Farewell, ‘Suggestions’.
It’s been a blast but it’s time for us to move on.
Where we are.
If you are a Buffer user you may have seen an in-app notification that the Suggestions feature will soon be retired. There’s a post by Courtney Seiter which explains the details here: https://open.bufferapp.com/retiring-suggestions/. Give it a read because it does explain a great deal.
Full disclosure: I have no stake in Buffer and I am not a Buffer employee. I do however participate in #bufferchat and adovocate the use of Buffer (and pretty much anything else I care to use as well!).
In my mind there are/were three main problems with Suggestions:
- As Buffer users we all shared the same pool of 25 stories. Effectively, we ended up sharing the same stuff — which in the cold light of day, isn’t actually that useful (infact it could be seen as slightly ‘spammy’).
- The content was getting very Buffer-centric. In itself that’s fine (it’s amazing content) but the same thing can be simulated by adding the Buffer Blog to your Feeds.
- Ultimately (and here’s the rub), there are many better content discovery/curation platforms out there…
Whilst I clearly agree with Buffer’s stance on the retirement of Suggestions, there is no doubt the feature was well used and well loved — I myself used it many times. It was great for ‘topping-up’ my feed when things where getting a bit busy and if I was stuck for ideas.
The truth is though that I had been using Suggestions less and less, to the stage that may have used a couple of articles a week. I’d developed a better (for me) workflow for discovering richer content using some really great tools.
Now what?
So what are some of the alternatives? Below, are the tools I use. Of course there are others — indeed others are mentioned in Courtney’s post above.
The tools below have free-to-use plans, (apart from Buffer Feeds) — so you can see what you like. Quite a few have integrations with Buffer to share directly, making the whole job easier. Otherwise a bit of copy and pasting will be required.
Lastly, if you have an iPad and the free Buffer app installed you can enable native iOS sharing between these apps and Buffer. More details here: https://blog.bufferapp.com/buffer-for-ipad-ios8
Buffer Feeds — Everyone on an Awesome plan and above has 15 RSS feeds per social profile. (So, you can have different ones for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.) When setup you will see posts from each of these feeds presently in a pleasing similar fashion to those in Suggestions. The key difference is you are defining the source of the content and not Buffer. Kevan Lee has a great introduction to Feeds here: https://blog.bufferapp.com/introducing-rss-feeds-buffer-social-media-sharing
The elephant in the room with Feeds is that it requires a paid-for Buffer plan for it to be available to you. If you are serious about your social media — from personal branding up — my recommendation is to at least have an Awesome plan. It’s great value and really opens up the functionality: “Once you go Awesome, you’ll want to stay Awesome!”
Feeds is what I use now, instead of Suggestions, for finding those ‘quick’ posts to get something in Buffer when I’m super busy etc. Oh, and it’s not limited to 25 articles either.
Here’s how I have my Feeds configured:
Note the red box around “My Reading List: Unread”. We’ll come back to that one later.
The config above produces the following when I browse to my Feeds:
As you can see: looks alot like a personalised Suggestions feature. Tap on ‘Add’ and you’re done.
Feedly — http://feedly.com
Feedly, for the purposes of this post is Buffer Feeds on steroids. Yes, it does take a little while to get setup but the content from that point it great. You can organise by subjects and can share quickly using built-in integrations and have as many feeds as you like. There’s a native mobile app to go with it too.
Flipboard —https://flipboard.com
Content delivered in a magazine style. You’ll need to set up your profile and follow topics and people of your choice. Note the ‘people’ bit here: you can create your own magazine and share it with others — as well as subscribing to theirs. So, someone might have done the ‘heavy lifting’ for you! Great mobile app too (indeed that’s where it started).
Swayy — http://app.swayy.co
Addendum: I have literally just received an email from Swayy stating that the service will shutdown effective 24th July 2015. That’s four days notice! A real shame as it was a tremendously useful, if not essential, tool. RIP Swayy. Alternative is the Klout ‘Explore’ feature (see below).
The great thing about Swayy is that when you log in with your Twitter account it works out what topics you are interested in and make suggestions based on that. Less content than Feedly and Flipboard but less setting up too.
Klout — https://klout.com
Yes, OK it’s got a bit of a bad rapp for the scoring feature. However, the content suggestions are really rather good and again it’s grouped by your interests, so little setting up required.
Pocket — https://getpocket.com
Remember that red highlight box I said we’d come back to? Well, here we are. Pocket as you may be aware is an off-line reading tool — available on Mac, Windows, Web and mobile. You sumbit a URL (plugins and integrations abound) and the app caches it to read later (and if there’s no connectivity).
But here’s the good bit: It also allows you to create an RSS feed of all the stuff you’ve saved for later. (Details here: http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/482632-can-i-subscribe-to-my-list-via-rss-).
The point being is you can add one of those RSS links to the Buffer Feeds. You can then see and add content you’ve saved in Pocket directly from Buffer.
Medium — https://medium.com
Well, you’re here, so enough said I guess! Great content updated all the time. Searching by keywords and tags. Mobile app available.
Others I use: LinkedIn Pulse, SlideShare, 500px and BrainyQuote
In the end it’s about using the right tool for the right job. I’d much rather Buffer concentrate on adding great stuff to their core product, saving me hours a week rather than using that same resource to save me the few minutes a week Suggestions did.
So farewell Suggestions. It’s been a blast but now it’s time for us to move on.
