Ideas for social content can strike at any time (does anyone else think of them right before going to sleep?) but they’re rarely fully formed or immediately ready to share.

You might need to create a new video, flesh out some copy, or run your idea past another person. Plus, there are just about a hundred ways to save posts for later: spreadsheets, word documents, notes apps, post-it-notes, written on your hand — we’ve seen it all.

When the content is polished up and ready to go, you would then copy it over to a social media management tool or directly to your social accounts.

There are two problems here:

1. You have to download and upload media from one place to another, which is annoying and time-consuming.
2. There’s room for error when you’re copying things over. Did it copy over correctly? Did you schedule it for the correct time?

At Buffer we’re on a mission to make this process easier for you, starting with some major improvements to our drafts feature.

The new drafts experience in Buffer

With the new-and-improved drafts experience, you’ll be able to:

• Plan and save content ideas for later across your devices. You can create drafts on mobile or desktop, and they’ll be synced together.
• Add drafts to specific time slots in your calendar, so that you can plan out your social schedule ahead of time.
• Save and schedule drafts with any Buffer plan, including our free plan.

Our goal is to help you jot down your ideas, revisit them, refine them, and schedule them — all in one place — in your own time.

Read on for more details about how it works!

Create drafts from anywhere

It doesn’t matter whether you’re using the Buffer mobile app, the calendar view on desktop, or the traditional queue view - if you’re composing a post, you’ll have the option to save it as a draft or add it to your queue.

Save or schedule drafts

Sometimes you may want to add a draft for a specific time in your calendar, and other times you may want to save a draft to a backlog of ideas instead. Scheduling drafts works the same way as scheduling posts. You can click on a slot in your queue or calendar to create a draft for that time, or you can create a custom time for your draft. Drafts with scheduled times act as “placeholders”; they will never be published until they’re added to the queue as a finished post.

Turning a draft into a finished post

You can review your drafts for a channel by going to the queue and opening the Drafts tab. Once you’re feeling good about a draft and it’s ready to be scheduled as a post, simply add it to the queue. This will “confirm” the draft as a finished post, and it will be published at your chosen time.

Collaborating on drafts as a team

If you have a Team or Agency plan, you can set up permissions for your team members so that they can submit drafts for approval before they’re published. Account owners and team members with full posting access can edit all drafts, delete all drafts, and move all drafts to the queue. Team members with restricted access are can edit their own drafts, delete their own drafts, and request approval for their own drafts.

Drafts are free

While collaboration workflows are available for Team and Agency customers, if you’re a “team-of-one” and use our Free or Essentials plan, you’ll still be able to save, edit, and schedule drafts.

More to come

Content creation is THE hardest part of a winning social media strategy, and drafting content is just one small step in that process. Helping you create quality content is going to be a big focus for us this year, so stay tuned for more features and updates.

Do you have any questions or thoughts about the new draft experience? Tag us in a tweet - we'd love to hear from you.

Happy drafting! ✏️