Today in Digital Marketing - 134: Has Buffer Killed Its “Reply” Product? (Answer: Yup)

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, April 20th, 2020. Happy 420. Yeah, Dave, come on, man. Open up. I think the cops are coming. Dave's not here. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. Today, Google is handing out free ads.

Starting point is 00:00:14 Does your brand qualify? Quora revamps its ads manager. And what is happening with Buffer's engagement platform? Is it just gone now? Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. YouTube is rolling out a new section in its analytics that sounds better than it actually is. They will soon be launching a chart showing you when your brand's YouTube audience is most likely to be online. It's basically a heat map. You've probably seen other examples of this,

Starting point is 00:00:42 a grid that shows days of the week and then hours of the day. And the darker the box, the more people are online then. And here's one nice touch that YouTube's thought of. It doesn't show when your audience is watching your videos. Only when your audience is watching any YouTube videos. And you might think at first, that's not good. But it is. Because measuring viewer times on your videos will align directly with your publishing schedule.

Starting point is 00:01:09 If you always publish Tuesdays and Fridays at noon, your data would indicate, hey, you get a lot of viewers on Tuesdays and Fridays at noon. And this is the fault of how a lot of agencies and brands audit their own channels. They forget that their publishing schedule directly influences consumption patterns, which is why, at least at our agency, EngageQ, when we do quarterly content audits, we mix everything up from time of day to type of post. And in this way, YouTube gets it right. It'll show you when your audience is just on YouTube as a whole. But remember, these exercises in let's measure the so-called best time to post are largely irrelevant now, thanks to the algorithm controlling distribution with a much firmer grip. YouTube agrees, saying while they don't have the data to prove that publishing during your hot times will increase viewership, it might be a good indication, though, of when to go live.

Starting point is 00:02:03 You won't see this in your dashboard yet. It is still being developed and is not yet publicly available. Google has now explained which brands are eligible for their ad of 2019 and in January or February of this year. So if you hadn't spent anything in 2020 so far, you are not on the list. Brand new accounts as of 2020, also not on the list. For those of you who are in agencies, as long as there is one manager level account that has accounts that qualify, the credits will get sent to each eligible account. But here's where it gets a little confusing. Each eligible advertiser will get one ad credit. And you may be wondering, what does an ad credit buy? Good question. Quoting Search Engine Journal, what that credit is worth

Starting point is 00:03:03 will vary by customer. Google doesn't release specific details of the calculation, instead specifying that it's based on historic ad spend levels plus their country and currency, unquote. Ad credits will be on a rolling basis starting in May. Eligible customers will get an ad credit applied and will receive a notification of the addition. Those credits can be used through December of this year and will be revoked after that. Credits can be used towards anything on the Google Ads platform that encompasses search, display, and YouTube, along with any campaign goal

Starting point is 00:03:36 or type within those. You might notice some changes kicking around Quora if you use their ads manager. They've launched a complete overhaul of their ads UI, including changing some backend code to let them onboard new features quicker in the future. Among the changes, there's now a progress bar across the top, so you know where in the campaign setup process you are. The UI has been tightened up. Some areas like ad previews are now higher up on the page and some smaller items like that. Also, and this is a little weird, Quora is breaking from most conventions and renaming their conversions. They won't call them conversions anymore. They'll call them events, which will be a little different than what Facebook calls events. So yay for more cross-platform confusion.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Quora says that they're a good place to advertise since half of their users make up more than $100,000 per year in salary. They also claim to have higher engagement levels than LinkedIn. Among their products, a promoted answer, which will let you show your brand's preferred answer shown to a question. A couple of quick third-party platform items here. Sprout Social was down in the early morning hours of today. They have fixed it, but they do warn that some Facebook private messages and some Instagram mentions did not pull into the smart inbox during the affected time.

Starting point is 00:04:55 So if you use Sprout Social, it might be a good idea to manually check on the platforms. Also, any posts that you had scheduled to be sent during the time that they were down obviously did not go up. They are working on showing those under publishing failed posts. And what has happened with Buffer Reply? I noticed on the weekend that it was just gone from their website. Buffer, as you may know, is a third-party social media platform that competes with things like Social, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, and so on. They had three separate products, Publish, Analyze, and Reply,

Starting point is 00:05:27 which they bought and rebranded. It was their platform for seeing and replying to the usual things like Facebook comments, tweets, Instagram comments, PMs, DMs, and all that. But now, the Buffer product page only shows Buffer and Analyze. Reply is just gone. Gone from the product page, gone from the pricing page. I've emailed both their support department and their media people, but I'm just breaking in here because at the last minute after I had recorded this episode, I did get a reply from Buffer,

Starting point is 00:05:56 and they said, you're spot on. We recently made the tough decision to discontinue support for Reply. We haven't been able to build it into the quality of product that we wanted, so we feel like this is the best decision. We do have plans for an Instagram engagement tool in the future, so keep an eye out for that. You know, I guess good for them for making what is, I'm sure, a very difficult decision to pull the plug if it wasn't meeting their expectations or their client expectations.

Starting point is 00:06:24 I do feel bad for Buffer, though. Buffer's been a stable platform. Their reply product, when we tested it, looked pretty darn good. And this leaves them now with a big gap in the overall dashboard setup. So anyway, that's what's happened. Breaking news. All that said, though, I have to tip my hat to Buffer. We use them at our agency, and of course, like everyone, we've lost some client work because of spend budgets declining. Buffer, without hesitation, helped with their fees for us for a few months,

Starting point is 00:06:55 even without pausing our account, for which we are very grateful. Promo.com, for its part, agreed to put our account on pause, but we wouldn't have access to the platform during that time. However, apparently when it resumes in August, it will be on the same grandfathered plan as we had before, which is great. As for Sposed Social, we emailed our usual rep there. We were passed off to a different person there for some reason, so still waiting to hear back from them on if they have any relief opportunities for their clients. Well, I am slowly returning to social media, so be sure to follow me there all my links are in this episode's description

Starting point is 00:07:26 talk to you tomorrow

Today in Digital Marketing - 134: Has Buffer Killed Its “Reply” Product? (Answer: Yup)

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