Alfred Lua
A collection of posts by Alfred Lua
A collection of 93 posts
You can now analyze and report your results on LinkedIn, on top of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This makes Buffer's analytics an all-in-one solution for these four popular social networks for businesses.
You can now measure and analyze your Facebook and Instagram boosted posts in Buffer, compare paid vs organic results, and add them to your social media reports.
Tried and tested tactics to break through the noise on social media
Search “best time to post on Instagram” and you’ll find countless articles telling you when to post according to studies of a few million Instagram posts. We have written such articles ourselves. For a long time, we thought that’s the way to grow our reach and engagement on social media. But that is no longer the best approach. There are many reasons for the change. Most importantly, you now have much more data about your own posts and followers. The best time to post is when your followers a
Please note: The Shopify integration with Buffer has been sunset. We recognize the value of integrating Shopify shop data with Buffer, and at the same time, maintaining the Shopify integration became increasingly complex and, as a small team, we have to make trade-offs to ensure we can deliver improvements to the core Buffer product. In the end, we decided that removing the current feature was best for Buffer's product. One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analy
10 billion. That’s the number of videos people watch on Snapchat every day. The same potential consumption (maybe more) exists for Instagram Stories — quick videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours, just like Snapchat, but with an audience of 500 million users. Does that sound like a channel worth exploring? We
Data is the fuel that powers a social media strategy. And understanding the data behind your social media performance can help you to make better decisions about your content, ensure you’re connecting with the right audiences and help you to boost engagement and grow your following. The problem is, there’s a lot of metrics to measure. Here are just a few you might need to keep an eye on: * Likes * Comments * Shares * Clicks * Reach And when you think about multi-platform performance (ac
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS A decade ago, the role of a social media manager might not have even existed. Today, however, almost every company is involved in social media one way or another. A quick look at Google Trends shows the rise in interest in the term “social media manager” over the years, and it seems that people have never been as interested in the term as they are today. But what does it take to be a great social media manager? What are
This post is part of our Instagram Marketing Strategy series. The series provides you with actionable insights and lessons on how businesses are using Instagram. Next up, Alfred Lua discusses the power of stories ads, and how we use them at Buffer. Businesses have been shifting their advertising budget from Facebook and Instagram feed ads to Facebook and Instagram Stories ads due to the lower costs and better results they see with Stories ads. Simon Lejeune, head of user acquisition a
How can you increase Twitter reach and engagement? That’s something that many marketers are thinking about, including Rand Fishkin, the founder of SparkToro, who has been wondering if Twitter gives tweets with a link less visibility than tweets without a link. And recently I’d been wondering the same. Then I heard about Aytekin Tank’s 17-million-impression tweet. Just a few months ago, Aytekin, the founder of Jotform, repurposed one of his popular Medium posts into a Twitter thread. He also p
More than 25 million businesses use Instagram worldwide, and over half of those businesses are creating Stories every month. Stories are an incredible way to connect with your audience in fresh and authentic ways. Who knows, maybe they’ll even become the new News Feed . But creating attractive Insta
Repurposing your content across channels is a great way to get the most from your social media strategy. However, sometimes, certain channels will perform better than others. When GQ posted a video about Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott on its YouTube channel (with 2.5 million subscribers), it was watched almost 30 million times. The same video on their Facebook Page (2.8 million fans) was watched 4.7 million times. A snippet of the video on their Instagram account (4.3 million followers) was watc
Whether you are a seasoned social media marketer , a marketer looking to venture into social media marketing, or a business owner looking to leverage on social media, it’s helpful to know the most popular social media sites around. This will allow you to maximize your brand reach on social media, engage with the right people , a
If you want your business to have a presence on social media, Facebook is probably one of the first orthefirst social media platform you think of. More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook every single day, and many multiple times a day. It’s almost certain that your potential customers are on Facebook and using it actively to connect with their family, their friends, and their favorite brands. Whether you’re running a brick and mortar store, an ecommerce site, an agency, or a software company
In 2013, a Facebook Page could easily reach about 12 percent of its fans with each post. Just a year later, in 2014, it would reach only about six percent of its fans. Today, in 2018, that number is very likely to be smaller than six percent. That means for every 100 fans of a Page, an organic post will reach, on average, only five or fewer people. Is it the end of organic reach on social media? I don’t think so. Yes, the (average) organic reach on social media has been falling over the yea
Ideal social media image size summary Looking for more details for a particular social platform? Click on one of the platforms below to jump to the relevant section: Facebook * Sharing images: 1,200 x 628 pixels * Sharing links with an image: 1,200 x 628 pixels * Sharing Stories: 1,080 x 1,920 pixels* Instagram * Sharing square images: 1,080 x 1,080 pixels * Sharing horizontal images: 1,080 x 566 pixels * Sharing vertical images: 1,080 x 1,350 pixels * Sharing Stories: 1,080 x 1,920 p
How do you stay on top of all your social media marketing tasks? From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to think of all the jobs social media marketers have to complete every day. Thankfully, there are a bunch of awesome social media management tools available to help. These tools can streamline your workflows, help you save some time and even ensure your content reaches the right audience at th
* After Twitter changed its rules on sharing identical tweets, we set out to experiment with new ways to boost the reach of our best tweets. * This strategy helped us to generate 122 percent more impressions, 87 percent more engagements, and 90 percent more link clicks for our top tweets. * It’s incredibly simple to implement this strategy — you just need to identify your best tweets and retweet them — and it can be done using Buffer or directly on Twitter.com (and Twitter apps). Keep readi
If you are a social media manager, you’ve likely looked at ‘best time to post on social media’ studies to come up with several posting times for your brand. I know I have. But now, I believe it’s time to reconsider these studies. In the last few years, more and more studies on the best times to post have been released. (At Buffer, we contributed to this too!) And while knowing your best time to post is still very relevant, I’m starting to feel that it’s no longer useful to refer to studies on
Even though Twitter has introduced an algorithm to its timeline , most of the tweets we see on our timelines are still displayed reverse-chronologically. This means that tweeting at the right times can help you reach and engage more followers. But as social media managers , you most likely don’t have the time to wait around and tweet at specific times of the day. Here’s where sch
Too busy to read? Just click the play button below to listen to Hailley and Brian discuss the Instagram algorithm on our podcast. How exactly does the Instagram feed work? That question has puzzled marketers ever since Instagram first introduced its algorithm in July 2016. The Instagram algorithm was introduced to help surface the best, most relevant content to each user every-time they check their feed. Until now, though, the inner-workings of the feed have been kept under wraps, but recen
As a social media manager , you likely spend a good chunk of your day scheduling content for your brand’s social media profiles . We understand the challenge. Social media scheduling can be a time-consuming process. So we would love to help! In this post, I’ll be sharing some ways you can save time while scheduling content for social media using Buffer [https:/
Up to €20 million… or four percent of your total worldwide annual turnover of the previous financial year, whichever is higher. That’s the penalty for failing to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s new data privacy law. Okay, sorry to start this post on such a heavy note, but the GDPR is very important to comply with. And not only that, I believe that the new regulation is something we should fully embrace as I can see it bringing around positive changes that c
Keeping Twitter safe and free from spam is a top priority for us. — Yoel Roth, API Policy and Product Trust at Twitter This year, the team at Twitter has taken additional action to keep Twitter free from spam. Specifically, they have introduced new rules around automation and the use of multiple accounts. You might be wondering, “why is this important to me?” In short, Twitter might suspend your account if you fail to comply. These rules are also encouraging good sharing practices on Twitter