Alfred Lua
A collection of posts by Alfred Lua
A collection of 88 posts
How do you know if your customers (and potential customers) are talking about you on social media? Use social media monitoring tools.
Creating attractive Instagram Stories can be challenging and time-consuming. We’d love to help with that! Get to know Stories Creator and the five free Stories templates we recommend.
LinkedIn was once a network solely for professional updates and has since turned into a social network in its own right. There are over 850 million LinkedIn members worldwide and over 65 million business decision makers are on LinkedIn. In most cases, it makes sense for you to be an active participant on LinkedIn. For people who own and operate a business or are content creators, LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a top destination. As with most social networks, some of the best interactions and
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
Summary We’ll walk through 9 very different but effective social media goals, and for each goal we'll share relevant metrics to track and how to measure your results. You will learn * How to set social media goals that drive results for your brand * Nine key metrics to consider for social media marketing * Tracking tips, formulas, and tools for keeping track of your social media goals Listen to this post as a podcast: The thing we love most at Buffer is to help you succeed at social
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 believe so! Storytelling has always been a key part of marketing, and features like Instagram Stories are empowering us marketers to tell better and deeper stories about our br
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
Editor's note: This post references an old Buffer tool, Reply, which has since been sunset. Read more about the decision to sunset Reply here. When you ask a brand a question on social media, how quickly do you hope they will respond? According to a research of 1,000 American consumers, 85 percent expect an answer on Facebook within six hours. (Fun fact: To earn the Very Responsive badge for your Facebook Page, you need to respond to 90 percent of the messages you receive and to respond withi
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
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, and achieve your social media goals. Of course, it isn’t only about the size of the social media sites. It’s also whether the social media site is a right fit for your busi
If you want your business to have a presence on social media, Facebook is probably one of the first or the first 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 c
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
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