Introducing Ideas: Creating Content Just Got 84 Hours Faster

Here’s one thing most of us agree on ... creating content is time-consuming.

Last month, I spoke to a bunch of Buffer fans and found that 71 percent wanted a faster way to create and publish content.

After hearing this, I decided to crunch the numbers behind content creation.

The average Buffer user publishes nine posts a day.

Usually, this involves loading up a separate platform where the content is saved. That might be a Trello board, a Notion doc, or a Google Sheet. It takes at least 90 seconds, to load up the content, copy it over to Buffer, check its formatted correctly, and to schedule it.

90 seconds per post might sound fast, but it adds up. Combined it’s:

• An hour and a half each week.
• Seven hours a month.
• Or, 84 hours a year.

In other words, each year the average Buffer user will spend two-working weeks (84 hours), just copy and pasting content from one platform into Buffer.

I’d rather you save that time and take a holiday some place hot.

So, I’m delighted to introduce Ideas, the latest feature from Buffer.

The idea behind Ideas

With Ideas you can store all your great ideas, tweak them until they’re ready, and drop them straight into your Buffer queue.

That will save you two-weeks a year. No more copy-and-pasting from one platform to another, with all your ideas in one place, you can work faster and smarter.

With Ideas, you can capture and store your great ideas whenever they come to you.

Whether that’s on the go with our mobile app, around the web via our browser extension, or in the moment on the Buffer desktop app.

Plus, Ideas is designed to be simple and intuitive to use, yet powerful enough to store all types of ideas. You can add photos, gifs, videos, links and more to your ideas.

By saving all your best ideas in one place, you’ll have a gallery of curated content that will hopefully inspire you to create even more.

8 ideas to get you started

Saving Ideas to Buffer is simple and initiative. With the Buffer browser extension, you can highlight any text, right-click, and save to Ideas.

Why don’t you try it out?

Here are eight Ideas you can save to get started 👇

• Create a how-to-video that documents how your service/product works 📹
• Partner with another brand for a piece of content 👫
• Do a social swap: have a team member take over social for a day 🔄
• Distill a blog post into a quick 30 second TikTok 📽
• Pull a quote from your blog post and share to Pinterest📍
• Poll your audience on Twitter or LinkedIn 🗳
• Ask one of your teammates to do an AMA about their job 🙋‍♀️
• Walk through a list-based blog post on Twitter Threads or an Instagram Carousel 🧵

Why not save these suggestions to Buffer as Ideas and turn them into content for your own social channels.

⚠️ One point to be aware of, some Buffer users who signed up over a year ago and haven’t migrated on to the New Buffer platform won’t be able to access Ideas just yet. So, if you can’t see Ideas in your Buffer dashboard that will be why. However, don’t worry, shortly we’ll offer a way for you to transfer onto the New Buffer platform to access Ideas, plus a host of other new Buffer features.

What’s next for Ideas

We’re just getting started with Ideas. It’s been wonderful to hear several businesses and individuals share how much they love the feature, and we can’t wait to keep evolving the feature. Next up, we plan to build out the mobile app functionality, promote suggested Ideas, and provide tags and categories.

We’d love to hear from you! If you’ve given Ideas a try, how’s it going? What would you like to see us add to it? Get in touch with us on Twitter to share your thoughts and feedback.

Get started with Ideas here →