Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 251 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 10
I manage the family budget with speed and efficiency. My spreadsheets are slick, my workflow is fast, and I’ve learned enough tricks along the way to shave hours off my process. I’ve also never bothered to teach anyone else how I do what I do. Don’t worry, this post isn’t about money management. (Phew!) Rather, I find that it can be hugely helpful to share the tools, tips, and tricks that make the things we do on a regular basis as efficient as possible. Using Buffer for social media managemen
Being a columnist means something a bit different to me than it did growing up. When I started down my writing path, I adored magazines and newspapers and the superheroes who wrote weekly or monthly columns in the op-eds or the back pages. Now, I adore those who write at my favorite blogs and websites. The back page of Sports Illustrated has become, for me, the featured spot on Huffington Post. And the most amazing news of all is that being a columnist online is a dream that anyone—you, me, yo
Heads up! This is an older post and we’ve since retired the Buffer bootcamp. Feel free to see the latest information here, including all the reasons why we made this change! We’re Retiring The ‘Buffer Bootcamp’ Period For New Teammates – Here’s Why Some call it a trial. Some call it a probationary period. We call it the Buffer Bootcamp. Our intro period for new hires is something we often reference in our monthly updates and hiring reports, but we’ve yet to really take you inside how this pro
Among the many superpowers I wish I had, one that would be quite useful is the ability to understand social media metrics. I know enough to get by, and I love learning the new techniques to get more from these numbers—and to make sure I’m seeking the right numbers in the first place. In an effort to understand the little bits I can, I’ve done some research into all the many different social media stats you might track and which ones are worthwhile. Wouldn’t you know it, social media stats aren’
What are we really talking about when we’re talking about conversions? Persuasion, right? Influence. When we talk about conversions, we are—most of the time—discussing ways we can be more persuasive, more influential. We’re interested in meeting the needs of customers, fans, and followers and doing so in a way that truly speaks to them. So how can you persuade—i.e., convert—better? Perhaps not surprisingly, the hacks for conversion and persuasion begin with psychology. Understanding why some
Few social media practices escape the arm of experiments here at Buffer. We love testing, iterating, and testing again to find ways to boost our metrics and explore new ways to interact better with our audience. Now Google+’s turn has finally come. We have made pushes on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to grow our numbers, and most recently we’ve been trying out some new tactics with Google+. And while doing so, we noticed that many others are talking about and testing out Google+ right alongs
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning schedules customized just for you * Track and measure repins, likes, and comments Anyone can try out this fun new feature! Authorize your Pinterest account now and try scheduling to Pinterest for 7 days free: What should I be d
The line between a beginner Twitter user and a seasoned pro is a fine one indeed. The distinction changes daily—sometimes hourly—for me. One minute I feel like I’ve got this Twitter thing figured out and the next I find myself overwhelmed by how little I really know. When I dove headfirst (or feetfirst? either way my eyes were closed) into Twitter, I tried just about everything to find the best strategies for a beginning tweeter. Now I’m ready for the next step. Seeing how much the Twitter e
Banana Republic and Susan’s Neighborhood Shirt Shop could be using the same social networks—Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.—but their marketing plans and their marketing tools are likely quite different. Enterprise solutions are great for the big guys, but the rest of us are in the market for something more our size. Small businesses are eager to find valuable tools that take a lot of the time and trouble out of social media marketing and that do so without costing an arm and a leg. I think we
Change is coming to your Twitter profile. Big, beautiful change. Twitter is currently rolling out a profile redesign to all users, a redesign that puts an even greater emphasis on the great Twitter content that you share and one that provides some bonus opportunities to make a branding splash. Visual content will get a big boost. Top tweets will get a bump. And we’ll all be scrambling to find out what works best on this extreme makeover of our Twitter homes. While you wait your turn to find yo
A good tweet peaks at 18 minutes. An evergreen blog post lasts for years. It’s crazy to see the disparity between two pieces of content that we all create on a regular basis. It’s a little reassuring, too, that some things we make online have a chance to endure. Having this long-lasting content on your blog and in your archives is a boon to traffic, social sharing, and more. Chances are good your site already has some evergreen articles, whether you intended to make them evergreen or not. Thes
Nowadays, when I endeavor to check my Facebook statistics, I do so with the window open, birds singing, a pint of ice cream at my desk, and party jams playing on my jambox. I must balance the bad news with some good. Checking Facebook statistics has been bad news for a lot of us lately as we wrestle with declining numbers and shrinking reach. As the Facebook algorithm continues to change and adapt, we continue looking for answers. Why can’t we reach more fans with our updates? What kind of con
Among the many ways to stand out on social media—killer content, amazing visuals, specific formatting, and more—one that often gets overlooked is voice. We don’t want brands talking at us as if we are dollar signs. We want authentic communication. Finding a voice for your social media marketing can be difficult because the concept is somewhat unlike other optimization strategies online. Voice is not a statistic you can track or a design element you can tweak. Voice goes deeper than that.
Do you ever wonder how often you’re being A/B tested? The practice is so commonplace among websites and marketers these days that at any given point at any given website you could be part of a grand experiment in optimization. I often hope this is the case. I love the science and analysis behind improvements—both on the web and in the real world—so I find myself clicking a blue button and hoping my participation is making a website better. I love participating in A/B tests, and I love performi
Social media sharing doesn’t just happen at a desk. It happens in the car, on the train, during a holiday – anywhere and everywhere. At Buffer, our goal is to provide you with the easiest possible way to share to your social accounts – even on-the-go. That’s why today we’re ecstatic to show you a project that’s been five months in the making here at Buffer: the completely redesigned Buffer app for iOS 7. Complete details on all the app’s upgrades are below – or if you just can’t wait, download
March was an incredible month for the Buffer blog, not only in terms of traffic but also in terms of change—so much so that calling this update the Buffer Blog Report doesn’t seem to do the month justice. At the very least, we’d have to call it the Blogs Report (plural on blog; more on that below). Big changes were afoot in March: blog strategies, audits, goodbyes, and so much more. It’s exciting to share this all with you and see what you think. So without further ado … Quick summary of the
From the moment you join the Buffer team, you are encouraged to read. In fact, the welcome email implores you to read early and often, and you receive a Kindle Paperwhite and free Kindle books just to make sure there are no obstacles to reading as much as you want. (Sound like something that might interest you? We’re hiring!) And once you are part of the team, you continue to see the deep impact that reading has on the goals and improvements of all of us. When we share our weekly improveme
Buffer runs seven days at a time. Many of our improvements, metrics, experiments, and tasks fit into one-week slices, which helps us to move quickly on new ideas and to revisit our results right away. Instead of it being early April around here, it’s just Week 14. This weekly perspective has some big advantages across all our departments, including marketing. Reviewing and improving our marketing metrics week over week, for the blog and our social media accounts, lets us quickly experiment, tes
We analyzed over 10 million posts sent via Buffer, looking for a common theme among the most shared content. Our findings surprised us as much as they might surprise you. The clear winner: pandas. Panda content—photos, GIFs, and stories—made up nearly 18 percent of the top 500 posts sent through Buffer. These posts received an average of three times more clicks and 10 times more retweets than content without pandas, and the gap between panda content and the next-highest viral ingredient, monkey
UPDATE: See a newer, updated version of this post with a brand-new infographic. Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much? I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media, but I want to do it in the right way. Curious, I dug around and found some answers for the ideal lengths of tweets and titles and everyt
The word “audit” deserves more love than it gets. When I hear the word, my mind goes straight to tax season and the manila envelope crammed with receipts and forms that I keep stashed away in the closet. Audits seem to equal anxiety, which is too bad – because not all audits are created equal. A tune-up at the garage is essentially an audit for your car, a check-up at the doctor is an audit of your health. You can learn a lot from regular reviews like these. The same holds true for an au
We at the Buffer blog can vouch for LinkedIn’s growth as our blog has experienced a swell in LinkedIn referral traffic over the past year, up 4,000 percent from last year at this time. Part of that has to do with our emphasis on updates and sharing at LinkedIn, another part has to do with the popularity of LinkedIn contributing a larger audience and more eyes to our content. Together, these factors have made LinkedIn a great source of visitors for our blog, and I’d imagine you might see a simila
There is no one way to create viral content. So many different variables go into a viral post—timing, emotion, engagement, and so many others that you cannot control. There is no viral blueprint. The greatest chance we have to understand viral content is to study the posts and places that do it best, figure out what worked for them, and try it for ourselves. Thanks to some incredible work by the team at Ripenn, we have access to headline analysis from four of the top viral sites on the w
hat does your ideal day look like? Would you believe there’s a scientifically correct answer to the question? Research into the human body—its hormone allotment, its rhythms, and its tendencies—has found that there are certain times of day when the body is just better at performing certain activities. Eat breakfast no later than 8:00 a.m. Exercise between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Read Twitter from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. (your fellow tweeters are more upbeat in the morning). Turns out our optimal tim