BuzzBundle

If you're like me, you like to plan things out ahead of time. I am one of those people that maps out an entire day into 15 minutes bursts. I use a calendar to remember who I am having lunch with and where. I don't like to forget a single detail, therefore I am quite detailed in what I am doing and when. Time estimates are a necessity. As a result, Buzz Bundle is one of the most important pieces of software in my life right now. It is great being able to schedule out my social media posts to coincide with things I am doing and different developments within our company. It is also great being able to control multiple accounts, allowing me to handle our "brand" and my "brand" at the same time. Not having a monthly fee to deal with or having to worry about service outages is quite nice; that is unless Twitter or Facebook goes down. Even then, you'd still have issues on the other services as well, so that really is a strength of Buzz Bundle.

There are some limitations with the software that one would expect from a piece of software. First of all, to be able to do a lot of searches within the software one has to have access to proxies. These can be hard to obtain and configure, especially for a computer novice. It is not the most user-friendly from that aspect; you do have to put in some work for some of the features. However, the social parts of the software are pretty easy to use. Would be great if there were more social networks; it is quite limited in that regard. It has the key ones, but there is a whole world out there that gets restricted because of the limited scope of the software. It would be great to see that rectified in further updates to the software. It also does worry me sometimes that my presence goes dark if my connection goes dark; but I generally don't run into that issue.

I've been a long-time customer of the vendor with their other products. It is only natural that I would find BundleBuzz to be pretty to use; they understand how to make features "just work". The fact that I was able to get this installed on both my Windows and my Linux machine was quite nice; doesn't require a lot of memory and I don't have to access a web browser to check things out. A bit cumbersome to deal with loading things up between two machines, but I guess you get used to that part rather quick. That's what cloud storage is for.

BuzzBundle has been a life saver for our company. Our customers have come to use our social media as a means of obtaining support or even communicating their own ideas for how to innovate what we are providing to them. We develop our own software for productivity; we are proud to say that BuzzBundle actually fits into our own productive schedules quite well. With the scheduling and organizing you can do with the software, it is easy to put out announcements on new features and changes with our software. It is easy for us to respond to questions posted to us or responses to things we put out on social media. We are also able to measure how our social media is impacting our sales and our SEO. Different members of our team have found different uses for the information provided to us in the reporting and for gathering information about potential bugs or issues our users are running into.

I would love if there was a hosted solution at some point with the same features. I myself have limited experience in using using proxies and had some issues with using some of the features which are reliant of using search engines. As a result, one of our web developers had to help set us up with proxies and get them configured within the software. While the price may seem a bit restrictive at the front, it was nice having a free version to test out with.

I will be the first to admit that I was wary about the software at the start. Most things dealing with social are hosted online and don't require anything to be installed. That's pretty much how all software is migrating. The software needs to be installed on your machine, and thus is reliant on your own infrastructure. That's both a positive and negative; the software cannot just disappear on us when we need it the most; that is unless we lose our electricity or Internet connection.

As a small business our team has the challenge of trying to fit a large number of products into a single work week. As a result, it can be chaos trying to ensure that everything we are doing is falling into place at the right time. For our social media, we are glad to have BB here to keep us on schedule with announcements, feature highlights, and even fun quiz posts and questions out to our growing community. We care about how our social media grows over time and the software gives us the opportunity to keep an eye on things from a single location while ensuring we are posting the right things at the right time. We have the pro license and it really is worth the price. For other services, you're stuck paying a monthly or annual fee that keeps you on your toes; you're then having to worry about how much use you're getting out of it and sometimes trying to remember whether it is coming from the right account or not. The only thing we have to worry about is whether or not we scheduled that post; we did.

For any piece of software out there one of the most important things to our group is reliability. While we haven't really had any issues with the software itself, it does concern me having the software on a machine in our office. The reason for this concern is because hardware failure happens and it can be difficult and cumbersome to rely on our own backups. We are in the business of online; all of the things we use are in a web browser. I believe BuzzBundle is one of the few "programs" we actually have installed on machines; as a result if a natural disaster occurs it could take us some time to get back up and running on our social media. I would prefer to have an online service to manage our social, but BuzzBundle just does things too right to pass it up.

My concern about reliability aside, I don't really have a lot to say negatively about it. I would say the scheduling and reporting are the two things that are most important to our team. We have become reliant on the software; and being able to monitor blogs and forums also makes it possible to keep track with the industry as a whole. Sometimes I feel like the software gives our company an unfair advantage; and that's alright to us!

Buzz Bundle lets you add Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts. This gives me a lot of flexibility in what I do and where I do it. Since these are my key social networks, I am glad I can handle all of this from one place and get my communications out on each platform. Adding posts and dealing with messages is fast and easy; there is not a whole lot of configuration that needs to take place to get up and running. Their support is fast at handling any questions I may have had on the software and it is a pleasure using it. While the software is a bit expensive, it ultimately works well for what it is.

One of the most annoying aspects of this software is the fact that it was written in Java. While it is nice that their software can be installed on different operating systems, Java is one of the languages most targeted by malware and those looking to gain access to a computer. As a result, I would say this choice makes the software more susceptible to malicious attacks. It makes me a bit wary, but most of that comes from my dealings with Oracle as a company and their horrible security practices. The software functions at the very least.

I've used a few different pieces of software from other companies to try to get the job done. Buzz Bundle was the first that really seemed to "click" with how I do things. It is nice having a single interface for everything; it cuts down on the amount of time I have to direct towards social media and makes it easy to interact with others. I work with a lot of people that use social media and having a public record of things is quite nice.