Buffer Acquires Respondly, Expanding Its Reach

Buffer, a social-sharing and scheduling tool firm, has acquired Respondly, a California-based startup launched in 2014 by Favstar founder Tim Haines. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal is part of Buffer’s new strategy- broaden its reach, to go beyond social media publishing and into customer service.

Respondly is a customer service tool for companies that use Twitter to deal with queries and complaints. Respondly’s platform allows managers assign tweets to team members to respond to, and collates replies and mentions to ensure that nothing gets buried in the Twitter noise. 

Leo Widrich, Buffer Co-founder and COO, explained to VentureBeat:  “It’s been in the cards a while, for Buffer to expand our products and offer a more complete product to marketers and community managers around the world”, and also added this: “We’d love to build out Respond as the essential social media and customer service monitoring tool that’s also affordable to a large customer base, similar to what we’ve done with Buffer itself.”

Currently, Respondly won’t be accepting any new signups through its existing website. New customers can apply for beta invites for the new product on Buffer’s site, with the rebranded “Respond” expected to launch for business in January 2016.

Founded by Joel Gascoigne (Current CEO Buffer), Leo Widrich (COO Buffer) and Tom Moor, Buffer is a software application designed to manage social networks, by providing the quick means for a user to schedule posts to social network sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Buffer has more than 2,000,000 registered users and it’s currently based in San Francisco, California. 

Image credit: PCWorld