Improving Buffer
product passion
The Buffer app is most useful and wildly popular. It is my go to tool for picking snippets from the web and posting it to my blog, Twitter stream, LinkedIn, etc. You can schedule posts, hook up with IFTTT and do neat things (like monitoring posts, notifications, cross-posting, etc.). However, I feel that Buffer has kinda stood still since its initial feature set. At least me as a user (a premium, paid user) is not seeing much apart from the ability to schedule and post a ton. Buffer can do more and if I were driving the product roadmap there, I would certainly consider the following options:
Content
I as a publisher would like to know what types of content I am posting, how frequently, where, etc. There is content I want to be associated with (for example, I love data and visualization). I may consciously or sub-consciously be choosing to post that content or not. I have goals. So, me as a user would like to know how I am doing against aligning my posts/views against certain specific content (and content types too).
Impact
I am sharing content so that we have some type of “impact” on our network. Whether this is measured by # of likes, shares, etc. I would like to get a sense of this, and whether I am trending up or down (a la Klout). Just a simple dashboard including activity levels would give me directional insight, which is a good start.
Analytics
The analytics that is currently served up is at best very basic. I am not getting much out of it. For each post, I can learn number of comments, number of likes, number of clicks, potential (what is this?), and reshares. Essentially, it is just picking up basic data from facebook, twitter, etc. and presenting it. What would be more useful is to look at this data from different perspectives, slice and dice it. For example, for the last 30 days, how am I doing? what is my target? Or, for a particular channel (say LinkedIn), what “impact” did my posts have? I would also like to look at this by content type. How about my top 10 posts for the month? all time? There is plenty of low-hanging fruits.
Buffer is a clean, well executed product that serves a strong, frequent need. With a bit more, you can elevate customer satisfaction and benefits delivered to another level!
