Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 273 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 11
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 doing
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
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
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. Ins
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 B
Subway has this sandwich with Fritos on it. I know this because their commercials play constantly on my TV and computer such that I nearly have the ads memorized. Every time their commercial airs, Subway is flirting with the fine art of frequency. How often is too often to share with your audience? Social media marketers face the same dilemma. We want to connect with followers without driving them away. We aim for the perfect balance of sharing and listening. I end up guessing a lot, trying
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 s
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 [https://buffer.com/library/the-complete-guide-to-social-media-formatting-make-your-co
When I was in elementary school, my wardrobe was fully automated. I had a certain pair of sweatpants for Mondays, jeans for Tuesdays, Zubaz for Wednesdays, and so on. It was quite the system for a fourth-grader! Automation has been a big part of my life ever since. I love to find helpful ways to work smarter—anything to shave an extra few minutes off my day. Automation, when done right, scratches this itch perfectly. The same holds for automation of one’s social media marketing. There are huge
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 audit of
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 web—w
I get a particular thrill from finding little-known restaurants that serve amazing food. My greatest hits list includes elk tacos at a highway diner, cinnamon rolls at a downtown hole-in-the-wall, and – perhaps my greatest discovery of all – barbecue from a trailer in a parking lot. (Seriously, it’s good barbecue!) The discovery process for great content has a similar thrill. How great does it feel to share a bit of awesomeness that few others have found? Without a doubt, sharing great finds o
What 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 [https://buffer.com/resources/5
Of the many email statistics that blow my mind, I think this one wows me the most: Email reaches three times more people than Twitter and Facebook combined. That’s a lot of people! (3.6 billion or so.) Clearly email marketing deserves your time and attention. And like any aspect of marketing, there can be a learning curve to discover the ins and outs and best practices. Hopefully these answers to ten of the most common and important email questions can make the learning curve a little less st
Seeing your name in the phone book used to be the ultimate, I remember it clearly. As a boy, I dreamed of the day when I would have the independence, stability, maturity, and home phone to be listed on page “L” alongside my fellow human adults. I’d crack open the new Yellow Pages, thumb through the Lees, and lo and behold, there I’d be. A celebrity. My Yellow Pages dream has vanished. Now it’s all about Google. I want my face on a Google search results page. The ticket to my desired Internet