Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 267 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 4
The world of paid ads can sometimes feel a little overwhelming, especially if you’re new to the game and wondering where to even start. Wouldn’t it be nice to find a nice and easy (and effective) way of dipping your toes in? I’m only a few months removed from this post exploring paid ads as a total noob, which I remain, and I’ve done my very best since to be a sponge for all the paid ads experiments and strategies I can find. We just so happened to come onto a neat one here at Buffer. It’s s
Awhile back, we were fortunate to try some neat email tactics that helped double our email list growth in just one month’s time. Then we stopped growing our list altogether. We shifted our learnings from growing an email list into growing Buffer signups. And we’ve yet to go back. Odd? Strange? Counterintuitive? Yep, probably all those things. Most online marketing advice today will advise you to build an email
What is the next big wave of social media? Maybe it’s Peach—or another hot new social network. Maybe it’s a strategy like posting times or text faces. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ It’s really hard to say! (And yet here I am saying it.) ? To ride the wave of the next big thing in social media, it often takes a lot of trial-and-error, a good deal of trendspotting, and some courage to try new things. I’ve spent some time reading up on what’s to come for social media and I’d love to get your thoughts on three n
There’s often a critical time (or two) in a business’s journey when it’s make or break and time is at a premium. There’re often times beyond this, once a brand is established, where time is still scarce and efficiency is the name of the game. The team at Smart Pension has felt both sides of this in the past couple years and has experienced the time crunch particularly on the social media side (sound familiar at all with your experience?). One of the UK’s leading pension companies, the Smart Pe
I am no good at a lot of social media things … which is a bit tough to admit as a social media marketer! I don’t use a smartphone . I’m scared of Snapchat . I’m not entirely sure what WhatsApp does. I can think of 50 social media things (and probably more) where I could improve. The things I am good at—mostly the things that Buffer helps me with, like scheduling, c
The Seattle Times—and many publishers like them—is in an interesting place. There’s zero difficulty in coming up with outstanding, high-quality content to share. The opposite problem is the case: Of the 160+ stories the Times publishes every day, which ones warrant a share on social media, where there are only two dozen or so slots to go around? Beyond the publisher-specific quirks of content, The Seattle Times is also solving puzzles that face any number of social media marketers, no matter
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. – Anne Lamott This quote from Anne Lamott resonates with me quite a bit. I seldom know what I’m doing until I’ve done it. I also seldom know what other writers are doing either. I recognize what I enjoy reading … aaaaand I’ve little idea why I enjoy it. That’s what makes the topic of linguistics and language so fascinating to me because it helps explain
Whether you’re a startup, a small business, an agency, or a brand, there’s always such value to be had in going to the drawing board with social media marketing. Setting a mission. Defining goals . Choosing the tools and workflows that’ll get you there. Campaign Monitor , a simple email marketing solution for businesses and professionals, has taken this bottom-u
Twitter favorites are changing to Twitter likes. The star is switching to a heart. What might it mean for marketers? We’re thrilled to see the all the latest changes and improvements to Twitter (Twitter hearts come hot on the heels of the announcement for Twitter Polls ), and we’re eager to learn what effect it might have on our sharing, engaging, and marketing. As we start experimenting and testing
Anyone is capable of mastering social media marketing. You can take a huge leap forward in just 10 days. We’re grateful for the opportunity to be immersed in social media marketing here at Buffer, developing our best processes and systems for building a social media marketing machine. And we’d love to share our blueprint with you. Join us for an action-packed 10-day email course to learn exactly how we manage social media marketing here
This is a little tough to admit. I’ve been failing at social media marketing. It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more. And that’s super scary to admit. What’s happening? I wish I knew! We’ve got lots of theories as to what’s be
Since we launched our Pablo image creation product in the spring, Pablo designers have created more than 500,000 images! And we’ve been excited to work toward making Pablo even more useful. Today we’re thrilled to announce Pablo 2.0 , the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly. We’ve expanded Pablo’s function
The Buffer blog brings in 10x the traffic of the Open blog. It has 50x the reach of our email courses. A single post on the blog reaches more people in a day than we reach on Facebook in two weeks. It is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it. We’re pivoting right now, as we speak! The latest change, which I’m excited to share below, fits with this remarkable culture of experimentation, where there are no sacred cows or off-limits areas. Everything is on the table to impro
The psyche of a writer bounces wildly, hourly, from confidence to self-doubt, certainty to fear, love to angst. Wild times like these call for reassurance. Here are some of the reminders I keep for myself, 36 quotes to remind myself that writing is completely worthwhile, entirely fulfilling, and all the best kinds of difficult. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. – Walter Benjamin Annie Dillard has said that da
It seems you can learn a lot about someone by looking at their phone: the apps they use, the folders they create, and the pictures they’ve added. We’re excited to share a glimpse into our phones (and our lives!) here at the Buffer team. A lot of what you might see here are some of the tools we use at Buffer like Hipchat, Trello, UP, and of course the Buffer app itself. A few other themes that pop up: Lots of great social media apps and tools and many apps focused on self-improvements like medi
Awhile back, a phenomenon swept the Internet where people shared pictures and video of what’s inside their refrigerators. This isn’t that, but it’s close. ? I asked 20+ wonderfully generous and incredibly talented marketers to share what’s on their smartphone home screens. In need of any app ideas? Looking for new ways to organize your phone? Check out our list of 20+ home screens and favorite apps. Hoping inspiration strikes! (And if you’re up for it, we’d love to see your home screen, too!)
If you’re curious for ways to grow your social media numbers, to have more success, to get more followers and more clicks, the absolute best piece of advice we’ve found is to keep trying new things. Always be testing. Need inspiration? I’ve drummed up 29 new, small, and simple experiments and growth hacks you can try this month to see what works for you. They’re all low-cost, big-potential. I’d love to hear which ones you’re interested in trying! (And which ones work for you.) My must-have
We’ve been studying and learning the best ways to reach a social media audience on mobile —where 60 percent of social media time is spent! How does one go about implementing mobile into a social media marketing plan? To really get to know the best strategies and workflows on mobile, we asked. A half dozen Buffer for iOS users were so kind to share how they go about
Given 140 characters, how can you make the absolute most of every single word, hashtag, and link in a tweet? We’ve been excited to test and experiment with answering that question by trying out headline ideas , power words , psychology , science , and more. N
I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around social media advocacy. It’s scary for me to admit that because I write about social media for a living. I should know these things. I should have everything figured out. And I don’t. Social media advocacy has eluded me. Though that hasn’t stopped me from experimenting. I’ve muddled my way through what I believed social media advocacy to mean, and I went so far as to implement advocacy strategies – though not even sure I was doing it right. An
Surfing through my daily content curation or checking out the latest, popular marketing stories, I’ll sometimes find strategies that sound completely fascinating—and entirely foreign. What do some of the biggest buzz words—remarketing, onboarding, CRO, etc.—even mean? And is it really possible for you to get these strategies happening for yourself? I’ve been really happy to dig in to all these intriguing new topics, and I’d love to explain 10 of these buzzworthy strategies—as well as some sim
Creating company culture and company values isn’t a static exercise—it’s a constant evolution. Lately we’ve been excited to begin growing the Buffer marketing team (see the roles we have in mind!). With this growth comes the great opportunity to share with new teammates how we currently think about marketing at Buffer. And what we found in thinking ahead to these great conversations is that our understanding of Buffer marketing is rather quite implicit. As never larger than a team of three, w
How do the best-performing Facebook pages get all that amazing engagement? And how can you and I do the same? The Facebook pages that are doing wonderfully well with likes, shares, and comments on their posts have so much to teach about new tactics and worthwhile strategies . Our friends at BuzzSumo analyzed 500 million (!) of these Facebook posts, and we’ve learned some amazing takeaways that you can im
How are things going for you on social media? I remember sometimes being a bit fuzzy with my answer to that question. I’ll have been really enjoying sharing and engaging with people, forgetting completely about the awesome stats and analysis at my fingertips. And knowing these social media stats can be incredibly valuable—for connecting deeper with my audience, for curating finely-tuned content, and for growing a following and a brand. So where do you go for these important social media stats?