Adding the Buffer Share Button to WordPress Using Jetpack

I’m currently in the process of investigating the usefulness of Buffer as a way to share my blog posts and articles to the various social services, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition to checking out the service, I wanted to ensure that my web site, currently using WordPress, would be able to integrate with it.

For those unfamiliar with Buffer, it claims to be a more efficient solution to sharing content on social media web sites. Basically, it allows you to schedule when you share your content, and will automatically push out new tweets or posts at times defined by you, when your audience will be more attentive and more likely to read.

The idea of being able to schedule the sharing of posts is attractive, as most of my followers aren’t looking at Twitter or Facebook when I’m posting, primarily in the evenings and sometimes on weekends. Buffer would allow me to get around that by sharing my content during weekdays when people are more likely to see my tweet or post and visit my web site.

So I started investigating the addition of the Buffer button to my social sharing bar, and as I’m currently using Jetpack and its sharing features, I wanted to ensure I could add the Buffer button for visibility on my posts. Jetpack does allow the addition of additional sharing services through its Sharing configuration page, and I’ll be documenting the steps to add Buffer as a new service here:

1. Navigate to the configuration screen of the Jetpack “Sharing” module.
2. Click on the “Add a new service” URL in the Available Services container.
   
3. Fill out the required configuration boxes with the following values:
   Service name: Buffer
   Sharing URL: http://bufferapp.com/add?&text=%post_title%&url=%post_url%
   Icon URL: http://www.daharveyjr.com/wp-content/uploads/buffer1616.png

   Ideally, you would host this icon on your own site, so feel free to download and use on your own servers. When you’ve filled out the applicable fields, your screen should look like this:
   

4. Click on the “Create Share Button” button, and you’ll now see a new icon added to your available services, as shown here:
   
5. Drag the newly created “Buffer” service, to the Enabled Services section of your configuration screen:
   
6. Click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen and BOOM!, you will start to see the Buffer button display on your sharing bar within your posts and articles as configured by you.

There you have it, your WordPress blog is now configured to enable sharing your content through Buffer.