Buffer is an efficient social media manager for content teams

10-second breakdown:

Buffer is a social media tool that helps you to schedule, curate and analyze your posts for maximum reach and engagement. Recommended for content teams looking to queue up large volumes of posts on multiple accounts.

Buffer is used in small (0-50 employees), medium (51-1,000 employees) and enterprise companies (1,000+ employees).

The good:

It has a friendly user interface and provides for a great UX. It’s been designed with simplicity in mind and it definitely shows. It’s really easy to get around and discover features.

It also allows you to post to groups on Facebook where as many other platforms do not.

Oh, and Pablo. Buffer has recently introduced a new tool called Pablo, which helps you find, create, and use images for your posts.

The bad:

It’s not as complex as you might need it to be for managing many social media accounts and more diverse networks.

The app doesn’t have interaction and engagement features, just publishing. In their defense, they did say that from the start – “Buffer is the easiest way to publish on social media. “

There is no bulk upload feature and no way to see things like mentions and new followers, which is essential to the whole social media strategy thing.

There isn’t an overview of all accounts and all posts in the same “frame” so to say. You have to go to each account to see its activity.

How it works:

Like with any similar tool, the first step is connecting your social media accounts. Buffer supports:

• Facebook: profile, page and group (for groups you do have to be the admin)
• LinkedIn: profile and company page
• Twitter: profile
• Google+: business pages
• Pinterest accounts (On Awesome and Business plans)

Next up, you’ll want to set up your posting schedule for each network. If you already know the best posting times that’s great; if not, Buffer can analyze your posts over time and give you a clear idea of what content performs bets and when so as to adjust your posting times.

Start posting by writing a post and selecting the networks you want it published on and Buffer will create a publishing queue that follows the afore-mentioned scheduled times. This is incredibly helpful for social media managers, who can sit down and fill-up their posting queue once a week and then move on to their other tasks.

To add a post, click the “what do you want to share” box at the top of the page, and type or paste in your post. Click the avatars for your profiles to choose which profiles this post will go to. You can add to queue, share now, share next (which means the post will go to the top of your queue, instead of the end of the queue) or schedule post (which enables you to set a custom posting time).

Then, once you add it to your Buffer, you will see it under the “queue” tab for those profiles. Once the post has gone out you can click on the “analytics” tab to see how it performed.

New, relevant content can simply be added later on using the web app or the browser extension available for Chrome, Safari or Firefox. Whenever you are on a page you want to share, just click the Buffer icon in the top right corner of your browser and the post will be added your queue.

For all you security connoisseurs out there, it’s worth mentioning that you can enable a 2-step login for your account. With this enabled, Buffer will ask for a second authentication code that gets sent to your mobile phone via text or free mobile app before logging you in.

Curating content is really easy with the browser extension but you also have other in-app options. Well, at least one – RSS Feeds – because the second one – suggestions – has just been removed from the app.

Feeds are currently limited to Awesome and Business users on Buffer, enabling you to connect up to 15 feeds for each of your social profiles. In the content – feeds section of your dashboard, you should see the option to “Add a Feed” with a search bar below. Type in the name or URL of the website you’d like to add, then click “Add Feed”.

Team members can enjoy the many benefits of the collaboration features available in the Business plan, such as scheduling content in the contributions queue, manage permissions and moderate contributions.

You can follow the performance of your posts in the analytics section. If one post in particular has a higher number of shares, retweets or favorites, it will be marked as “Top Post (or Top Tweet)”.

Every social network has its own metrics, for example Twitter has “Most Retweets”, “Most Favorites”, “Most Replies”, “Most Clicks” and “Most Reach” (Yes, they meant biggest reach, but symmetry is important).

You can also see what type of content performed best on a particular network – images, links, text posts or retweeted content. With Buffer for Business, you can select custom timeframes for your analytics, integrate your social media activity with Google Analytics and also export this information.

If you want to track campaign links (and you really should), Buffer has a feature that makes sure all links added to updates are unique to each individual update. That means it will display clicks for each update uniquely rather than as an aggregation of all updates you post with that same link. To make sure this is turned on head to the web app. First click the profile on the left, then “Settings” and “Link Shortening”. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see “Campaign Tracking” – click “Yep” and enable the setting.

Overall, Buffer is a great tool for fast social media scheduling and posting, especially if you’re new to the industry. If you’re only interested in posting and aggregating curated content, this is the tool for you.

For complete rankings of all social media management tools, go here.

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