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Buffer
What Is Buffer?
Buffer is a social media management software trusted by over 75,000 brands and businesses to drive meaningful engagement and results on social media. Try Buffer's suite of products for planning and scheduling your content, analyzing results, and engaging with your audience. Buffer helps social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.
Who Uses Buffer?
We aim to serve a variety of markets including: publishers, mid-stage startup teams, non-profits, higher education, sports teams, e-commerce, solopreneurs, businesses, and enterprises.
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Reviews of Buffer
One of the best social media management platforms with a high price for teams
Comments: Overall, Buffer is an excellent platform that offers incredible features - but due to the high price for simple features like team management & multiple users, it is not for me. While our social media team was just me, I found it to be the very best platform for social media management - offering a simple UI & high quality features for the free & low-tier accounts - as our team grew, we rapidly outgrew Buffer simply due to pricing, and found that there were similar products at a lower price point that would fit our needs.
Pros:
Buffer is perhaps one of the simplest & easiest social media platforms on the market today; offering comprehensive and crucial features for managing your social media streams. This platform allows for the easy management of multiple social media accounts, allowing you to customize post-times & days, and then schedule posts quickly via the Queue only for those days. It offers built in analytics, direct posting to Instagram & Instagram stories, team management features & more - assuming you are willing to pay for those features. Overall, Buffer was probably my favorite social media management platform due to its simplicity & base features, yet it suffers in a few key areas.
Cons:
I loved using Buffer for the period of time that I actually used it, but quickly discovered that the platform could not suite my needs because of one insurmountable obstacle - price. As a non-profit youth organization, having a low overhead cost for platforms such as this is extremely important, and I quickly found myself unable to continue using Buffer as my social media team grew simply because I could not afford their $65 CAD/month just to be able to have a second user (without admin privileges). The added features like direct Instagram Story & first comment seem interesting for me, but not at the cost $663/annually when there are alternatives (be it, with less features) out there that offer a lower overhead cost AND non-profit discounts. Furthermore, while the platform itself is extremely simple to use, I found their pricing structure & different brand building products to be quite confusing - with products such as "Reply", "Publish" and "Analyze" featuring little to no immediately accessible descriptions, and each one carrying a different pricing structure & subscription requirement. Lastly, one feature I've found on other social media platforms (but not on buffer) that I wish were available is the ability to draft a single post that can be queued in multiple social media channels, and customized for each channel. With buffer, you would need to recreate each post - which can take added time dependent on your social media channels.
Alternatives Considered:
Easy to use and essential for my business
Comments: Buffer is one of the more inexpensive social media scheduling and tracking sites. I really like how easy it is to link all my different social media accounts and schedule my posts ahead of time. It also makes it really easy to post to all my social media accounts at once. I like the browser extension that allows me to buffer an image, website, or page on the fly. I also use their app on my smartphone. It gives me all the tools I need for only about $8 per month. I also like that it offers analytics and tracking information on my posts. You can also republish an old post. Another feature I love is the ability to see all your post comments and comment back from Buffer.
Pros:
The ability to link to all different social media accounts. The extension for the web browser is amazing and easy to use. The app for the smartphone is also very easy to use. The free version also has a lot of features. If you do not have a lot of social accounts, the free version works perfectly. You can track the engagement and analytics of your posts. You can actually comment and engage on your posts from the website or app! It's very inexpensive.
Cons:
Nothing really. Sometimes a post gets blocked because of the link, but that's an issue with the social media site and not Buffer directly.
Alternatives Considered:
Buffer is a bare-bones alternative to it's competitors
Comments: Buffer is great for posting directly to social media without having to log into each platform to manage your accounts. IT has a very reasonable price point for the services that it provides.
Pros:
Buffer is easy to use for scheduling and posting to social media. It has saved us a lot of time compared to posting directly to each social media platform. The pricing structure for Buffer is great, and they honor legacy pricing while still passing along the upgrades that normally come with price hikes.
Cons:
The tracking and analytics are a bit lackluster when compared to Hootsuite. I would like to see the ability to monitor and respond to replies and comments directly from the app, too.
Alternatives Considered:
Great Social Media Planning Tool
Comments: Buffer is a great product. I enjoy using it.
Pros:
Buffer has a great UI, its easy to navigate. I also like the Ai assistant it generates the text for social media posts for you.
Cons:
Not much bad to say about it to be honest if I had to pick something it would be that sometimes it takes a while to load after logging in.
Alternatives Considered:
Social Media posting with ease
Comments: What a blessing! A big time safer - especially for Instagram!!
Pros:
I must say the number one thing I like about Buffer is scheduling posts to Instagram without having to trigger them on my phone! The beautiful posts appear on Instagram (and my other social media accounts) when scheduled - even if I'm busy doing something else. I also like the ability to RE-post things from years ago. Because of this, Buffer is a huge time saver for social media (and my sanity!!)
Cons:
Re-posting isn't easy. and somewhat frowned upon - even though re-posts are from past years. And posting a video is a little cumbersome, but it still works!
