Over the last three months, I’ve met with more than a dozen agency owners and operators to talk quietly about their work. This is one of my favorite parts of my job as a product marketer, even if it means getting up at odd hours to meet with people on the other side of the world since I live in Australia. I love that I get a glimpse into running a small business, and it’s almost always more interesting than the version you might see on LinkedIn.
Agencies and freelancers are the lifeblood of Buffer. They are real social experts – often more up-to-date than us because they are on the platforms every day on behalf of customers. They tend to find us through word of mouth (one of my conversations this quarter started when someone spotted a Buffer sticker on a stranger’s laptop at a coffee shop in Portland). And once they’re in, Buffer becomes a central part of the company’s governance, meaning we take every job Buffer needs to do seriously.
These conversations revealed how much these agencies are achieving with Buffer and what features they rely on.
I wanted to put it all together in one place, so here’s a tour of all the team features currently in the team plan, as well as what’s on the roadmap.
Content planning
The Ideas Library captures content ideas in a common area, with a Kanban board that routes a rough idea through to publication. Nothing gets lost in someone else’s Notes app, and a creator who creates a draft in the morning can pass it on to someone else in the afternoon without anything falling through the cracks.
Once content is in motion, you can use tags to organize it into campaigns, topics, or custom buckets. However, your team is thinking about the work. Templates display proven post formats that tend to increase engagement, and you can save your own for the recurring content your customers post regularly.
Once an idea is scheduled, it lands in the content calendar, where your entire publishing schedule is displayed in one view. You can filter by brand, customer, channel or campaign, see the upcoming weeks or months and identify any gaps in your schedule.
Team collaboration
Each Buffer team plan includes an unlimited number of users. You can add a strategist, a designer, a freelancer, or a client without checking the number of seats.
For agencies switching to Buffer from another tool, this is often the trigger. One Buffer customer I spoke with manages over 70 channels in over 60 senior living communities, and the space limitation on their previous platform was the reason they switched to Buffer. His team had shared logins because the plan limited the number of users to six. At Buffer everyone has their own account.
The permissions also apply to the people doing the work. If necessary, grant team members read-only access, grant them publishing rights to specific channels, or set up draft approval workflows. This is useful if you work with junior staff, contractors or clients who need access without fully liquidating the account.
Based on all the chats I’ve had with agencies, many still do final client approval outside of Buffer – in Google Docs, email threads, or shared boards. Authorities that have moved approvals into Buffer say it reduces errors that become apparent after publication. Those who haven’t want their customers to use Buffer, but getting a customer to create an account and log in is a real hurdle. We are working on this (see “Coming soon” below).
If something needs feedback, you can leave a note on a post. Comments live in the draft itself, within Buffer, not in a Slack thread that no one reads. And once content is published, the Community Inbox consolidates comments and replies from each channel into a single view, so no one on the team has to switch between five native apps to keep customers’ communities active.
Analyzes and reports
Insights tracks the performance of all your channels in one dashboard or zooms in on a single channel when a customer needs details. The views are designed to be displayed to a customer without translation. So there is no need to take a screenshot of a chart and recreate it in Google Slides.
Reports are exported to CSV, PDF or Markdown. Markdown is perhaps the most flexible of the three. It fits neatly into Notion or Linear if your team is writing customer updates there, and it’s the format that AI assistants analyze most reliably – give a report to the assistant of your choice and get a written summary, a draft of a customer email, or a list of things to try next week.
Takeaways are the newer half of reporting. Buffer reads each customer’s performance data and displays personalized recommendations for next steps. Less “Here’s a diagram”; more “Here’s what you should try this week.”
Account Security
Agencies enjoy great trust. You manage accounts that belong to other people, and a single weak password anywhere on the team can put a dozen customer brands at risk.
The team plan now includes enforceable two-factor authentication. Admins can require 2FA for all users on the account, and team members who don’t have it set up will be prompted to do so the next time they log in.
This is especially important for teams that include external employees. One of our agency clients, who runs a non-profit account with 15 channels, told us that she was in the process of removing volunteer team members because she repeatedly ignored her requests to enable 2FA. Through enforcement, this “please enable it” battle becomes a system that simply requires the account.
Buffer is also SOC 2 compliant, which covers the rest of the security discussion that usually comes up when an agency sells to larger clients.
Integrations
The agencies and brands that are making the most of Buffer have integrated it into the tools they already work with.
Native integrations with Canva, Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Photos, Unsplash and more cover most of the workflows we see. If your team plans content in a tool not on this list, the open Buffer API gives you the ability to create whatever you need – pull posts from a Notion board, sync to a customer dashboard, or incorporate approvals into your project management setup.
Marin Nedelev’s team operates 77 channels in nine countries on Buffer. They specifically chose this because the API allowed them to build the cross-country reporting setup they needed on Google Sheets and n8n without having to pay enterprise pricing for a platform that bundled features they didn’t want.
We have also invested in AI-driven workflows. Buffer’s MCP server connects to agents like Claude and ChatGPT, allowing you to draft, schedule, and review posts in-conversation rather than having to click through a user interface.
And if you already recommend Buffer to your customers, you can become an official partner with the Buffer partner program and receive a share of the sales. It’s a great way to turn that referral you were planning on making anyway into a little extra income.
Coming soon
Guest Access is one of the next big releases on the roadmap. Customers can view and approve content without requiring a full Buffer account.
This comes directly from customer research. Agencies tell us all the time that they would like to send a link to a stakeholder – to the calendar, to a draft, to a queue – without asking that person to create an account, accept an invitation, and learn another tool.
That’s not the only thing on the flight. We’re investing in reporting, customer visibility, and team administration over the next few quarters and will release more information as these features get closer to completion.
Developed together with the agencies that use Buffer
Much of what is in this post comes from an agency request or shows us a smarter way to work. The conversations I have each month continue to shape what we build next.
The pricing also reflects this partnership. Buffer is charged per channel, not per seat, so you can add as many people to the team as you need without changing the bill. When you acquire a customer, add their channels. When a job ends, remove them and your costs go down with them. You never pay for the number of employees or for a busy season that has already ended.
Maybe you’re already getting more out of Buffer than you thought, or there’s a feature here that you’ll be setting up this afternoon. Either way, if you’re looking for a targeted tool that grows and shrinks with your agency, you’ve come to the right place.
And if you already run your agency on Buffer, thank you. These conversations are why we know what we need to build next.
Get started for free → or see how Buffer works for agencies →
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