Engagement by Buffer - A faster way to engage with your Instagram audience.

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

Hi! I'm a Buffer user :) We'll check out this new feature! Do you plan to develop it somehow and launch "Engagement" for other social channels?

Congrats on the launch !

Congrats on your launch, this seems to be a great out-of-the-box solution for Instagrammers.

Long time I didn't heard about buffer, will have to check it again.

Congrats on the launch. Loving the vision

I've been using this engagement tool for the past several months and it's one of those products where you wonder, how on earth did I do this before?! Clearly, I'm a little biased but it's a fantastic experience if you ever need to engage with your audience!

Congrats! Does it also integrate with Direct Messages?

Useful ! I can't wait to use it.

Congrats @diesanx and team 🙌