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Buffer Adds Google+, Goodbye Hootsuite!

by Matthew Rasmusson

About a week ago, I received an email that I had been hoping to receive for a few months now. It was an update from Buffer, the social management tool. It looked like this:

So Buffer has now incorporated Google+. What makes me so excited about this? Hootsuite has had Google+ integration since…forever. So what makes this update so great, or even blog worthy?

My main goal with these social media tools is to have the ability to schedule and post my social media content in a reliable fashion to every social network that I utilize. I am not interested in having social media marketing features in my management platform. To me, this is totally separate from posting regular updates and to include it in a social management platform is to include an extra feature that I will not use and do not want to pay for.

As a social media manager, I’ve tried quite a few tools: Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and StatusPeople to name a few, but most of them did not include everything that I needed.

Tweetdeck, for example, only allows you to post to Twitter. It has a great dashboard and used to allow you to see Facebook interactions, but that was discontinued several months ago, rendering it all but obsolete. Hootsuite is the industry leader in this sector, providing the ability to post on just about every major social network amongst many other capabilities. Hootsuite has its own link shortener, post scheduling, social analytics, and even offers integration with third party apps. So why not just use Hootsuite? In one word: reliability.

Hootsuite has failed me on numerous occasions. I would schedule updates for the weekend and come in on Monday and find that 25% of the posts had failed. Fortunately, I figured this out with Saturday and Sunday posts before major holiday posts came around. It’s one thing to post something on a Monday that was supposed to go out on Sunday, but imagine wishing someone a happy 4th of July on the 5th. I actually spent an hour or two this past 4th of July fixing posts that failed on Hootsuite instead of spending time with my family and friends. Links often failed to populate descriptions within Hootsuite, leading me to just directly post on the social page instead of using the tool at all.

I have been using Buffer to post on a few of my social pages, but its major drawback for me was its lack of Google+ integration. So far, I love it. It has a clean design, it is simple to use, and most importantly, it hasn’t failed me yet. With this update, I plan to migrate all of my social accounts over. Hopefully we will have the long and mutually beneficial relationship that I could not form with Hootsuite.