The post was last updated in July 2020.
Most social media managers can confirm that searching for new and interesting content to fill their daily schedule can be extremely time-consuming.
Luckily, tools like Quuu are designed to alleviate that problem by automating content (re)search and promotion.
As a tool that gained a lot of traction in the past year, we decided to take a closer look and try it out. If you are interested in learning how does this platform work and what we think about it, we invite you to read the rest of our Quuu review.
What exactly is Quuu?
Quuu’s primary goal is to grow your social media following and engagement by helping you post hand-curated content in your niche.
Quuu sends to its users relevant, high-quality content from their niche each day, which they can easily schedule using any popular scheduling tool like Buffer or HubSpot. These suggestions include a link to the content (article, blog post, video, podcast episode…) and a text containing relevant hashtags and social handles (making it easier to tag the author or source).
What makes Quuu really interesting is on the other side of this coin. You might wonder, where do they find all of those suggestions and how are they hand-curated? Well, a big part of this is Quuu Promote – it is a stand-alone feature through which you can submit your content which, if found worthy, will be sent as a suggestion to other Quuu users. More on this later in the post.
How does Quuu work?
Once you have created your account, you’ll get a set up you’ll need to fill out so that content creators can create the content of your interest.
Quuu has three interesting options:
- Hand-Curated Content – which is showing content recommendations for each day and sending those recommendations to your Buffer/HubSpot schedule. Depending on the set up all 6 content recommendations will go automatically to your Buffer/HubSpot schedule or you will need to pre-approve them and choose which you’d like to promote.
- Pods by Quuu – it will allow you to create and share content with other Quuu users. You can join pods other people have created or create your own
- Discovery (in beta at the moments) – If suggested topics aren’t something you’d like to read more about, you can use the option ‘’Discovery’’ and browse through many different topics from different fields.
Quuu pricing plans
Below you can see Quuu pricing plans and what each includes.
The rest of the article will concentrate on the standalone feature called Quuu promote as it is fairly unique and something we had the opportunity to test extensively.
Quuu promote 101
The short story is:
- You submit a post you want to promote.
- Quuu puts it in front of people in your niche who have signed up to receive content suggestions from them.
- Some of them inevitably share it on their social profiles.
Quuu Promote pricing plans
Quuu and Quuu Promote have separate pricing plans.
If you take a look at the screenshot below, you’ll find the new Quuu promote pricing plan that was active in July 2020.
With the new pricing plan, they also implemented the hands-off promotion service where all you have to do is enter your website/blog into Quuu Promote. The automated promotion (their internal team) will take care of choosing the suitable category and creating variations of share text for each platform – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. All of that described is $75 per month/per site.
DISCLAIMER: The rest of the article shows how the process works without its hands-off promotion service. In other words, it describes how things work with the Manual approach.
If your content is interesting and you know your target audience well, you can get hundreds of shares, clicks and mentions with a very little optimization. And no, those shares are not bots but usually micro-influencers in their own right trying to grow their brand through content curation!
It all sounds great but how hard is it to get to those “hundreds” of clicks? Not that hard – made even easier with our tutorial below.
Step #1: Setting up Quuu Promote
The registration process is pretty straightforward. If you ever registered for anything online, you can handle this as well. Just enter your email address and desired password and that’s it.
After you verify your email address, you need to enter the URL of the blog.
The next screen you will contain a list of 10 latest articles from your blog, ready to promote. In case you don’t want to promote any of the suggested articles, click on the “search for more articles” button at the bottom of the page to find the post you’d like to promote.
You can promote posts from multiple blogs. To add another blog, click on the blue plus sign in the top right corner and the process repeats.
Step #2: Creating a promotion for a new post
We know it may sound complicated, but there are only five steps to promote your blog post:
- Click on a blue plus sign on the article you wish to promote
- Pick an interest category (content marketing, beauty, email marketing,..)
- Create a social media post (social media that are covered are Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter)
- Create up to three variations of your post
- Click on the ‘’Save’’ button (you can do this at any time; the post will be saved as a “draft” and you can come back to it at any time to review/edit/submit)
- Once you’re reviewed everything, you just need to click on the ‘’Submit’’ button
Have in mind that after you submit your post, the review process is starting and it usually takes 1-2 business days to finish. If you want to find out more information like that, feel free to check their Q&A.
We have created a short video that takes you through each step (watch it in full screen for the best experience).
In case you don’t want to create the promotion by yourself, Quuu Promote also offers automated promotions where they write you descriptions and add hashtags for you.
Step #3: Edit your posts for better engagement
Quuu Promote itself is not a guarantee of great engagement. You need to adjust your post to each of the social media platforms and their guidelines. We covered both technical and visual component as both of them are equally important in this process.
Technical component
As already mentioned before, Quuu Promote allows you to set up shares for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can use the same copy for everything, but it’s not recommended because every one of them has different guidelines you should follow if you want to have good engagement.
For example, Twitter shares should contain relevant hashtags (usually 1-3) and proper tags. Another important thing to take care of is character count when you’re writing the text. Your posts always have to include the link that is created by Quuu automatically so count that in when you’re coming up with creative posts. Quuu will help you out by showing you the counter of how many characters you used for the copy. Facebook and Linkedin don’t prefer that many hashtags so it’s ok to leave them from those social media. You can always compensate that with longer descriptions as those two social networks don’t have character count.
Keep in mind that it’s not being shared by you, but other QUUU users so you should refrain from writing share text in the first person using “I” or “We”.
As we mentioned earlier, you can create three different copies for each social network. For example, in one content variation, you can share a quote, in the second you can put some relevant statistics, and in the third, you can explain what value your content offers. All 3 sets of share texts will be used at some point, and your content will be able to be shared 2 more times than usual by the same user – as they have three different variations of share texts to promote the same piece of content with.
Screenshot below shows how this step looks like.
Visual component
Quuu Promote lets you customize featured images for each social network. As you can see in the screenshot above, it automatically pulls a featured image from your blog post during the promotion setup process. If you have nicely designed images already, feel free to leave it like that! In case your post doesn’t have a convenient featured image, you can put your custom picture (your design or stock photo).
Once you click on the ”Save” button, your post will appear in the drafts section. Always check this part and look for any spelling or grammatical mistakes!
Step #4: Pay and publish
Once you are done with everything, simply hit “Next”. If you didn’t already, Quuu will lead you to the page where you can choose your pricing plan. Whichever plan you choose, your posts can get an unlimited number of shares, mentions and clicks during the 30-day promotion period.
Each pricing plan contains a certain amount of credits and you spend one credit per post.
After payment is done by spending that credit and your content has passed their internal review process, it will be put in front of the eyes of people in your interest category and you can look how the number of shares and mentions grows.
Does Quuu Promote work?
If you open your dashboard and filter it with posts that are currently active, you can see how many “promotion days” are left and how many clicks, shares and views your posts have gathered so far.
Metrics can significantly vary from category to category. As you can imagine, posts in more popular niches (like marketing) garner much better metrics from those in less saturated niches (like engineering for instance).
We get new shares on a daily basis, and those shares get engagements, likes, and retweets which increases our reach and the reach of the person that shared our content – a win-win situation!
Here is how the post looks on Twitter when someone shares it!
Discussing UI and UX
In this time of fast technology rise, users want to experience it without spending too much time on it. That’s why it’s important to have your website design and user flow in place.
Dashboard design
Since you have the possibility to promote blog posts from more than one website, Quuu Promote gives you a dashboard that is pretty easy to use. You get all the websites listed on your main dashboard.
The confusing thing can be the fact that if you promote a post you wrote for a website that is not yours, it automatically puts it on your dashboard with the rest of your websites. Maybe the better solution could be to group all the guest post websites in one place. In that way, they would be separated from your websites so you get better transparency and they are easier to manage.
If you choose to go on a specific website dashboard (in this example we choose Point Visible one), you get a filter in a shape of the dropdown menu so it’s easy to manage different views. On the screenshot below, you can see all the categories that this filter has, and trust us, you are going to need them for a better organisation when you have dozens of active posts.
In our case, 3 most used ones are:
- active posts – all the posts that are currently being promoted
- in review – posts that are under review by Quuu Promote team
- drafts – posts that are created but still aren’t promoted yet (i.e. the share text needs to be reviewed internally or we wait for a designer to create a new featured image)
Last but not least, is a possibility to work in night or day mode. The visibility on both options is equally good so feel free to adjust it to your habits. All previous screenshots were in a day mode, and below you can check out how it looks to work in a night mode.
User experience
Not all posts pass the review process. If your post doesn’t follow Quuu Promote guidelines, it’s likely going to be rejected. The good thing for you is that you can always find it under rejected filter on your dashboard and analyse what went wrong!
Another neat feature is the progress bar that shows how much time of each promotion has left (as can bee seen in the screenshot below).
One thing that did annoy us a bit is the persistent tutorial. After we made a new account, Quuu Promote offered us the tutorial every time we signed in without an exit option. This continues to happen until you create your first promotion.
Managing your account
Sometimes duration of the review process can vary. Quuu Promote lets you know how many days it’s going to take to review your promotion, but they also give you an option to skip the queue called Quuu Jump. Of course, it’s not for free, but it can be very handy if you need to meet a deadline.
A nice addition is the ability to enter your credit/debit card and save it under your account so you don’t have to re-enter it every time you wish to purchase any of the premium features they offer!
While still being on the financial side, we need to mention that you can access all of your invoices from your account without any additional complications! In case you have a lot of them, Quuu Promote took care of that in a way of the possibility to view up to 100 invoices on your account.
All of that can be found under account settings.
Pros and Cons of Quuu Promote
Pros
Easy to use
As mentioned a few times above, the tool is very easy to use, with an intuitive dashboard and easy to understand instructions. It has some tips and pieces of advice for new users that will help you create better posts.
Getting your content in front of the right people
This is obviously the largest benefit of QUUU Promote. Your content will be seen by people who chose to see suggestions from your niche/category and they will share it with their followers who are obviously also interested in your industry – it doesn’t get much better and targeted than that!
Social engagement
If you include your Twitter handle in posts or are using any of the social mention tracking tools, it will be easy to engage with people that shared your content by saying thanks or answering any questions.
Additionally, any social shares and other social signals are presumably tracked by Google and could have a positive effect on the ranking of your post.
Cons
You can only pick one category
As mentioned earlier, it would be great to pick more than just one category because sometimes that’s what your content needs.
Not enough categories
We ran into some hiccups with some of our clients when we just couldn’t find a perfect category for their content and we were forced to improvise by picking the next best thing. Perhaps adding a few more categories would be great. That being said, they are probably limited by the number of people that actually want to see suggestions from particular niches so this might be remedied as the network grows.
Final takeaways
We stumbled upon Quuu when a blogger that republished one of our infographics decided to promote it via Quuu. We didn’t know it at that time so we were caught off guard as we weren’t sure why are we seeing a sudden increased in shares.
After we found out the reason, we decided to try it out for ourselves – and we have been using it ever since.
