In this blog post, we explain exactly why Vivid Media stopped paying for a social media scheduling tool but continue to pay for social media analytics and reporting.
How it all started
When you start your social media marketing journey, finding a platform to schedule social posts and create White label reports will be one of your first tasks. I clearly remember creating a spreadsheet comparing the most common platforms such as Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social when I started.
I was looking for a tool that was simple to use while also being cost-effective – I ended up going with Buffer Publish and Buffer Analyze.
Two years after starting Vivid Media Facebook released the new and improved Business Suite. I then found myself asking the question, do I still need to pay for scheduling and reporting?
A quick summary:
Don’t have time to read this whole blog post? No worries, we’ve summarized the most important points:
- We used to pay for Buffer Publish and Buffer Analyze
- Now we only pay for Buffer Analyze and use Facebook Business suite to plan and schedule posts.
- Facebook Business Suite is free, crops images on the go and lets you upload higher quality images.
- Facebook doesn’t let you create White label reports, sort posts by engagement and only lets you export one type of graph (reach).
Scheduling Comparison
| Buffer Publish | ||
|---|---|---|
| Price | FREE | $6 per channel |
| Image Size | 30MB | 10MB |
| Editing | Colour and aspect ratio | None |
| Tagging | Yes | Yes but glitches |
| Usability | 7/10 | 9/10 |
| Extras | Convert an image into branded MP4 | Customer Support |
Reporting Capability Comparison
| Facebook Insights | Buffer Analyze | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | FREE | $6 per account |
| Post Sorting | Posts (paid/organic) | Posts and Stories |
| Available Metrics | Missing Engagement | Various |
| Report Generation | Terrible | Customizable & White Label |
Schedule Social Media Posts For Free
Facebook Business Suite vs Buffer Publish:
We choose a scheduling tool based on 2 criteria – price and time savings.
Firstly Facebook business suite is FREE! It has some additional massive advantages such as being able to easily and quickly resize images that don’t meet the required aspect ratio, upload larger image sizes (30MB compared to 10MB on buffer) and tag other accounts in your scheduled posts with ease (Buffer frequently glitches). All these differences result in a massive time-saving in the long run.
It just made sense to cancel our Buffer Publish subscription and save that extra bit of cash.
Create Professional Social Media Reports
Facebook Insights vs Buffer Analyze:
We choose a reporting tool based on 3 criteria – price, post comparison and ability to generate professional reports.
Facebook does a good job meeting the first 2 criteria, it’s free and allows you to easily rank posts for a chosen time period based on various individual metrics such as reach, likes and shares. Where it flops, is creating the report and sorting posts by engagement.
SORTING POSTS
Let’s first mention that Facebook does not allow you to sort posts based on overall engagement. You can filter posts by individual metrics but there is no metric that takes all interactions into account (shares, likes, saves). This is not ideal when trying to find top-performing posts. Buffer on the other hand provides a calculated engagement rate: % = all engagements / Impressions.
CREATING SOCIAL MEDIA REPORTS
Buffer lets you mix and match different metrics and graphs into one single report. Facebook only gives you the option to export individual sections separately. For some absurd reason, the only graph that Facebook lets you export is reach! If you wanted to create graphs from Facebook’s data, It is technically possible. But you would have to export the data into a spreadsheet or Google Data Studio and create graphs from there but who wants to do that?
If you have ever generated reports for clients you will know the value of visual representations versus numbers. It’s just easier for the client to comprehend. Buffer lets you create graphs for multiple different metrics not just reach.
If you’re an agency buffer gives you the added advantages of adding your logo to your reports and writing a summary on the first page and include comments under individual sections.
We are happy to pay R500 ($35) a month for a single pdf document that contains our logo and multiple graphs using metrics of our choice!
* Currently Buffer is offering all its tools for $6 per social channel (That’s a better deal than when we subscribed!).