to entry for social media users/managers at all levels is fairly low, leading to greater adoption within the organization. I've had experience with other tools with many more bells and whistles but required a fair amount of training to take advantage of them. This boils things down to what we really need to keep our social media activity consistent.
- Takes the guesswork out of scheduling. Figuring out when to share content, and how often, can take significant time. I like the Buffer queue feature that enables you to set a schedule once for each of your accounts, and then just drop new content in and not worry about whether there are holes in your calendar.
- Adding content for multiple profiles at once. It's nice to be able to compose a message and quickly schedule it to go out on multiple profiles with a couple of clicks/minor adaptations. I use this feature regularly and it saves a lot of time vs. having to schedule for profiles individually.
- Custom tracking. When sharing to multiple profiles, it's nice to be able to include different tracked links for each profile. By default, Buffer doesn't make this very easy - the standard campaign is just set to 'buffer', which can make traffic difficult to differentiate if you forget to create a unique link.
- Media editing. Images and videos are simple to upload and edit, but I do wish there was some more customization available to ensure that you select the right size for a given network. I've also run into cases where an image I thought I'd uploaded wasn't actually shared along with the post.
- Account management. We ran into an issue within our organization where we realized that not all our accounts were actually included within the Pro plan (vs. the free plan) because of it was required that our account administrator add the accounts. This may make sense in general, but was an issue for our organization with several distinct business units. Enabling more flexibility/permission levels for users would be nice.
- Account disconnection. Buffer seems to 'lose' its connection to LinkedIn often, which may be more of a problem with the LinkedIn API than with the software, but it's a pain to have to re-verify the page and in some cases re-schedule updates.
- It's definitely freed up my time to focus on other marketing activities by reducing repetitive tasks like scheduling the same message across multiple profiles.
- The analytics feature offers a simple way to communicate the impact of our social media accounts internally, which has helped spur more investment.
- Our social media activity (in terms of post volume) has increased by about 20% since we started to use the tool.
I've previously used Sprout Social and while I think that is a more robust product overall (including its reporting/tracking capabilities), the cost is much more manageable with Buffer. As compared to Hootsuite, Buffer has a far more intuitive interface and makes it simpler to share and manage content. The thing that both of those tools have that Buffer lacks is the ability to monitor feeds and respond to feedback within the tool - it's really just for sharing content.