Courtesy of a new partnership with Buffer, users of the ‘make-your-own-online-magazine’-styled service, Scoop.it, can now schedule social media updates at the same time as they curate their topic-based news. As is now traditional with just about every new Buffer integration, I’m told that the tie-in with Scoop.it was a much requested feature by users.
Buffer CEO, Leo Widrich, writes breathlessly on the company’s blog:
As lots of you are already Scoop.it curators, many got in touch and asked, how about we can also Buffer whenever we scoop? Today, we are super excited to announce exactly that as we unveil the brand new Scoop.it and Buffer integration.
The premise behind Buffer’s popular social media scheduling service — it recently hit a milestone of 10M scheduled updates — is to enable users to time-shift or ‘buffer’ their social media sharing on the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, so as to ensure that they aren’t overwhelming followers and friends with too many updates at once and, most crucially, that those updates get in front of an audience at the most optimum time.
In addition to the partnership being announced today, Buffer already has around 30 similar third-party integrations, no doubt helped by an open API (see TC coverage), although the company says that Scoop.it is undoubtedly the biggest tie-in with a Web app so far.
It’s also one that seems to make a lot of sense since the news curation service actively encourages social media sharing on the articles that users include in their ‘magazines’ — so why not kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
As Widrich explains:
If you are reading an interesting article that you think is worth scooping, just hit the bookmarklet and also tick the boxes to share via your Buffer accounts…
Meanwhile, Buffer says it has now amassed 300,000 users — though only 5,000 are paying customers — and is seeing 20% month-on-month growth. That’s up from 180,000 registered users, in April this year.
As a side note, the last time I wrote about Buffer, all the way back in May 2011, the startup was “celebrating” its 100,000th scheduled Tweet — so it’s undeniably come along way since then. (That original post still carries one of my favourite headlines, however.)
