The Complete Guide to the Brand New Buffer Web App

What a crazy few weeks here at Buffer HQ in San Francisco to make everything work out in time for Christmas. The last thing we wanted to happen was for you to not get your shiny new presents. And fortunately, it all worked out. The brand new Buffer is ready today. We’re launching both a brand new web app and iPhone app today.

So without, further ado, let’s dig in and have a look around about what’s new:

Easily manage all your social accounts

With the new Buffer web app, we wanted to give you a much clearer overview of all the social accounts you want to post to:

From the new compose menu in the top left you can easily start sharing to all your social accounts. Of course, the smartest way is still our browser extension, which lets you Buffer any page you come across:

With the click of a button you can add multiple accounts to your Buffer stream, including Twitter, Facebook, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups and App.net:

A better stream of all updates in your Buffer

An important thing that we noticed is that more and more of you started sharing images, videos and other media type next to links and text. We tried to optimize for this and show you all images, links and texts more clearly in your Buffer waiting to go out:

Better analytics, including “Top posts” from you

A key focus with this update was to improve the way you can access your analytics. It is now very easy to view the analytics, with a nice big button at the very top of your account area. You can browse through super easily and learn how many clicks, retweets, likes and so forth you’ve received on your updates.

We’ve also introduced “Top posts”, which will indicate the best performing updates you’ve put out with Buffer:

4 Awesome new features to make your sharing even smarter with Buffer

With the new dashboard we also have some awesome new features available for you. They are things focused to help you to share the content that performed the best and make your stream on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else even more consistent. Here it goes:

1. Copy updates from one stream across to other social accounts

You can now simply drag and drop any update, say in your Twitter account, and drag it over to your Facebook or LinkedIn one. It’ll be copied and go out for that account too:

2. A shuffle option: Mix up what’s in your Buffer queue

Simply mix up the content that goes out of your Buffer and let our algorithm randomise the order. Especially if you are Buffering a lot of links from one source and want to have it mixed up, hit the shuffle button and give your friends and followers a better stream:

3. Share your “Top posts” from analytics to other accounts

Seen that one of your Tweets has done really well? Why not publish it on Facebook too, chances are you might get tons of engagement there as well. You can easily copy across to other accounts by simply dragging:

4. Reorder your profiles super easily

You can drag and drop all of your connected profiles on the left. It will also adjust the order of accounts in your Buffer browser extension. So in case you want to have all your Facebook or Twitter accounts closer together, take it for a spin:

Easily manage and update your schedule

For the most part, managing and accessing your schedule has always been a bit hidden away. With your amazing feedback, we’ve put it more prominently, so you can easily change when your updates are going out. You can also easily create a second schedule for different days of the week with just the click of a button:

Link shortening, team members and more

We’ve also worked hard to make the interface around team members, shortening URLs and general settings a lot more intuitive and accessible. Hit the menu button on the top right and set everything up the way you want. Did I mention that you can connect your custom bit.ly account to track your URLs with more detailed analytics? All that in the account menu here:

We’ve got several link shortening options for you available. Whichever one is best, simply choose it and of course you can also have different shorteners for different accounts:

Want to collaborate with co-workers and friends on filling up your Buffer? Invite them over in the team members tab:

Where is Buffer going?

We’ve been speaking to lots and lots of you over the last 6 months while building the new Buffer. All the amazing insights from conversations have helped us shape the vision for Buffer.

One of the key realizations we’ve had was that the Buffer web app isn’t necessarily the best place to share with Buffer. If you get up in the morning, chances are you are using one of the awesome news reading apps out there, on top of Twitter, Facebook and your browser to find great articles and content to read. So instead, to truly make Buffering smarter, we’ve worked with dozens of new apps who you can now Buffer from:

With this recent iteration, the Buffer web version is more tailored to manage and learn about your social sharing. It’s become more of a place to check on how well your posts are performing and to move and edit updates in your queue more easily. As more and more awesome developers have built on top of the Buffer API, adding to your Buffer from anywhere has already become a ton easier.

We want to really focus on spreading the smarter Buffer sharing functionality across the web, be it with Buffer buttons, which over 10,000 sites have already put on their site or through great new integrations. When Mark Zuckerberg said that:

“Every year, we are sharing double the amount of what we shared the year before.”

As Zuckerberg’s law of sharing becomes more and more evident and we all share more and more, knowing which social network to post to and how well you are doing becomes more and more important too. That is exactly what we want to focus on with Buffer and what we’ll execute for every day in the coming months. It’s an exciting ride were we hope we can help lots and lots more people lead more efficient lives.

Whoa, we covered a lot there! With both new apps out, we are of course dying to hear your feedback. Give the new web app a go. What do you like? Where could we improve? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Looking for a better way to share on social media?

Schedule, publish & analyze your posts across the top social networks, all in one place.

Co-founder and COO at Buffer. I enjoy working on company culture, customer development and marketing. For more personal posts, check out leostartsup.

Rani

Not to be a downer, but…2 things aren’t addressed that really limit Buffer:

I read the email about the update and got very excited: “move posts to the top
in one click” — sadly that isn’t actually in the release ((unless I’m missing it? Please tell me I am!)) One of the most frustrating things is how hard it is to reorder your posts when they are several – especially if images are involved. I don’t want a random order – I’m very particular about the order. ((I’ve suggested this and voted on others who have as well in the forums))

LinkedIn company page — it’s still missing. I checked again…Without this tool, Buffer cannot be a 1-stop platform to manage your social media. ((again — I’ve entered this in the forum – others have voted for it – we’ve requested updates…silence))

Great point guys, so every update that is already in your Buffer should have a “move to top” button. I think we didn’t do a great job explaining that it’s not a button for adding to top when you are about to add it to the Buffer. Let me know if that helps at all! 🙂

Just tried this out. Great improvement. Thanks! Was a bit surprised / curious that after you select “move this to the top” I actually got moved to the top as well vs. being left where I was. I then have to keep scrolling back to where I was at the very bottom…which is where the newest items get added. Not how I would have expected it to behave.

Right, I so want to stop using Hootsuite! Especially since they added that new ‘feature’ that opens their app whenever you click on a Twitter link on the web. Ugh!

JamesDiGioia

FYI, you can turn that off – at least in Chrome -> right click the Hootlet button -> options -> link twitter status… -> turn to off. I hated it too. Also hated how they just turned it on w/o telling us.

I may be doing it wrong, but I set up a few posts with photos to go facebook, then did the whole drag and drop to a twitter account, and none of the pictures transferred. So I went ahead and added them manually. Then when I went back to proofread the FB posts, THOSE photos were gone, save one. What’s worse, to manually add the photos what I really had to do was delete the whole post and start over, as there is no way to add a photo as an edit.

Again I could be doing it wrong. It’s been known to happen.

LeoWid

Hi Emme, oh no, that’s definitely a bug, working on getting this fixed asap, so glad you are letting me know!

I’ve already moved off the product, since the auto-schedule came to HS, but I see the direction you are going in – this was my hope for your future and so I’m likely to come back when you add the next round of updates. I imagine it will provide the right value for me to again pay for your service. Keep up the good work. HS is leaving some serious holes in the market, I hope you guys spot them and fill them. With that you will be peers and we’ll all be using both, whereas today it’s really more of a ‘do I need buffer?’ type situation. *For us anyway, I’m guessing not for others.*

LeoWid

wow, that is awesome to hear, would love to help with any more questions! 🙂

Loving the new updates, but there are some things to be desired. One of your e-mails said you would have the option to have buffer post on the most high traffic times for your account to get the most exposure for your posts…I do not see that feature.

Also, would it be possible to have Buffer connect to your Facebook and Twitter followers? Such as when you are posting to your twitter and you want to tag someone, that as you type options for followers appears…similar to the way Facebook does it these days? Just a suggestion, it would make the app so much more user friendly.

All in all I LOVE your product and use it more than any other social media platform that I have. Thanks for constantly making it better and better.

LeoWid

Hi Kersten,

Great to hear from you and yes – tagging people is very high up on our list, I hope we can have this soon for you! 🙂

I really like using buffer on my desktop, but I just bailed on the IOS platform and adopted the Android. If I am in Facebook and want to add a post to my buffer, I have to copy move to the buffer app and paste. This is not really easy/useful to do on the run… Am I (hopefully) missing something?

What about adding StumbleUpon and/or Tumblr Integration? Particularly StumbleUpon.. GoogleReader? The ability to manage/publish RSS feed streams would be a nice feature to add and so would options that allowed for integration with ITunes and YouTube or another similar type of Social Media and Video Sharing site application..Having an option to Add to My Feedly would be a very welcome improvemnet too…

Great work and I love everything here…just signed up for a new account and will be requiring that my team members do the same. But, I don’t see a way to track Google+. Am I missing this (I hope!) or will it be added anytime soon? We have a new blog/magazine that is going live in January that will be closely associated with our circles and I would love a way to track that. Other than that, this product is the best out there and is going to replace our Hootsuite at the first of the year! Keep up the great work guys and have a Happy New Year! 🙂

Love Buffer, but would like to use it for more than 12 accounts, as well as G+. Also, is there a way to edit the content of a scheduled post without having to go into each account separately & make the post edit?

Joey Wang

i can’t seem to find the way to have posts repeat..Anyone know? Thanks.

Hi Joey! I hope I can be of help here. 🙂 Let me know if I’m on the right track with this. When I want to repeat a post, I drag-and-drop from the analytics tab to the account I want to repeat on. There are some rules in place about posting the same exact update in close succession, but if there’s some space between, this method should work just super!

With the brand new web app we are launching today, we’ve got another special gift ready for you, just in time for Christmas. The brand new Buffer iPhone app has hit the app store today. We’ve made tons of improvements and revamped the app to work with some exciting new features. Most importantly, you can […]