Are you looking for a social media management tool? No matter whether you’re a one-person team, a small business or an agency, you’ll need a dependable tool that can help you scale your business. If you’re interested in such a thing, you’ve probably looked into Buffer - the pricing, features, benefits and more.
In order to help you make an informed decision, we’ve decided to look into Buffer and share our findings. In this article, we’ll analyze Buffer’s offer in order to answer the question - Who is Buffer for and is it worth it?
You deserve a reliable social media management tool that can help you engage your audience, create and monitor ads, build a loyal community and much more without breaking the bank.
We’ll give you an overview of the tool as well as the pros and cons of using it. In the last chapters, we’ll introduce you to some Buffer alternatives and compare them for a better insight into which tool would be the best pick for you.
In our research, we focused on the essential features every tool of this kind should have, the price and the value you receive. Let’s jump in.
Buffer is a social media management tool that covers Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The tool allows you to publish, manage and schedule posts from a single dashboard.
You can easily track your progress, measure social media performance, plan your campaigns and respond to comments. Moreover, Buffer doesn’t just focus on social media but also includes a browser extension for integration with WordPress, Chrome and other research tools.
Although Buffer’s services called Publish and Analyze were once split and you had to buy them separately, now the services are joined. That means that one tool helps you schedule and analyze your social media platforms.
Buffer’s key features:
Let’s dive deeper into the most used features.
Social scheduling is a feature that allows you to easily publish your content with a drag and drop editor. You can schedule posts for multiple clients on multiple platforms from one dashboard.
Buffer lets you customize your post’s appearance and natively upload videos and gifs as well as photos, galleries and text. If you’re not sure what time you should schedule your posts, you can rely on the optimum scheduling tool. It will recommend the best times to post based on your user engagement.
With the browser extensions, you can easily share blogs and images by saving them directly to Buffer.
If you’re having trouble letting go of control, you’ll appreciate the feature that notifies team members to take a final look before your posts are published.
A lot of marketing agencies have been burned by free scheduling tools like Studio Creator and know how challenging scheduling social media posts can be, especially for Instagram. You can avoid any missteps with Buffer for Instagram.
It’s a specialized tool that will let you grow your audience on Instagram, schedule posts and stories, manage hashtags and drive sales. Seeing how Instagram allows one link per profile, you need to play it wisely. Buffer for Instagram provides you with a shoppable page that connects your posts to relevant links.
Since social media management is a team effort, you need to know how collaborative Buffer really is. Depending on the plan, you’ll be able to invite team members and give them varying degrees of access.
Buffer allows more than 60 native integrations and with Zapier, you can link any other apps and tools you need.
Once you create your campaign and schedule the social media posts, you can keep track of the performance. Whether it’s reach, likes, comments, shares or anything else. All the data can easily be organized in a report your clients will understand.
Buffer offers four plans
In simpler terms, the only Buffer packages that you should be interested in are the Team and Agency ones. That’s because they offer unlimited users, branded reports, custom access permissions, approval workflow tools and other features you would expect at that pricing point.
However, once you add up all the additional costs like social channels, you’ll come to a much higher price. Even if you’re a small agency, you’ll quickly outgrow the 10 social platforms that are included in the price of the Agency plan.
Buffer pricing plans aren’t designed in a way that makes them easy to understand. The price they highlight is the starting point and as you include more social media platforms, the price gradually rises.
Furthermore, if you choose Buffer, you’ll have to supplement your work with other tools. It’s clear that you won’t have the same effortless experience managing all available social media accounts.
While a lot of effort was put into Instagram and Facebook, the features they offer for Pinterest and Twitter are still very rudimental. In the end, it doesn’t make sense to pay for a service that will leave you needing to use other tools.
In order to keep it brief - no.
Although Buffer is good a social media scheduling tool, the value it’s offering is not worth it. They advertise advanced analytics and reporting as their biggest selling points, yet you can get the same or even more detailed analytics on social media for free.
You may have to visit a few different dashboards to view the different analytics but it will give you all the necessary data.
Furthermore, the priciest plan allows only 10 social media accounts and any additional one will cost $5 per month. This means that if you have 4 clients and you’re responsible for more than their Instagram and Facebook, you’ll have to pay for every additional platform.
Although Buffer is easy to use, the fact that so many essential features are pricey add ons makes it anything but an affordable tool. It doesn’t offer any type of social listening or brand monitoring, which is also a huge letdown.
With arguments like these, it’s easy to see that Buffer pricing its services in a less than transparent way has its reasons.
Seeing how Buffer won’t give you the best bang for your buck, it makes sense to look into different social media scheduling tools.
FeedHive is an AI-enabled social media management software that helps you increase engagement, speed up content creation, schedule posts and more. The tool supports Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, with Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Google My Business coming soon.
Marketers love social media management tools that focus on humans - your audience as well as the people using it. That’s why we put focus on helping CMs combat writer's block with more than 3,000 AI-generated templates to draw inspiration from.
Say goodbye to used and abused posts like - Happy Friday! and Did you know it’s International (insert word) day?
Furthermore, we make sure that all social media platforms are equally represented in our features. You can reply, like, retweet and quote - all mentions and comments directly from FeedHive.
The global search bar lets you navigate around FeedHive without leaving the page you're currently on and the scheduling of posts is easier than ever with a new feature that lets you manually add a draft to a specific slot.
When it comes to Facebook, you won’t have to log in to the app to post to groups anymore. You can do it straight from FeedHive and soon we’ll offer the same feature for private profiles.
FeedHive’s key features:
Our tool is an amazing pick for any freelancer who wants to streamline their social media management. FeedHive is also great for small businesses and agencies that want to access more data on their audience and find a way to engage their followers without sacrificing the quality of their posts.
We won’t push you to share more if it’s counterproductive with your audience. The substance of your content is far more important to us than the number of it.
You can rely on our Engagement Prediction tool to create posts and campaigns your audience will love. That way you can maximize the impact of your social media presence and increase not just engagement but also the sales that come through social channels.
FeedHive is an all-encompassing tool for anyone looking to grow their socials in a way your core audience will enjoy.
Our pricing is split up into four plans - Creator, Brand and Business.
Creator plan costs $19 per month. It allows four social accounts, one user and 30 scheduled posts. This package includes 15 post templates and 300 inspirational templates.
Brand plan costs $29 per month and allows 10 social media accounts, 5 workspaces and 5 users per each workspace. With this plan, you can schedule 500 posts and create 25 custom labels.
Furthermore, you get access to
The last plan is the Business plan which costs $99 per month. It includes 100 social channels, 50 workspaces and 20 users per workspace. There is no limit on the number of scheduled posts or how far into the future you can schedule your posts.
Other features you’ll love are
In order to further demonstrate the value of FeedHive’s offer, we compared two of our plans to Buffer’s same tiered plans. As you can see in the table below, the sheer number of social platforms included in every plan proves that FeedHive’s plans give you more bang for your buck.
This is especially important if your business is growing and you need space for additional clients and social media platforms. You need a tool that’s going to be there for you every step of the way as you scale your business and FeedHive can do just that.
We also go a step further and don’t stop supporting you once your posts are created. With FeedHive AI you can generate relevant and trending hashtags for your posts. Our AI will predict how well your posts will perform based on an analysis of over 150,000 social media posts and give you tips on how to better them.
If you have trouble finding the best time to post, especially for your international clients, FeedHive will suggest the best times to post based on your followers’ activity and engagement.
We also know the importance of resharing your most popular posts. That's why we’ll suggest great posts you should repurpose. Lastly, we’ve created post conditions. That means that you can set up conditions that will trigger automatic follow-ups. It could be the number of likes, the engagement rate and more.
This feature comes in handy when you want to remind your followers that your giveaway is about to be over, that your product is selling out or that you have a special discount on your site.
With all the features, price points and benefits we mentioned, it’s clear which social media management tool will provide a better experience and more value.
There is a reason Buffer is one of the pillars in the social media management industry, however, over time they lost their edge. Digital agencies grow very quickly and they need tools that can support their growth.
When looking for a social media management tool you need to look for
With all things considered, it’s easy to see that FeedHive is the better option. Not only because of the features and monthly allowances but also because of the long term benefits you’ll experience from working with us.
Grow your own socials and help your clients with engagement, building a community and selling more. Sign up for our free trial and tap into the unused potential of your social media pages. You’ll quickly set everything up and get to create memorable posts, plan out your campaigns and analyze your performance quickly.
Our customer success team can help you every step of the way and our AI will make sure you’re on the right track. With a tool that provides as much value as FeedHive, you’ll quickly reach ROI and steal some of your competitors' audience.
