Monthly Q&Artful: December 2021

PayPal and Square, Shopify and SproutSocial. Twitter.

❓ How should I handle my monthly invoicing? I'm trying to even out my cashflow as I have a bunch of invoices at the beginning of the month and end of the month and very little in the middle 2 weeks. Appreciate any input you might have to offer.

I use PayPal Merchant Center, and under “Pay & Get Paid” I can tap on the “Recurring Series” tab to plan out a series of invoices that post at any interval of my choice. I offer NET-30, so sometimes the payments will pile in all at the nᵗʰ hour. There is also a subscription feature; while the experience is slightly different for the customer, it does provide merchants a little more predictability on when the dough comes in. The fees are still the same: 3.49% + $0.49 on any transaction.

❓ I am working with a retail/Shopify business and trying to figure out what scheduling platform will allow me to schedule and tag the products. I usually use Buffer and that's a no-go from them. Any tips are greatly appreciated.

SproutSocial. They have a Shopify API integrator that makes it easy to select and tag products that are offered in the shop.

❓ Why isn’t Twitter’s YouTube preview text not updating? For some weird reason, it displayed with no spacing, so I changed the youtube description; however, the tweet preview doesn't get updated. I changed it yesterday, so I've waited long enough.

Link preview description fields on Facebook and Twitter don’t parse line-breaks and they’re not written smart enough to convert a line break into a space. I’d suggest fiddling with the description in YouTube Studio to include a no-break space after the word “Matroid” so that one is included in the social link preview.

Twitter—like Facebook—will need a bit of a nudge to scrape your page again. Their bots typically don’t revisit pages that haven’t seen a lot of click-through activity, so waiting isn’t going to cut it. For Twitter, you’ll need to visit the Twitter Card Validator page.

❓ What does Jack Dorsey’s exit and Parag as the new CEO mean for Twitter?

An edit button on tweets. In all seriousness, Jack has this whole other business with Square, and Square is growing. Merchants are moving to Square for payment handling. And there’s the whole crypto scene. Conversely, Twitter has really been falling behind the times from a technological standpoint; it hasn’t seen the level of growth they’ve hoped for, and they have a lot of painful work ahead of them to combat the spread of hate speech and misinformation.

So what does this mean? Parag was the CTO, so I expect there will be a focus on driving platform innovation based on user feedback without the friction of a founder’s vision of “what it was intended to be.”