Buffer is a social sharing tool. When browsing content, clicking on the Buffer icon automatically stores the content and schedules posts to social media channels throughout the day.
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Meta Business Suite
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Formerly known as Facebook Business Suite or Facebook for Business, a solution for small businesses used to manage all business activity on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram from one place. It is presented as a one-stop shop where business owners can manage all marketing and advertising activities on Facebook and Instagram. It centralizes tools that help the user to connect with customers on all apps and get better business results.
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Pricing
Buffer
Meta Business Suite
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Essentials
$6
per month per channel
Team
$12
per month per channel
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Buffer
Meta Business Suite
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
A discount is offered for annual billing.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Buffer
Meta Business Suite
Features
Buffer
Meta Business Suite
Publishing
Comparison of Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Buffer
8.6
Ratings
7% above category average
Meta Business Suite
6.3
Ratings
24% below category average
Content planning and scheduling
9.00 Ratings
6.30 Ratings
Content optimization
8.00 Ratings
5.30 Ratings
Workflow management
8.80 Ratings
6.70 Ratings
Audience targeting
00 Ratings
6.90 Ratings
Reporting/analytics
Comparison of Reporting/analytics features of Product A and Product B
Buffer
8.3
Ratings
5% above category average
Meta Business Suite
6.3
Ratings
23% below category average
Campaign success analytics
8.30 Ratings
6.20 Ratings
Real-time tracking
00 Ratings
6.70 Ratings
Competitor analysis
00 Ratings
6.00 Ratings
Account management
Comparison of Account management features of Product A and Product B
Buffer
9.0
Ratings
12% above category average
Meta Business Suite
4.8
Ratings
50% below category average
Role-based user permissions & privileges
9.00 Ratings
4.90 Ratings
Mobile access
9.00 Ratings
4.80 Ratings
Listening/monitoring
Comparison of Listening/monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Buffer
-
Ratings
Meta Business Suite
4.6
Ratings
51% below category average
Boolean keyword searches
00 Ratings
4.00 Ratings
Filtering out noise/spam
00 Ratings
4.30 Ratings
Sentiment analysis
00 Ratings
5.00 Ratings
Broad channel coverage
00 Ratings
5.30 Ratings
Engagement
Comparison of Engagement features of Product A and Product B
Buffer
-
Ratings
Meta Business Suite
5.3
Ratings
40% below category average
Automated routing and prioritization
00 Ratings
5.80 Ratings
Customer interaction histories
00 Ratings
4.10 Ratings
Bulk actions
00 Ratings
6.00 Ratings
Marketing
Comparison of Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Buffer
-
Ratings
Meta Business Suite
7.0
Ratings
10% below category average
Lead generation
00 Ratings
5.90 Ratings
Content marketing
00 Ratings
7.40 Ratings
Paid media management
00 Ratings
7.50 Ratings
Campaigns and promotions
00 Ratings
7.20 Ratings
Channel coverage/integration
Comparison of Channel coverage/integration features of Product A and Product B
It is a very interesting tool for entrepreneurs or CEOs of startups who do not have much time to manage social media communication and also have few resources at the beginning of their venture. It can also be convenient for small companies that do not have specific personnel with training in community management and require easy-to-use tools to carry out the basic actions of scheduled publication on social media.
Meta Business Suite is great if you are a business that is heavily reliant on paid media performance. It is also a great platform if we are looking to scale paid performance and look to send partnership ads live with existent creators and influencers we are working with.
Allows you to upload current email lists and drive ads to them more passively than email.
Audience segmentation tools make it easy to target prospects based on actions taken on specific pages.
Lookalike tools allow you to build new prospect lists based on common interests of your current clients.
The ability to test multiple variations of ads against each other and report on them directly from the dashboard simplifies the decision-making process to optimize advertising efforts.
Analytics-- The analytics on the Pro plan are limited at best. You can simply review your posts from the past 30 days, but you can't access any analysis (or even simple tallying of Likes, Shares, etc.) without upgrading to the Premium or Business plans, which are otherwise more than we need at the moment.
Publish+Reply+Analyze-- It's a bit tedious to have these basic social media functions/tools separated out as three distinct products, as well as overkill for a small nonprofit without a dedicated social media team. I imagine each tool is good at its job if you need 'em.
Linking to Accounts-- Buffer seems to lose touch with Facebook and LinkedIn somewhat frequently. It's vaguely annoying but very simple to fix, so I just roll with it.
Reporting, especially as you drill down. For example, it won't show you purchases by region or hour of the day.
Consistency has been an issue. Top-performing campaigns/ad sets/ads will hit a wall overnight for no apparent reason.
Cloning ads doesn't work between certain campaign types. It seems like they could make it so that even a partial copy can be made, with other required fields left empty.
Ease of use, affordability, time saved and just love for the app and the team. It's not a miracle tool that will suddenly increase your company's value or leads, you still need to put in quality posts, thoughts and content but when used regularly and with thought, you'll be happy in the long run
We have to continue using this tool in order to be effective on this marketing platform. Though there are several changes I wish we could see, the fact is that we will still need to use this product to provide customers with the information they need.
Easy enough to use even my boss got it right away. It helps to off-set the workload to less active times, and we can preschedule way in advance, which also helps to keep the team on track as we know what we have planned and want to reach our milestones before posts go online.
The main barriers is that Facebook has stitched together so many legacy systems and verifications and whatnot that it's sometimes hard to onboard new people or get all of the accounts to work together. Once it does, it does work very well.
I've only dealt with the API having issues a couple times, but as you can imagine an outage is not something an advertiser would find acceptable, especially during any ecommerce-heavy time of year. The overall platform could use some help with availability when it comes to authentication, as it struggles with consistency in authentication.
Buffer performs well on both desktop and mobile platforms. The one area as I have stated before is that it does not always want to automatically push to Instagram and the user will have to go do it manually. Buffer works very well pushing to other platforms. The instagram issue is the only reason buffer does not get a 10 on this section
There are a lot of shortcomings when it comes to performance. There are pages that I do not expect to have much information to load on the page, yet it takes an incredibly long time (10+ secondes). I have not had experience with the integration slowing other platforms down too much.
I've found the Facebook for Business support to be hit or miss. For billing questions they're timely and helpful. For complex questions about specific services I've often received a longer wait and a less helpful experience. I'm often redirected to their docs, which are often not particularly helpful.
We were very satisfied with the implementation of Buffer. We had no issues switching from the platform that we were using over to buffer. Our staff did not even miss a beat when it came to posting content. It was an easy transition and I feel that is something that buffer has really done well. They have an "out of the box" usability platform
If you don't want to display your feed to your boss before going over scheduled posts for the week, use the Business site and it will be less awkward instantly. Having someone lean over your shoulder is always a bit awkward, you think about how you smell, maybe consider offering them gum because they have bad breath
Both of them are great at their own levels but I find Buffer quite easy to go and the way they perform every task is quite like my way of work so I personally like Buffer more, it has helped me save my most of the time hence improved my work efficiency and also the creativity they put into my work is outstanding. The support I get whenever I run into problems they provide a quick response every time.
Meta Business Suite is a good paid media option that offers several features for building ad campaigns, which other paid media channels lack. The usability is generally good, but it probably isn't quite as intuitive as Google, as a comparison. LinkedIn is behind all of these platforms, as its ad features are not as advanced. Overall, Meta is highly ranked.
Buffer does what it say on tin as they say! you can always count on Buffer. Buffer can be scale to 25 social account with 2,000 scheduled post which is enough for most agencies or businesses
This product is definitely able to run at scale, but it would be wise to have enough eyeballs to oversee it and the tools for keeping the campaigns, adsets, and ads organized could use some improvement. I can also see the UI interfering with usability at greater amounts of scale.
Definitely has a positive ROI with increasing sales, but beware because it's not easy to measure on every stage of the funnel (how much does an ad in the very top of the funnel should be accounted for on a sale?). Attribution is hard sometimes.
Managing is expensive and time-consuming. So far we haven't been able to find any solution to automate this. We are using automatic rules but you still need to be on top of things (considering how much budget we are spending on this).
Beware on Facebook suspending your account. As I said before, the suspension was completely unjustified (they ended up activating it again) but don't over-rely on this platform because they just don't care if you spend your money there or elsewhere. They just don't give a damn about the customer (you).