Earlier this year my favorite social media sharing tool Buffer decided to terminate what was one of my favorite Buffer features–Buffer suggestions. I loved Buffer suggestions, but I understand why they decided to end the service since; 1) Buffer is not a content curation service so it wasn’t in line with the Buffer strategy, and 2) it resulted in a lot of lazy social posts that were all the same. Just the same, I’d love to see someone outside Buffer take up the torch and provide a curated list of digital marketing posts that are optimized for social sharing. Come to think of it, that would be a great idea for a service my agency could provide and get publicity from and reap the benefits of having a large audience for content we curate…nah, we’re too busy as it is, you do it. Anyway, back to the task at hand. Without Buffer’s expertly curated suggestions, now what? Buffer offers a lot of suggestions (ha!) for replacements, but the one I’ve settled on as my favorite is to use the RSS feed option. As Buffer says in the linked post:
You can also add your favorite RSS feeds to your Buffer social profiles and share links directly inside your Buffer dashboard—Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can connect up to 15 feeds per connected social profile. (Those on the Individual plan can try out Feeds by signing up for a no-risk, cancel-anytime trial of Buffer for Business, which gets you access to feeds, team members, robust analytics, and more.)
Here’s how it works on your desktop/laptop. Under the content tab of a profile you go to “Feeds” and once you add a bunch of RSS feeds the individual posts will show up like this.
To add a particular post to your queue, just click the “add” button. To get rid of it, dismiss it. Easy enough?
The process of adding a feed is also easy. Just click on that “Add & Remove Feeds” button and you get this:
What I love about adding a feed in Buffer is you don’t need to get the feed address! This can often be a bit of a pain to find, but Buffer has a great search tool that you can type keywords into and it pulls up a list of possible matches. Sooo easy! Note: If you want to add a feed on the mobile Buffer app you do need the RSS feed URL. No such search function there (yet), unfortunately. Hopefully Buffer will add it there soon 😉
Buffer does have a limitation of 15 feeds per profile, which I have found to be a minor annoyance. I don’t use this on all my profiles, but on some I would like to have 50 feeds to choose from so that my posts are a bit more diverse, just like my content consumption, and I find that with 15 I have to be quite judicious about which feeds I include.
Were you a fan of Buffer suggestions? What are you doing now that it’s gone?
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