The Story Behind Buffer’s New(ish) Content Suggestions

Mar 12, 2014 2 min readWorkplace of the future
Photo of Courtney Seiter
Courtney Seiter

Former Director of People @ Buffer

Important update: We’re retiring the Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more…

Overcoming writer’s block. Curating great content. Sharing on social media many times a day for better engagement.

These are topics we talk about often on the Buffer blog, where our daily focus is making you smarter and more productive.

So when we realized that Buffer could go one step further and actually begin to solve these challenges for our customers, we jumped at the opportunity.

Enter Buffer’s content suggestions!

You may have noticed these suggestions in your Buffer account:

content suggestions

Or in your inbox when your Buffer queue could use a little topping off:

empty email

Why we added content suggestions

We added content suggestions in both of these spots – 5 daily suggestions in the Buffer app, 3 suggestions in your email – to make it easier for you to discover great things to share.

We figure you’ll have a better overall experience with Buffer if you can see right away how easy it is to share content on social media and learn how your community responds to it. Plus, we promise it’s all really great stuff!

Where does the content come from?

All over the place! Right now, these suggestions are kind of a look inside the online reading habits of the Buffer team.

On most days, you’ll find a mix of social media and marketing posts, some productivity and lifehacking content and an inspirational quote or two thrown in for variety. (We like the philosophy of having a few consistent post types – read more about how Buffer founder Joel tweets here). You’ll probably notice a lot of images, too – we’ve found that photos really increase engagement.

And we always try our best to keep the suggestions in line with our core values – like happiness, clarity, reflection and gratitude.

They’re still a work in progress

Content suggestions are one of our newer projects at Buffer, and (like a lot of what we do) they’re likely to evolve over time – and with your input.

I’d love to hear what you think about the suggestions, what you’d like to see more (or less) of and how we can make this optional feature even more useful for you. Let me know in the comments!

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