Social media scheduling service Buffer adds RSS-style news feed

Update: The day after announcing the Feeds feature, Buffer’s CEO Joel Gascoigne issued an apology in another email titled “We got this one wrong”.

[box type=”note”]On May 17 Singapore time, Buffer announced that it had listened to user feedback and changed the number of feeds for both paid personal (Awesome) and business plans. “I wanted to get in touch to let you know that we messed up here. We’ve increased the limits from one feed on Awesome and 10 feeds on Business plans, to 15 feeds on Awesome and Business plans. We want to move beyond that 15 limit too over time, once we can handle it technically,” said Gascoigne in the email.[/box]

Buffer, the social media management platform, has added a feed feature for paying subscribers to its dashboard. The Buffer app allows users to connect social media profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and then schedule updates to be automatically posted to specific social networks at different times every day.

The company says it is responding to requests to make content easier to find, easier to follow, and easier to share. “…When you asked for the ability to add feeds within Buffer, we listened. We got right to work to build a way to add great content from great publishers—quickly, easily, and efficiently,” said Kevan Lee, Content Crafter at Buffer in a blog post on 15 May. “We’ll pull in the latest stories from whichever sites you choose, and you can decide which links to add to your queue and share with your followers.”

In the past, Buffer would suggest curated content for user updates while allowing users to add their own content for each social media profile. With this new feature, paid users now have a feed manager as well so they can add their favourite feeds to the Buffer dashboard, then decide which feed updates to share with their followers.

Since a lot of previously posted content would likely have been from a feed in the first place, Buffer has made the process of sharing content more streamlined.

The feeds are only for paid users, however. Buffer for Business users are entitled to 10 feeds per connected social profile, while Awesome users, which is what Buffer calls subscribers of its personal paid plan, may have one feed per connected social profile.

Click here to see how things work.