Buffer, the social media scheduling and analytics tool, is introducing a useful new feature today — the ability to pull RSS feeds into its dashboard.
It will allow users of Buffer’s paid product to have an automatically populated queue of content to share on their connected social media accounts. It other words, it could be a godsend for people juggling multiple social channels.
“This has been one of our most requested features,” Leo Widrich, Buffer co-founder and chief operating officer, wrote in an email, “from big publishers to small bloggers and individuals who just want to follow their favorite blogs and share their stories alike.”
The new feature will be available today for paid customers of Buffer. “Awesome” ($10 a month) users will be able to pull in one RSS and Business ($50 a month) users will have access to up to 10.
Not A Robot
I haven’t tested the tool, but it appears to be far superior to HootSuite’s RSS feature. HootSuite does offer two RSS feeds for free (and unlimited feeds for Pro and Enterprise customers), but its tool is robot-like. If you enable a blog’s RSS feed to publish to a Twitter account in HootSuite, for instance, every post from that blog will be tweeted out upon publication.
Buffer’s tool allows users to curate the social messages they send out, which should make for a more human-sounding social feed.
Public Launch For Suggestions
Buffer also announced that its content Suggestions feature, in beta for the last several months, is launching publicly today on both desktop and the iOS mobile app.
Suggestions are just that, five suggested posts a day intended to help users find quality shareable content. It’s proved a popular feature: in the last month of testing, more than 200,000 of the suggested stories were shared.
Currently, suggested posts are picked manually by Buffer, but Widrich said they plan to experiment with topic-based suggestions in the future. “With a lot of algorithms out there that help you discover content,” he wrote, “we’ve so far found that picking the stories out by hand can often times still provide a better experience for users.”
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