We Tried a New Social Amplification Tool for 30 Days. Here's What We Learned

Social media platforms, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, are quickly figuring out how to monetize the value of their networks by charging businesses to reach their target buyers with new advertising units. Facebook is getting so good at it, that businesses are reaching only a small 1%-5% of their acquired followers when they post an update on their platform — unless they pay to promote it. And if you’re spending money on Facebook ads to reach your target buyers, you know the costs can quickly add up.

So we were excited to try out a new promotion tool called Quuu that seeks to give B2B audiences a way to amplify their content in a more organic way. It’s pretty ingenious if you ask me!

Amplify your B2B social media content

The Quuu platform has two sides to it: one for thought leaders and one for publishers.

As a thought leader in your B2B company (like the VP of marketing), you might be interested in signing up for the curated content that Quuu delivers directly into your scheduling/publishing platform, like Buffer or HubSpot. Quuu lets you choose from dozens of B2B topics like cyber security, healthcare, human resources, or financial services, and lets you dictate the number of social updates you’d like to receive. Both features are included in free plans as well as paid plans.

Don’t worry, Quuu doesn’t automatically publish anything without your consent. It saves their recommended, pre-written posts as drafts in your Buffer or HubSpot account for you to review, edit if you so choose, and then schedule when you want. You can always delete them if they aren’t quite right for you or your brand.

As a publisher of content, your brand is probably producing some pretty awesome top-of-funnel content like long-form explainer pieces that help educate buyers, cool infographics, and videos that entertain as well as raise awareness for your brand. That’s where Quuu Promote comes in, allowing publishers to write their own social media updates for the Quuu thought-leader audience, including hashtags and mentions. Publishers pay just $30 per post for 30 days of serving the pre-written social update within a single topic/vertical. They offer additional options to extend the length of the promotion as well.

We didn’t know what to expect from such a low cost promotion effort, so for 30 days we experimented with promoting content for a variety of clients in different verticals. The raw results are below. Because Quuu doesn’t disclose how many people are in each channel or the statistics around each channel, it’s hard to make an educated guess about where to promote content if you are in between categories (for instance, would your SEO post reach more people in the SEO channel or a broader marketing/inbound channel?).

Promoting marketing and sales content

We promoted seven pieces of content for 30 days in the following Quuu channels: Inbound Marketing, SEO, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Sales Strategy, and eCommerce. (We assumed for all calculations that we paid $1 per day since some promotions had not completed a full 30 days.)

Promoting healthcare content

We promoted one piece of content in the following Quuu channel: Healthcare - for businesses.  (We assumed for all calculations that we paid $1 per day since some promotions had not completed a full 30 days.)

Promoting cyber security content

We promoted two pieces of content in the following Quuu channel: Cyber Security. (We assumed for all calculations that we paid $1 per day since some promotions had not completed a full 30 days.)

Promoting recruiting/HR content

We promoted one piece of content for in the following Quuu channels: Recruitment Industry. (We assumed for all calculations that we paid $1 per day since some promotions had not completed a full 30 days.)

Traffic quality and conversions from B2B social media promotions

While added visibility and traffic to your B2B website is a great thing, you may also be wondering about the quality of the traffic and conversion rates. In our own analysis of the traffic, the bounce rates and quality are the same as we see from other organic Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn traffic. That is to say, for us, social media traffic is not the biggest source of high-converting traffic to our site (that remains organic Google search traffic).

However, the benefit for smaller businesses with relatively low brand recognition and visibility is that B2B social media promotions through tools like Quuu have a multiplying effect. While the visitor may only engage with your content briefly and leave, the fact is that you have now created awareness for your company where it didn’t exist before. That makes it more likely that the third, fourth, fifth, or twentieth time they see your brand and company name, they will take more notice, and maybe even search for you in the future knowing that you are a thought leader in the industry.

In short, we’re looking forward to continued tests with the Quuu platform and adding this into the mix of promotional tools we’re using for our content amplification efforts as well as for our own.