Buffer

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.

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.

At the time f using Buffer – there weren’t many social media content schedulers on the market. Buffer was inexpensive and easy to use. It was easy to integrate Buffer with Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. The most impactful feature was how easy it was to use and that you could schedule multiple posts to go out automatically which is a huge time saver.

Buffer was extremely glitchy. There were periods of time that it would not post the content and you wouldn’t know unless you checked. Once this had happened a few times I started to not trust it anymore. As I publish a lot of content at once for multiple businesses it was no longer sustainable to keep checking if posts were going out or not.