Social Media Manager Buffer Opens API To Developers, Looks To Become “Widespread Sharing Standard”

Billy Gallagher is a writer for TechCrunch. He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him... ? Learn More

Buffer, a social media manager that aims to become a “widespread sharing standard,” opened its API to developers today.

Buffer lets users post to their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts (Google+ isn’t as lenient with its API) and offers the usual array of analytic feedback. However, its focus on non-original content sharing, especially photos, videos and articles, and individual users differentiates it from a crowded market.

While competitors like HootSuite and Sprout Social mainly target companies by offering them a dashboard for managing media, co-founder Leo Widrich tells me Buffer has a wide variety of users, many of whom use the service for personal accounts.

Widrich says they want to help anyone and everyone “improve the performance of their social media updates and create the most amazing social sharing.” Using their browser extensions and app integrations, users can find “the best content,” add it to the Buffer queue to post throughout the day so that they aren’t dumping content on followers all at once and then track how it performs using analytics.

“With well over 15 integrations done and dozens more in the pipeline, we are super excited to build out a sharing tool that is available to you, no matter where you are finding great content on the web,” Widrich tells me. “What we are working on is to build a new sharing standard with Buffer across the web, that makes timed or untimed sharing of your top links, images and videos easier and gets seen by more of your friends and followers. Drop it into your Buffer and that’s it, we take care of the rest.”

While Buffer could be shafted by Facebook (hmm where have I heard something like that today) if Facebook develops similar tools (and I really think they’re headed in that direction), the service looks pretty awesome and useful for now, so check it out and hope it doesn’t get acquired or killed. Or both!

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