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Engagement by Buffer — A faster way to engage with your Instagram audience.
Buffer’s new engagement tool helps small businesses stay on top of their Instagram comments and build a loyal and engaged audience. It automatically detects important interactions that need attention, and makes it quick and easy to reply or dismiss comments.
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@aga_jaskiewicz Hi there! We'd love to hear what you think of the new feature and we are indeed planning lots of improvements including another social channel... More details will be revealed in the coming months :) Great question!
Hi everyone 👋
Mike from Buffer here, thrilled to be sharing this launch with you all on behalf of our whole team!
To set the scene a little bit… we’ve been working on this new engagement tool for almost a year now; ever since we made the tough decision to retire the social customer service product that we acquired. (You might remember Buffer Reply, we launched it here some years ago!)
One of the reasons why we retired Reply was that despite our best efforts to integrate it with the rest of our tools, we learned that it was ultimately more suited to Enterprise-scale customers. Most of the customers we serve are small businesses, so it wasn’t the best fit.
Which brings us to our exciting news today! Although Reply wasn’t a good fit for small businesses, we knew that social media engagement is more important than ever. So we went back to the drawing board and built a new engagement tool from scratch.
Some guiding principles we used when building it:
‣ Make it with small businesses and for small businesses. This meant doing a lot of research and validation with our customers and making sure we were solving jobs that are important to them.
‣ Make it easy to use, right out-of-the-box.
‣ Make it feel fast and save time. Time is one of the most valuable assets to small businesses and marketers.
‣ Make it work with Instagram first and expand from there.
We also felt it was important to bundle it with our existing paid plans rather than ask customers to pay for it separately. We want as many small businesses to be able to use it as possible and to add as much value as we can for existing customers. It’s available today on our $15/month plan, and at some point, we hope to have a version of it that is available on our free plan, too.
In terms of the key features, there are a few that I’d love to highlight:
‣ The grid view makes it really easy to see your published posts and which ones have comments that need attention.
‣ Buffer will automatically detect and label comments that you might want to prioritize, for example, comments with negative sentiment or purchase-related queries. It uses machine learning so that you don’t have to set up any rules or tags yourself.
‣ The emoji picker also automatically detects your most commonly used emojis and has them ready for you to use with one click.
Any comments or questions are very much appreciated! We’ve been absolutely thrilled with the response we’ve had so far but we also know that replying to Instagram comments is only one small part of what it takes to build a loyal following on social media. Plans are underway to expand our engagement features and we’d love your feedback.
With much gratitude! ❤️
Mike
Congrats on your launch, this seems to be a great out-of-the-box solution for Instagrammers.
@officialexaking Thanks Jim! One of my fave things about it is that once you've connected your account, there's nothing else to configure.
@laurasm00460050 Hey Laura! It's great to hear that you'll be checking out Buffer again. We've been introducing many improvements and changes which we hope you like. If you have any questions or if there's anything we can help with please let us know 🤗
@nitinmagdum Thanks Nitin 🙂 Not yet. Instagram Direct Messages aren't currently available in the API so we started off our engagement exploration with comments (which we learned many small businesses spend hours manually replying to every day). We have been exploring Direct Messages too if/when that becomes available in the future🤞 In the meantime we are working closely with our customers to ship new value including Facebook comments and other features in the works 💬 This is just the beginning of our engagement offering 🙌 I hope that answers your question and here for any more you might have. Cheers!
Buffer