QPublish helps business owners schedule Facebook posts at the optimum time of day to reach customers.
When Jennic Law and her husband, Justin, first opened KangarooBoo, a West Des Moines store selling baby toys and gifts, she admits she didn’t know much about running a business. An ex-engineer, Jennic had never managed a small business before, but she knew building a social media following would be crucial.
Though Justin built the shop’s customized website, when the Laws began to write and schedule Facebook posts for their fans and customers the software always came up short. While sites like Hootsuite and even Facebook itself let users write and schedule posts days, weeks or months in advance, the tools still didn’t offer the solution the couple was looking for.
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So Justin built his own.
“If we as a small business have this need, there have to be others that do too,” Jennic said.
The software, QPublish, is the first product of the two-person company, BloomSimple, which launched a public beta at the end of February.
“Just because a page manager thinks of an idea, doesn’t mean that moment is the best time to post it,” Jennic said. “Most of us don’t know what the best time for posting is—we’re just guessing.”
Justin co-founded the company with Houston-based programmer Keith Turkowski in January, directing his full-time attention toward BloomSimple. The pair continues to work on the software full-time from across the country. While Jennic is not officially part of the company, she helps promote the product through her own business’ success using QPublish and as a communications consultant to the company.
Currently there are more than 100 Facebook pages connected to QPublish with a number of paying, premium users, Justin says.
Like traditional scheduling software, QPublish helps businesses, organizations and even individuals better utilize Facebook. But the software offers a number of features the Laws couldn’t find other places: the ability to schedule for the best time of day, a collaborative draft function and a customized analytics system.
How it works
QPublish’s built-in Smart Queue algorithm helps calculate the optimum time for posting and schedules posts based on the profiles of individuals who have liked the group’s Facebook page, allowing businesses to reach the widest range of users. The service also updates scheduling as more posts are added in order to adequately spread out content throughout the week.
“The idea is that you don’t want to spam your fans,” Jennic said. “The technology allows the business owner to be really carefree and it’ll spread posts out for them as best as possible.”
The software also allows users to save drafts of posts so that multiple administrators or business owners can collaborate on social media content.
“Sometimes I might think I have a good idea, but he won’t,” Jennic said. “It solves the problem of how do we run ideas back and forth without 20 different emails.”
The software operates on free and pay models depending on the number of users and posts an individual wishes to schedule. The premium QPublish plan costs $9 per month and allows for 20 Facebook pages between two collaborators while the Gold costs $39 and supports 50 pages with five collaborators.
Jennic says that the BloomSimple team has discussed releasing other products with similar social media management goals, but for now, the focus will continue to remain on QPublish.
Credits: Screenshot from qpublish.com.
