The social media tool

Chances are if you do any social media marketing, you’ve heard of Buffer. Buffer is a social sharing and scheduling tool based in California. If you are not familiar with Buffer, it is a faster, easier way to share what you love on social media. You add updates to your Buffer queue and the content you load will be posted for you throughout the day and at peak engagement times.

Optimal timing

Why would you use Buffer instead of posting directly to social media yourself? For smaller companies and startups without a social media expert, Buffer allows you to load all your promotional advertising that you want to be pushed to your followers without having to be at the computer typing in the message and hitting send at those optimal times. Basically, Buffer is set-it-and-forget-it for social media.

Assign customer service tasks

Now, with Buffer’s latest acquisition, they’ve become even more. Buffer has acquired Respondly, a social media customer service and brand monitoring tool. Essentially, Respondly is a customer service tool for companies that use Twitter to deal with queries and complaints. It allows you to assign tweets to team members, collating replies and mentions so nothing gets lost.

Buffer’s blog states they will rebrand Respondly as Respond as keep it as a separate platform.

Beyond social media

This is quite a notable expansion for Buffer; they’re moving beyond social media publishing into customer service creating an all-encompassing customer service station.

Buffer’s blog explains, “social media has matured tremendously—Facebook and Twitter have gone beyond the “hot new thing” to become ubiquitous tools that help us connect with each other and help businesses reach their audiences.”

Simplicity and speed

The decision to keep the platforms separate came directly from Buffer: “Because of our focus on simplicity, it didn’t quite feel like the right approach to combine those two functionalities together into one tool—our approach to product is to try to keep things simple and intuitive, yet powerful. Instead, we felt that if we were to enter the customer service and brand monitoring space, we would tackle it separately in order to build a world-class product for both the marketer and the customer service person.”

Buffer plus Respondly will be geared towards simplicity and speed, offering you the best of both platforms. This sounds like a pretty awesome deal to us. What do you think?

#BufferAndRespondly