Moving to Buffer from another tool?
Buffer is a powerful, yet robust solution that saves you time and helps you grow your audience.
With Buffer, you can dabble with the best of our features whether you’re on a paid or a free plan. While free tools are less common these days, we prioritize delivering a powerful free plan with enough functionality to get you started. Even on our Free plan, you can organize all of your social media content in advance: connect and manage up to 3 social channels (including the newest channels, like Mastodon and TikTok) and schedule up to 30 posts (10 per channel) for free!
Our mission is grounded in serving small businesses and other ambitious individuals, so if you need something a bit more robust than our Free plan, we have that for you. Our Team and Agency plans offer unlimited users, access to a full analytics dashboard, and comment engagement. Oh, right, and there are no contracts to sign!
In this article:
- How to get started right away
- Buffer’s stand-out features
- A full list of Buffer’s features
- What Buffer can’t offer right now
- Using Buffer to bolster your other social efforts
- How to get extra support along your journey
How to get started right away
If you’re ready to get started already, feel free to hop into our Getting started guides to quickly learn how to get around.
A few resources you might be especially interested in:
📺 Watch a video demo
💰 Peruse Buffer’s pricing
Buffer’s stand-out features
We’ll share more about all of our features below, but we wanted to point out several that we think are unique, and not always available with other tools.
Buffer offers a range of unique features, including:
- Unique captions for each social channel — customize unique posts for each social network, yet still, schedule all of the posts with just one click.
- Start Page — a web- and mobile-friendly customizable landing page to use as your link-in-bio.
- Idea collection and storage — a free content library to help you plan out your content calendar.
- Mastodon scheduling — draft, publish, and schedule Mastodon posts.
- TikTok scheduling — draft, publish, and schedule TikTok posts.
- Tags (campaigns) — Track the impact of your social efforts and calls to action.
- Hashtag manager — hashtags populate as you type to help you make your content more discoverable to a relevant audience.
- X/Twitter thread scheduling — schedule threads in advance to 'wow' your audience.
- Unlimited users — With our Team and Agency plans, add unlimited users, set their permissions, and collaborate within Buffer.
- AI Assistant — untangle writers-block in an instant with an assist from AI.
- Integrations — Create images in Canva or choose a royalty-free image from Unsplash. Have your own image? Grab it from Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive right within the composer.
- Customer support - our commitment to quality support is shown by our 94% CSAT rating. And just to confirm, our support is all human. Although we appreciate AI technology, we want to make sure that you receive the right response the first time. Reach out to us at hello@buffer.com!
A full list of Buffer’s features
For a full overview of what we offer, take a look at our features list and keep a special eye out for any must-have features from your previous tool. If you have any questions that come up while taking a look around, feel free to reach out to us at hello@buffer.com.
Our feature roadmap
We’re continually increasing the value of our free and paid plans. We have some fun things coming for you in the near future, including bulk scheduling, publishing to blogs, YouTube scheduling, a Google Calendar integration, and more.
You can follow along with our progress and see all of the cool things we’re working on over on our Transparent Product Roadmap.
What Buffer can’t offer right now
We don't currently offer ad management (e.g. creating ads, boosting posts, or monitoring ads) or social listening at this time. Although we don't offer bulk scheduling directly within Buffer, we do integrate with Bulk.ly and Bulk Buffer to allow you to import posts via .csv file.
However, our Product team is collecting feedback via our suggestions board and also in the Buffer Community on Discord if you have something top of mind.
Using Buffer to bolster your other social efforts
Most of the users who sign up to Buffer see an increase in their following and engagement. This is because Buffer offers a number of features that help our users boost their engagement and visibility. Here are a few of the ways Buffer helps 👇
- Grow your following and increase brand awareness through consistent posting. Schedule dozens of posts in advance to make sure your audience consistently sees your content. This will allow you to get more impact from your posts.
- Use our hashtag manager, integrations, and Canva plug-in to attract an audience that you can continue to nurture and retain. With consistency and thoughtfulness, you have the opportunity to boost your engagement online and improve conversion rates to ultimately get the visibility you deserve.
- Leverage our workflow tools, AI writing assistant, and "Duplicate" feature to free up time. This will allow you to focus on other parts of your business so you can get more ROI from your time on social.
How to get extra support along your journey
We know that transitioning from one tool to another can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be! 🙂 Our Customer Advocates are here to support you every step of the way. Join our Discord community or reach out to us at hello@buffer.com.