What is BUFFER and What Does it Do?

If you work in the creative industry, particularly in the social media world, you've undoubtedly heard of Buffer. For those who haven't, Buffer is an internet-based social media planning tool that helps users plan and schedule content in advance for a variety of social media channels.

Now, Buffer isn't for everybody. For example, if you use your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to post pictures of your life and communicate with friends, you don't need Buffer. If you're a social media agency and you have 20 clients who need their social media managed, Buffer will be your best friend.

Here is a look inside the Buffer's dashboard:

Accounts

On the left-hand side, that's where you'll find all of your connected accounts. At present, you can attach Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, & Pinterest accounts. What more do you need?

Content

The dashboard is super easy to use and very straightforward. When you click on an account from the left-hand side, the content calendar will pop up. If you have content planned, you'll see the type of material, on what day, and for what time it's scheduled for.

Approval

An exciting feature in Buffer is called the approval section. Within each account, there's a tab called awaiting approval. Here's how that feature is designed to work. If you have a content coordinator who is responsible for scraping content, and planning it, he or she can upload it, but if it needs to be approved by say, an account manager, they can then sign off on each post or ask for edits. It's a newer feature, but definitely, one that helps the workflow process in agencies.

Recently, Buffer added their additional tool, Buffer Analyze, to their paid business plans. Buffer Analyze is an analytics tool that allows you to analyze your social media accounts' performance and the individual posts within those accounts. It's a great tool that can work tremendously in conjunction with Buffer publish.

As you can see, Buffer is a great available tool. If you're in the social media business and aren't using Buffer, you're seriously missing out.