Ash Read
A collection of posts by Ash Read
A collection of 115 posts by Ash Read - Page 3
Managing a social media strategy is consistently challenging for individuals and businesses of all sizes. There’s the art of uncovering when to post your content. Continually measuring your ROI and social analytics. And, of course, the constant demand for fresh, engaging content to be shared. Added to that, each major social network has continued to diverge both in how they are set up and what your audiences expect on each one. Each different platform also has its own set of character limits,
It’s 10:00 a.m. here in England. Alfred and I have just finished our weekly content sync. Alfred is a content crafter here at Buffer and does an amazing job producing most of the content we post on our Social blog and I’m an editor focusing on our content strategy. We catch up for an hour every Tuesday to discuss the various pieces of content and projects we’re working on for Buffer’s Social blog. Alfred is based in Singapore, where it’s 6:00 p.m. for him when it’s 10:00 a.m. for me. He’s about
By now, it’s clear that video is an essential channel for marketers. But what makes a great video? And what keeps viewers engaged? Is it a good story? Or maybe it’s all about reaching the right audience at the right time. We teamed up with Wistia and sought to find out. We looked at some of our favorite examples of video marketing and uncovered some traits they have in common. Here are 7 secrets to creating successful video content. We hope these tips will help you as you plan and create your
Right now, the standards we expect on the web are being re-written for mobile. The rise of stories across Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Facebook is the perfect example of this. The News Feed is outdated and stories are becoming the default for content consumption. Very few formats, features, apps, or services are truly unique. Facebook, for example, didn’t invent the vertical scrolling feed. For decades, way before Mark Zuckerburg even enrolled in Harvard, online content has b
This post has been refreshed for 2017. Snapchat is the latest platform taking the social media world by storm. Since its launch, in September 2011, Snapchat has shown incredible growth. The Venice, California-based company now boasts over 161 million daily active users and 10 billion video views , daily. And with consumer attention comes ad dollars, with many major brands turning to Snapchat as a
Did you know you can now create your own Snapchat Geofilters? It’s only been a few months since Snapchat debuted this feature , and there are already some amazing results flowing in for businesses and brands of all sizes (we’ll share a few quick case studies in this post). Right now, Snapchat Geofilters can offer an enormous competitive advantage because 1) not a lot of brands are using them and 2) Snapchat users love to share f
Finding the best time to post to Facebook can massively help your business stand out and reach more of your audience—even as Facebook organic reach continues to decline. But knowing the best times to post, can be a challenge and we’d love to help. In this guide, we’ll share exactly how you can find the best time to post content on your Facebook Page for maximum reach, exposure, and engagement. Ready to jump in? Is there a best time to post on Facebook? There probably isn’t a single best time
What does the future look like for social media? That’s a question we regularly discuss here at Buffer and one we’re not quite sure anyone has a concrete answer to. However, there are some clues out there as to what the future in 2017, and beyond, may look like. As part of our State of Social Media week, it feels like a great time to sit back and reflect on the social media landscape and what may be ahead. So let’s take a look at some of social media’s biggest platforms (Facebook, Instagram, S
Imagine being able to predict the next big thing on social media, knowing what social media will look like in 2017 and beyond and how will brands use social platforms to connect with their audience. As someone who works with social media every day, this information would be invaluable. At Buffer, we’re always eager to dig up new research into social media marketing — things like how marketers are using social media and what they’re excited about heading into 2017. To better understand how soc
In this post, we’ll share exactly how to repost on Instagram. One of the best aspects of social media is being able to share something with your followers. On Twitter, you can retweet. On Facebook, there’s the option to share a post. And on Instagram, you can repost, which is essentially a way to share a picture from another Instagram user with your followers. Though reposting isn’t an official feature of Instagram’s apps or website, it’s something that many brands and users have been doing f
Instagram is the go-to place for over 300 million people to share their photos, videos, and stories every single day. And as Instagram has grown over recent years, that’s left many business owners and marketers with one very clear and important question: How can we use Instagram for business? Well today, we’d love to dive head first into that topic and share: * How to set up a killer Instagram profile * The importance of goal setting and how to creat
The ability to create Twitter Moments is being rolled out to all users. Twitter Moments enable users to stitch together multiple tweets into slideshow-like stories. When they originally launched, Moments were intended to help Twitter users keep up with what the world is talking about at any given time without having to follow loads of new people or watch trending topics closely. The below video from Twitter explains a little more about how Moments work: pic.twitter.com/boP59z64dH — Twitter (
Twitter has just made a big change to the way tweets work. From today, Twitter is cutting back on what types of content will use up its 140-character limit. Now, @names in replies, media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) and quoted Tweets will no longer be counted against the valuable 140 characters that make up a tweet. This allows for richer public conversations that are easier to follow on Twitter and ensures people can attach media to tweets without sacrificing the charact
Over the past six months, Instagram has released some exciting updates, from a new logo to longer videos and even a new way to share everyday moments with Instagram Stories. Recently, Instagram announced another interesting (and long-awaited) feature: the ability to zoom in on photos and videos. Instagram users can now pinch photos and videos to zoom in and take a closer look. This update has been released for iPhone users and Instagram says this update will be rolling out to Android over the
Most people don’t read content online. In fact, eight out of ten people will only read the headline. For content writers, that fact is alarming. But it also places extra importance on the headlines we choose for our content, as headlines have the power to influence readers even if they don’t read any more of the article. I don’t believe the perfect headline exists, though. Not anymore, anyway. The evolution of social media and search has also complicated the playing field. When we write a hea
Instagram Stories is a feature that lets users post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. The feature feels much like Snapchat Stories, a Snapchat feature that was introduced in 2013 and a pivotal part of the company’s growth. And like Snapchat, the photos and videos shared in your Instagram Story are ephemeral and can’t be viewed once 24 hours have elapsed. Content shared to stories also won’t appear on your profile grid or in the main Insta
If you could travel back in time to when Facebook or Instagram first started grabbing mainstream attention, knowing what you do now about the opportunity they hold for brands, you’d jump aboard, right? Well, that opportunity is now on Snapchat. Snapchat, a platform built on short ephemeral messages, seems destined to become a long-lasting social media powerhouse. This future seems all the more realistic with the addition of Snapchat Memories — a way to share photos and videos captured outside
One of our cultural values at Buffer, is to live smarter, not harder. We like to think this extends into our workflows as well. This is why marketing spreadsheets have been such a boon for us, helping us to track important social media metrics, see our blog growth, and get more work done in less time. That being said, spreadsheets are not always easy. Finding or building the right ones and figuring out how best to use them can be time-consuming tasks. We’d love to help. To give you a hand wi
The goal of Facebook’s News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them. That’s no small task when you have over 1.65 billion people to keep happy and over 1,500 stories per day to prioritize for each of those individual users. Now, Facebook has announced one of their most significant News Feed shuffles. On Wednesday, Facebook shared that the News Feed algorithm is going to shift so that it will more favorably promote content posted by the friends and family of users. The
Millions of blog posts are published every day. A small percentage gain traction and attract readers. And among those readers, 55% will read the blog post for 15 seconds or less. (If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking with this one!) The internet is a daily battle for attention. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to share the latest marketing hacks with many of the same points echoed repeatedly. I’m guilty of it myself, and I completely understand why many of us write articles th
When I first started out in marketing, I didn’t quite predict that I’d be a part-time designer, too. Now, in 201, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content and it’s become obvious and even necessary for all of us marketers to have at least some basic knowledge of key design terms. Thankfully, we live in a wonderful world where anyone can make the jump from novice to inte
GIFs are great. And they’re everywhere. We use them at Buffer in our customer service tweets, our emails, our Slack channel. We include GIFs in marketing emails and team announcements. Anywhere there’s a message; there’s the chance for a GIF. And what’s more, we’ve found GIFs get great results! GIFs in tweets are one of our top tips for more Twitter engagement. One of our most popular transactional emails we send to customers features a GIF. Want to know how to create GIFs yourself? And know
Back in 1894 to 1929, before sound could be synchronized with video, silent movies were in their heyday. In silent films, the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards which contain a written indication of the plot or key dialogue. And if you scroll through your Facebook News Feed, you may notice that in some ways, we’re moving back to those days. Here’s a clip from a recent Tech Insider video: And a clip from Gary Vaynerchuk: You’ll notice that both th
At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels. To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media. We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of o