Smarter Sharing: Feedly connects with Buffer
@feedly2013-02-07T16:00:55+00:00It all started in summer of last year. We started to see an increasing number of users asking us to integrate buffer’s sharing features into feedly.
At first, we did not understand why: we already had good integration with twitter and facebook. With hindsight, it is obvious: feedly users tend to read their feedly once or twice a day and love to share the best articles they find with their social networks to generate engagement and cultivate their digital persona. For users sharing a lot, the bursts end up overwhelming their followers.
In November 2012, we met with the buffer team and were seduced by their level of energy and their obsession with customer happiness. Enough that we decided to do a sprint and build a small prototype of what a feedly+buffer experience might look like.
After a couple of days of usage, I was in love!
My buffer is configured with my Twitter account, my facebook account and my LinkedIn account. The configuration lives in the buffer cloud, allowing me to access my accounts from lots of different apps and lots of different devices.
In the mornings, when I read through my favorites sources in feedly, I can easily share the best articles to both Twitter and LinkedIn (I consider those two networks as isomorphic. They are both related to my passions and professional life and sharing content allows me to spark interesting conversations and build up karma).
I have scheduled buffer to deliver articles to Twitter and LinkedIn every hour. So even though I am reading and sharing all my articles at around 5:45am in the morning, they get spread through the day, resulting in much better engagement.
In December, we decided to take a couple of weeks and productize the prototype on both iOS and Chrome.
Working with the buffer team was awesome: I have rarely seen people with such a positive attitude and so focused on doing the right thing for the customer.
What we are announcing today, is the first step towards a long partnership: we have lots of great plans regarding adding more sharing options and making sharing more visual and impactful.
If you are curious on how to get started, here is a quick tutorial:
- Go to www.bufferapp.com, create a free account and connect it with your social networks.
- Go to iTunes and make sure that you have the latest version of feedly for iOS.
- When you want to share an article on feedly for iOS (or feedly for Chrome), simply tap on the buffer icon, login, select the subset of networks you want to share with and that is it.
- Over time, try to think about what would be the ideal delivery schedule for your workflow and your audience. You might need to upgrade to the buffer awesome plan to get more flexibility. I did.
Go ahead. Give it a try. You won’t go back!
See Buffer’s post about the partnership.
Special thanks to Leo and Cyril for driving this project. Thanks to TNW, AppAdvice, The Social Media Hat, Lifehack and MacLife for helping us spread the news.
Edwin // feedly co-founder and CEO
