Why And What's Next

Why And What's Next

Being a part of a company that is run according to a specific set of values brings a great amount of clarity into everything we do at Buffer. Looking to our values becomes particularly important when there鈥檚 a challenging decision to make鈥攆or example, how to move forward with a feature that hasn鈥檛 yet found its fit. When we practiced this reflection with Buffer鈥檚 Suggestions feature recently, we decided that they鈥檝e reached the end of their journey. Beginning August 1, we鈥檒l start turning off Suggestions in phases, the final phase to be turned off somewhere around the end of August. I know that for some of you, this may not feel like good news. I鈥檇 love to share with you our deliberation and thought process to help explain how we came to this decision and what might come next. We created Suggestions in order to make it easier for our customers to discover great things to share. The content was focused on only a few different topic areas, not necessarily the topics you would naturally choose to share around or in your preferred language. The design of Suggestions prioritized sharing content over consuming content.

Having the same pool of suggestions for all our customers led to lots of sharing of the exact same posts, which didn鈥檛 feel like a very authentic experience. When we reflected on Buffer鈥檚 values and how they might apply here, one element stood out in our value of 鈥淟isten first:鈥?You focus on listening rather than responding. By making it so easy to share Suggestions, we haven鈥檛 spent as much time encouraging listening as we should have. We haven鈥檛 been able to overcome that challenge, and we have no desire to give you a product that doesn鈥檛 make the grade. And that鈥檚 how the decision to retire Suggestions became clear. We know content curation is an ongoing task for social media managers, so we want to give you as much time as possible to adjust to this change. After August, we defer to the many other great tools that offer personalized content suggestions.

LinkedIn has expanded rapidly as a content platform, and there are enough good stories on LinkedIn to make their Pulse page a fantastic source of solid content. Pulse includes customized stories according to those whom you follow on LinkedIn and you can also receive Pulse via email: weekly, daily, or as soon as new content is posted. To turn on the LinkedIn Pulse email, visit your Email Frequency settings, and change the settings for Updates and News. Browse the collections and trending lists straight from Medium to find great content, or follow your favorite writers. Based on whom you follow, Medium sends emails with content it thinks you might like. This daily newsletter collects the stories that have been shared most often by those you follow on Facebook and Twitter. Your digest then becomes a reflection of the content that is most important to your audience鈥攁 pretty good indicator that you鈥檙e onto something good to share. Nuzzel is another one of the 鈥渘ews from your friends鈥?apps, letting you connect your social profiles in order to surface the stories that your circles are sharing.

The site collects the top stories and visuals from some of the best communities on the web and delivers the content in an easy-to-browse layout (or via email, if you鈥檇 prefer). You can cycle among a handful of different sites without ever leaving the Panda homepage. Prismatic delivers a personalized, social news stream of interesting links based on those you follow on your favorite social networks and on your chosen categories and topics of interest. The content discovery carries over to the web, too, where you can browse stories and edit your interests and followers. Whatever your specific industry or niche, chances are that SmartBrief will have a newsletter for you鈥攃hock full of curated news and information. Swayy connects to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to discover the topics and stories that are trending among your circles or being shared by your community. You can access this content directly from the Swayy dashboard (as well as view analytics on what you鈥檝e shared via Swayy), or you can see stories via the Swayy daily email.

You can also add your favorite RSS feeds to your Buffer social profiles and share links directly inside your Buffer dashboard鈥擜wesome and Buffer for Business customers can connect up to 15 feeds per connected social profile. I know for some of you this will be a disappointing change, and I am so sorry to create frustration for you. I can tell you that we鈥檙e not through trying to make content curation a better, easier experience. We鈥檙e so grateful to have heard from some of the amazing people who use Suggestions every day and that it鈥檚 useful to have a single place to go and quickly find great content. We鈥檙e here to serve you all and feel passionately about making life easier for each of you. This decision will help us focus on providing the best content sharing experience possible. We鈥檇 love to hear from you about your content curation workflow, your needs and wants, and what sort of tool or feature would be the most helpful for you. Any feedback or thoughts at all are always welcome鈥攑lease share it all in the comments.