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What is Buffer?

Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by brands, businesses, agencies, and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media. We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration (Publish, Reply, and Analyze). Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively. Buffer is a team of real people, aligned in common values. Being a Buffer customer should feel like you have a whole team of people cheering for you. We want to see you succeed on social!

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Feature of Buffer

Buffer Social Inbox and Engagement

If you’re looking for a social media tracker, Buffer Publish won’t help you much. All you can do in the main Buffer tool is get some basic information on your own social media posts, such as what you sent and when you sent it.

This could be enough if you’re a personal user. However, if you’re a business user, then consider checking out Buffer Reply, which works with business Instagram accounts, as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Buffer Reply also includes a social inbox, so you can reply to messages in one place. This is especially useful if you regularly need to respond to customer requests or otherwise engage with your audience. Plus, you can add your own tags to social conversations to keep track of the topics that matter most to you.

Buffer Social Inbox and Engagement

If you’re looking for a social media tracker, Buffer Publish won’t help you much. All you can do in the main Buffer tool is get some basic information on your own social media posts, such as what you sent and when you sent it.

This could be enough if you’re a personal user. However, if you’re a business user, then consider checking out Buffer Reply, which works with business Instagram accounts, as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Buffer Reply also includes a social inbox, so you can reply to messages in one place. This is especially useful if you regularly need to respond to customer requests or otherwise engage with your audience. Plus, you can add your own tags to social conversations to keep track of the topics that matter most to you.

michael buffer

Buffer Team Features

There are no team features in the free or Pro versions of Buffer. You’ll need to upgrade to Buffer Premium for two users, or to Buffer Business for six.

If you’re managing a team and have one of these higher-level accounts, you can set access and permissions for individual social sites. That means team members only have access to the platforms you allow them to use. This is useful for managing your workflow and ensuring that there’s no duplication of tasks.

Another cool feature is the ability to set an approval workflow. That means you can decide which users need to have draft content approved before it goes live. Those who have full access can then review content before adding it to the Buffer calendar.

Buffer External Integrations

You know where Buffer really wins? Its ability to integrate with the external tools you’re probably already using as a social media marketer.

In addition to web, mobile, and browser tools, Buffer Publish works with:

  • Tools for connecting apps, like Zapier and IFTTT
  • Tools for curating and reading content, like Pocket, Feedly, and Scoop.it
  • Twitter management tools, like Commun.it and Followerwonk
  • And many more

Using integrations is seamless, taking you straight into the main Buffer interface for quick content publishing and scheduling.

bruce buffer

Buffer Freebies

One of Buffer’s best features has nothing to do with the main tool. It’s all the stuff you can get for free.

For example, the Buffer blog is one of the best sources of reliable social media information, statistics, and tutorials. There’s also the Buffer Marketing Library, which is an excellent place for beginners and intermediate social media users to get up to speed on strategy and techniques.

You can take advantage of on-demand webinars that cover a ton of different aspects of social media marketing. Plus, Buffer is always putting out free reports that can help you make good decisions when it comes to your communications strategy.

But one of my favorites is the Pablo Image Creator, a tool to help people create shareable social media images fast.

With built-in guidance on image sizes, and templates you can customize quickly, it’s a hugely useful resource, whether you’re using Buffer or not. That also applies to the recently launched Stories Creator, which is a great way to create Facebook and Instagram stories fast.

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Buffer Benefits

Buffer is an app with an organized layout that makes it relatively easy to keep social media accounts updated. It has an automated feature for timing social media posts. Its user interface has a sophisticated appearance with options available for adding social media networks — most notably Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The app offers the ability to make status updates and create tweets. This can be posted across several networks at the same time, while giving a user the option to decide when the post can be posted. A post can immediately be done or the user can opt for the “Add to Buffer” selection. This lets the app decide when it can make the post.

Buffer provides a browser extension made for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox that allows for content sharing on any web page. An icon is added to the current browser that lets a user share a certain link through Buffer within the present web page. It also suggests texts that could go with the link (which can freely be altered). An option is available for making an immediate post or for initially including it in Buffer.

The app’s analytics will determine whether its decision on when to post a user’s content is effective. The embedded analytics gives a smooth balance for small-sized and home-based business users. The information offered is helpful enough in terms of describing the number of clicks, mentions received, retweets, and potential reach of a user’s posts. All these are laid out neatly without overwhelming the user.

what is a buffer

Pros

  • Best management capabilities of the bunch.
  • Drag-and-drop publishing interface is unmatched in usability.
  • Good individual post and inward-facing growth analytics.

Cons

  • Still a young platform that's building out its analytics side.
  • Doesn't provide any data on audience, demographics, keywords, mentions, or competitor comparisons.
  • No Instagram support.

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Buffer Pricing and Discount with Promo, Coupon code

Buffer is one of the more reasonably priced social scheduling platforms. It’s plans are separated into Starter plans and Business plans. The Starter plans are geared more towards individuals, with the most basic plan coming in at a whopping $0 dollars. That will get you a total of 3 integrated accounts and 10 scheduled posts per account. If those numbers won’t cut it, you can upgrade to the Pro plan for $15 month, which allows 8 integrated accounts and up to 100 scheduled posts per account. On the business side, Buffer offers different plans for Small, Medium, and Large companies. The Small comes in at $99/month and offers up to 25 accounts with 2,000 posts each. Medium will set you back $199/month, 50 accounts and 2,000 posts. The Large costs $399/month, with 150 accounts and 2,000 posts each included. All Business plans come with extra features you won’t find in the Individual plans, including advanced social analytics.

buffer social media

Conclusion 

Overall, Buffer Publish is one of the best social media scheduling tools around. It integrates with a ton of other marketing tools and makes social media sharing a breeze.

If you’re just starting out with social media marketing, then you can’t beat the free plan, and Buffer Pro is an affordable upgrade when you need to add more accounts and functionality.

The only issue for business users is the need for social media monitoring and analytics. Since these features are now separate paid tools, it’s difficult to see Buffer as an all-in-one social media dashboard.

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Shafiq Armani
I'm Shafiq Armani, an expert in selling group buying tools. With more than 10 years of experience in the digital marketing industry
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