Quuu Promote Review: Promote content via other social media users
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TL;DR
Quuu Promote ensures your content marketing gets more shares on social media. The content sharing tool supplies time-starved Quuu users with high-quality articles such as yours, meaning everything you published gets seen by more people, more often. A clever means of promoting content.
Quuu Promote Pros
- Shared by real people
- Low cost subscription
- 500+ niches
- Shares dashboard
Quuu Promote Cons
- Slow customer support
- Tend to be straight shares
The Story
What is Quuu Promote?
I’m a big believer in creating once, distributing forever. Plus, it’s even better if others willing to do it for you. Step up Quuu and Quuu Promote…
Quuu has two jobs - as a content scout for businesses that need to up their game on social media and a place to promote your own content. Its genius is in both sides feeding the other.
So, if like me, you’ve been busy crafting well-researched, expertly-written content, Quuu Promote can put it in front of a community of content-hungry social accounts happy to plug it for you. Powered by RSS feeds and Quuu’s eye for thumb-stopping stories, Quuu Promote calls itself “the simplest content promotion platform on the planet.” A bold claim, but does it walk the talk?
In this review I’ll be running an experiment as a paid-up member of Quuu Promote’s $75 per month ‘Automatic’ plan as well as the usual breakdown of key features and Quuu alternatives.
Meet the Maker:
Daniel Kempe
Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of Quuu. He launched the SaaS tool in 2015 with his co-founder, and COO, Matthew Spur. I interviewed him back in 2019.
Quuu began life as a way for the two to save time and effort sourcing great content to share on social media. A common problem felt by many business owners, too busy to carve out time in the day to so manually. The resulting tool used a unique set of rules and human intervention to handpick only the most compelling content.
Quuu Promote was their way of injecting submissions into that big bank of content suggestions and opening up a new revenue stream - people after a content promotion service. Fast forward to today and Quuu has served up more than 22 million content suggestions to its users, and counting!
The Product
How we tested Quuu Promote for this review
This is part-review, part-experiment. Having built up a reasonable body of reviews and interviews on Surges.co it was time for my lockdown side-project to spread its wings and attract new eyeballs to the website. Quuu Promote is very strict about the content it will allow on the platform. I was confident Surges would pass their quality threshold but they’d much rather promote content such as blog posts, long form content and news stories than reviews and interviews. Still, I was good.
I’m all for automating existing workstreams so decided to put the $75 p/m all-inclusive ‘Automatic’ subscription tier to the test.
The package includes Quuu Promote creating three variations of every post (one for each social network), adding custom hashtags, selecting the most relevant categories, adding @usernames and more. That’s a lot of time saved over the more manual $50 entry tier.
My current social media stack consists of MeetEdgar and Publer, although I’ve tested and reviewed many more. I love the ability to recycle my top content with MeetEdgar’s auto-variation feature but the resulting engagement is very hit and miss as I’m still speaking to my first 1,000 followers. Quuu Promote promised to make my content more popular and up its reach, so let’s see if it delivered the goods…
Getting started with Quuu Promote
Quuu spreads your content shortly after hitting publish. To do so it needs an RSS feed to work from.
Website builders such as WordPress and Squarespace have built-in RSS feeds most types of content, however Quuu is only interested in high-quality articles and blog posts. If, like me, you don’t have an RSS feed services such as PolitePol or rss.app act as a workaround, creating one for you. It’s not always a like-for-like substitute, as it wouldn’t pull in all the info I wanted, but Quuu thankfully offers a fall back where the team will manually strive to find any content worthy of promotion from any URL you give them.
I went down the rss.app route while my developer worked on adding an RSS feed to the site.
Once your RSS feed is connected, anytime you publish new content it automatically enters the suggested content to share of relevant users on Quuu. After an initial first batch of 10 posts across the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), Quuu promotes 2 items of your content a day. Social media promotion made easy!
Quuu Promote features you’ll love
Quuu is a platform of two halves, each side feeding the other…
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🚀 Quuu Promote – unlimited organic shares
Sitting on great content but short of readers? Quuu Promote has one feature of note: the ability to share it like wildfire.
Hooked up to your RSS feed it acts as a shot in the arm for every new article or blog post. As long as it meets their quality threshold and isn’t blatant self-promotion, it will enter the list of suggested social media posts of Quuu members too busy to source their own content to share. Win/win for all involved!
The main worry when paying anybody to share your content is that it will be bot accounts with fake followers and no clout, however that’s simply not the case with Quuu. Every account is a real person that has paid for the privilege of curated content and it’s posted via the individual’s own social scheduler. As such, it doesn’t look like an advert or sponsored post – it’s shared organically and enthusiastically, regardless of how well-known your site is or the size of your budget.
A lot of the content on Surges was rejected at first as reviews aren’t allowed on the platform. However, interviews and helpful business articles are so we went with those. A snapshot of results shows the level of shares and clicks you can expect from Quuu Promote:
- 901 shares / 263 clicks
- 774 shares / 154 clicks
- 124 shares / 429 clicks
- 149 shares / 501 clicks
- 321 shares / 94 clicks
- 40 shares / 138 clicks
- 54 shares / 230 clicks
I’d have to dispute a lot of the clicks data here. Surges was a relatively new site when conducting the Quuu Promote experiment and I didn’t see that level of referral traffic attributed to social networks in Fathom Analytics.
In terms of which genre of content performed best, ‘Digital Marketing’ and ‘Content Marketing’ had the best CTR, whereas ‘Startups’ and ‘Startup Stories’ got a hell of a lot of shares but not much interaction.
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🐜 Quuu – an army of willing sharers
The other side of the Quuu empire is its content suggestion arm. In 2020, Quuu curated 27,251 high-quality posts for paid-up members hungry for content suggestions to share.
Subscribers can select from over 500 content niches as diverse as ‘Marketing’, ‘Travel’, ‘Health & Fitness’ and ‘Cats’, meaning every pick is going to land well with its intended audience. They tend to be extremely time-poor and trusting of Quuu, so are the first responders to any newly created content and your golden oldies that need recycling. In terms of who shared my content, it was a real mix. It included: fellow entrepreneurs, agencies, social media managers, design studios, coaches, VCs, incubators. All sorts. From all over the world. Many had thousands of followers. Some only 10.
Your post gets suggested to the users throughout their 30-day lifespan on Quuu. They happily promote content that needs sharing. When its time is up you’ll get an email summarising its performance in terms of shares and clicks.
One thing I observed is how infrequently Quuu users add anything to their shares, instead posting it blindly. This means that your headline and social card need to work as hard a possible. If there’s any doubt what the article is about, it won’t get any clicks.
Things to consider
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Maximising your return on Quuu Promote
Quuu Promote isn’t exactly expensive at $75 per month, but it’s not an insignificant cost either. Now that Quuu Promote has cut the number of posts it’ll share on the basic tier to 10 (from 60), you’re going to want each one to be a roaring success. Here’s a few tips for doing so:
- Craft amazing content: Your words need to be useful, interesting, original and relevant to the target audience or they won’t see the light of day on Quuu. It’s important it isn’t too promotional either – another red line for the curators.
- Max out your social card: There’s a tiny window to impress would-be sharers and their followers. Make sure your content has a sufficiently compelling headline, image and description, otherwise it’ll get passed over. It’s not unusual for Quuu Promote posts to get hundreds of shares, so investing in these small details can really pay off.
- Select your niche: There’s 500 interest categories to pick from. Choose wisely and it’ll hit the right note with the right target audience, increasing its odds of being reshared over and over. A blog post isn’t just a blog post.
- Make it stand out: The little details count here. If choosing a DIY subscription, include your own social account and any key sources in the body of the post, add emojis and keep it succinct.
Quuu will give you a rundown of your earned media performance, so make sure you’re studying what’s getting picked up and driving traffic, and incorporate it into your next month on the platform.
Quuu Promote Pricing & Offers
from $50 per month
Choose to submit content yourself for $50 per month or let Quuu Promote do all the hard work for only $25 more. That extra used to get you 2 items of your content promoted a day, but that’s recently been reduced to only 10 posts per month, with no limit on the shares it will achieve.
The ‘Automatic’ subscription tier also means Quuu Promote will research the hashtags to use and tag any relevant accounts in tweets. A small price to pay for the added convenience!
If you’re still not convinced about paying to promote content, Quuu Promote offer new customers a 30-day 100% money back guarantee.
Quuu Promote Alternatives
The closest alternative to Quuu Promote I can think of is paid social ads. Unless you’ve uncovered maiden keywords to bid on, you’re going to be paying a far higher cost per engagement to promote content with facebook ads. It will obviously come with clear ‘Ad’ indicators too.
If you’re looking to extend the reach of your social posts for a flat monthly rate, then Twitter has a Promote Mode. I wrote about it here. TLDR: For $99 as a beta user, I gained 67% more reach – not bad!
I view Quuu Promote as native advertising or influencer marketing without the hefty pricetag, spreading your bets across multiple accounts.
Quuu Promote Support 👍 or 👎
Unfortunately no tool is perfect. I love Quuu Promote. I think it fills a need for anybody struggle to get traction with their content. The people behind it seem great too. However, the support is a bit too slow for my liking.
Support is not manned at weekends, which is understandable. However, I encountered an RSS-feed problem which meant I couldn’t upload any content to the platform. That problem went unresolved and without a response for a few days, despite chasing.
All that aside, Quuu does have great support documentation and is generally accessible on social media, so hopefully you’ll have more luck. Once you’re up-and-running, it’s all on autopilot too.
The Verdict
Surges score
85%I’ve now concluded my Quuu Promote experiment as a paid-up member of their $75 per month ‘Automatic’ plan. The results are in!
In total Quuu Promote’s dashboard says it achieved 4727 shares and 3185 clicks. So less than 1 click per share. I’d have to dispute those click figures too as looking at Fathom Analytics I don’t think Surges saw that many visitors from social media that month.
Speaking broadly about Quuu, being socially active has never been easier. If your quality content often struggles to get traction after hitting publish, the service is a failsafe way to get it spreading with very little effort. Beyond crafting the content and submitting your RSS feed, you really don’t have to do anything. Just sit back and let Quuu do all the hard work in a mutually beneficial relationship.
Quuu Promote has delivered 10 billion views on user content in its short years. Each of those is down to real people making your content more popular and extending its shelf life on social media. However, my biggest criticism is that it’s nearly always straight shares, so no quote tweets with added commentary. The downside of this is fewer clicks and reduced traffic to your website, although Quuu Promote still delivers good bang for your buck.
I found it particularly useful as a new website. Search engines was still sizing up Surges and my social media accounts were short of followers. Quuu is a great equaliser against more established entities and paid amplification budgets. Worth the $75 investment, in my opinion.
If you’re still not convinced, they’re offering a 15-day, 100% money-back guarantee. Give it a go and see for yourself.
Need a hand creating top content?
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