Crowdfire vs Buffer – Which Is The Best Social Media Management Tool In 2019/2020

How do you manage your Business’ Social Media accounts? If you’re still posting content from each social media network individually, well… As Obi-wan puts it, you’ll want to go home and rethink your life. Social media management tools are where it’s AT! 

 

 

 

 

There are plenty of tools that can help you manage your social media accounts and that give you access to a wide range of features, from creating and scheduling content, to analysing and reporting.

These platforms are great as they’ll make your life easier and save you loads of time. Time you could be spending watching Game of Thrones a TV show that doesn’t have a bone-crushingly disappointing ending. 

There is a wide selection of Social Media management platforms you can use, you can find all of them nicely organised in this spreadsheet with information about their pricing, features and uniques selling point. You’re welcome! 

 

 

We’ve looked into all of them, and in this post, we’ll compare personal favourites: Buffer and Crowdfire. We’ll analyse each platform in detail and how they differ so that you can decide which one of these two Social Media management tools is the best for you.

Need someone to manage and grow your Social Media? Get in touch with The Growth Hustlers!

Buffer

 

Features

Buffer is an old favourite that’s been around for AGES. The platform enables you to create, schedule and report on your Social Media content. You can connect it to the following networks:

 

– Facebook

– Twitter

– LinkedIn

– Instagram

– Pinterest

 

You can connect multiple accounts per network (including personal profiles as well as pages). This is why it’s a favourite of freelance social media managers who manage multiple accounts. Once your channels and accounts are connected, you can start creating and scheduling posts to be published. 

A good thing about Buffer is that it allows you to select the times you want your social media posts to be published, which means all you have to is create those posts and press schedule, and they’ll be added to the queue instantly. We recommend posting at different times throughout the week, which will allow you to find out what times perform best – ie times your customers’ fans are the most active. Our favourite feature hidden features within Buffer is that if you input a link (as long as it’s not for an Instagram post), it will find the photos within that link for you to post, meaning you don’t even have to download images manually. Just post the link, and that’s it!

Pricing

 

– Free

– Pro: $15/month

– Small Business: $99/month

– Medium Business: $199/month

– Large Business: $399/month

 

The free plan allows you to connect 3 social media accounts and schedule up to 10 posts. The free plan is great to get started with Buffer, and you can upgrade as you grow (if you want to). We recommend using the Pro plan, which is the best bang for your buck as it also allows you to connect up to 10 social media accounts, including Pinterest accounts (which can’t be used on the Free plan). Find more information about Buffer’s pricing here.

Rating and Review

G2 Crowd rating: 4.4/5

Buffer undoubtedly and firmly holds its place as one of the top Social Media Tools. The user experience is smooth, and the platform feels clean and intuitive to use. We’re big fans of buffer and we definitely recommend it to companies of all sizes. They have also released a cool new analytics product called Buffer Analyse that promises to be a good tool to measure and report on your overall social media activity.

 

Crowdfire

 

 

 

Features

Crowdfire is fairly similar to Buffer, but has a few variations. You can create, schedule posts, and analyse what is doing well.

Same as Buffer, you can connect to the following networks:

– Facebook

– Twitter

– Instagram

– Pinterest

– LinkedIn

Where Crowdfire used to excel is with their Twitter management features. They told you who to follow every day to grow your following, and then unfollow whoever does not follow you back.

This made Crowdfire seem like your cool little sidekick that helps you grow on Twitter. Sadly, because of changes to the Twitter API, they had to get rid of these useful features.

They did replace them with a tool they call Mentions, which allows you to keep track of people mentioning your brand on Facebook and Twitter, and reply to them directly from the app. To be honest, we don’t think this is worth paying for as you can just reply from Twitter or Facebook directly.

Crowdfire also has a range of other stuff going on within the platform, such as article and image recommendations in the app’s feed, ready for you to share. You can also connect your blog’s RSS feed to automate the process of posting your blogs, and upload posts in bulk from a spreadsheet to be scheduled to your social media accounts.

 

Pricing

– Free

– $9.99/month

– $49.99/month

– $99.99/month

The free plan allows you to connect 1 account per social network and schedule up to 10 posts. It’s great to get started with, but we recommend using their Plus plan for $9.99 per month, as you can schedule up to 100 posts and have 2 accounts per social media network. You can find more information about Crowdfire’s pricing here.

 

Rating and Review

G2 Crowd rating: 3.9/5

Crowdfire is a very easy to use platform, with plenty of features up its sleeve for you to use. We must say, some of these features are not 100% necessary. However, Crowdfire will shine if you like automating stuff. The fact that it can create social media posts whenever you have a new blog post, YouTube video, or product on your online shop, is pretty cool. 

To sign up to Crowdfire click here

 

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Conclusion

Crowdfire has focused on releasing loads of ‘cool’ features, but some of these are not 100% essential.

On the other hand, Buffer has preferred to focus on refining and perfecting its one core feature, that is scheduling and publishing content.

To cut to the chase, we think Buffer is king right now in 2019. It is the easiest one to use, and they have focused on building one main product that brilliantly answers their customers’ needs.

Crowdfire is the cool underdog and used to be the favourite with their unique Twitter growth features. Since these have been removed, alongside their recent problems with scheduling content on Twitter which lasted a long time, we have moved over to Buffer, which rarely seems to have any issues.

We hope you found this blog useful.

Feel free to click here if you’d like us to help you Growth Hack your Business’ Social Media and send it into hyperspeed.

 

 

 

May Growth Be With You

PS, other Social Media management tools & platforms include: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agorapulse, Sendible, eClincher, Social Pilot, CoSchedule, MavSocial, Friends+Me, Edgar, Post Planner, Tailwind and Later.

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Giovanni Perri

About Giovanni Perri

Giovanni is the co-founder of The Growth Hustlers. His years of experience in marketing – and growth marketing in particular – have helped many businesses find and accelerate growth using his data-driven approach.

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