Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 251 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 8
I’ve got several go-to moves when I’m playing basketball. The crossover. The fadeaway. The tear drop. I’ve got several go-to moves when I’m writing social media updates, too. Title case. Text only. Signatures. I imagine you’ve got your own favorites, too. Combined, there are a litany of ways to compose, style, and organize a social media update, even in just the words we use in our updates. I’m always on the look out for new experiments to try with the way I write a social media update. My la
When I first set foot in Disneyland, I race to the most famous rides first—Splash Mountain, the Matterhorn, Indiana Jones, all the biggest and best. Little do I know there are just as many hidden gems and overlooked attractions that I’ve likely missed in my sprint for the headliners. Social networks are a little like Disneyland in this regard. There’s so much to see and so much to do that some of the fun stuff is bound to slip through the cracks. Which features of Facebook, Twitter, and the ot
Five or more hours of sedentary sitting, according to Dr. David Agus, is the health equivalent of smoking a pack and a quarter of cigarettes. Yikes. Yet, sitting around is something we get plenty of practice at. Reading and writing and creating on a computer makes for big chunks of sedentary time. If you’re reading this post right now, are you sitting down? How long have you been sitting? It’s a topic that I think of often. We’ve all kind of taken a shining to it on the Buffer team, being more
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer a unique opportunity to get close to people who are hundreds of miles away. You can share anything with anyone at any time. You can share. Does this mean that you should share? I’ve come up against this question many times, hovering over the Send button on a status update or considering what’s okay to share and what’s too private (or uninteresting). Where should the line be drawn? Should there even be a line? I’m happy to offer some of my th
Imagine you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self a bit of advice on investing in the creative process, coming up with new ideas, and producing good, fun work. What would you say? I’ve thought a bit about this topic lately, as I reflect on how I’ve changed from the person I was in my twenties to the person I’ve become in my thirties. Creativity has become more and more important to me, both at work and at play. And the lessons I’ve learned along the way (and the ones I’m still l
When I started at Buffer, I was given permission to make mistakes, to ask forgiveness rather than permission, to always test everything. So I’d like to give you all some permission as well. You have permission to pick and choose your social networks. In fact, often times it may be best not to be on certain social networks, perhaps because of the time it takes to do social right or because your customer personas don’t fit with a particular network. When you’re choosing which social networks to
A headline can serve either as an apple pie on the windowsill of your content or as its bouncer. It’s all in the way you phrase things. Fortunately for us, many people have found headlines that work wonders, consistently, time after time. And they go well beyond the saturated listicle or clickbait. Why not take some inspiration from the best headlines of the best headline writers? The blueprints exist to get your tweets, emails, updates, and articles clicked. I collected a trove of interesti
There comes a point in my afternoons or evenings where I’ve just about sapped all the creativity and efficiency I’ve got. I need a break. My mind and my body—and oftentimes, my writing—make it quite clear. Do we ever get the same clues when we need a break from social media? Certainly, the subject seems a bit taboo to discuss. We’re social media marketers, after all! Taking a break from social media seems almost sacrilegious, yet I wonder how many of us have had those thoughts or feelings befo
We wrote a post awhile back about email list building, and in the course of writing that post, we got the Christmas morning jitters. We wanted to try every single idea we could. And so we did. And wouldn’t you know it, the ideas worked! I’m really happy to share with you our experience from an exciting month of email list building and the strategies we used to get more email subscribers. The hugely encouraging aspect to all this is that our simple email changes can be done by anyone. If you’r
We love happiness at Buffer. We’ve renamed customer support as customer happiness. Happiness is baked into our culture and values and the DNA of every person who works on the team. If there’s a smile to be had or a positive outlook to take, we’ll do our best to find it. As such, we’re always keen to test out new ways to improve on this value of happiness at work, at play, and at home. We’ve tried science-backed ways to be happier, productive ways to be happier, and lessons from historians, w
Funny, we’ve had the Facebook Like button along the side of every Buffer blog post for the past several years. And I don’t think I’ve ever clicked it. I’ve hoped that others would, of course. I hope they click all the share buttons. But until now, I’ve never known what that experience was like for the end-user. What’s it like to actually share a story to Facebook? And how can I make it a better experience? We talk a lot about reversing the decline in organic Facebook reach and succeeding wit
How many browser tabs do you have open right now? While writing this post, I had 18 tabs open. I’d like to say they were all for research, although I’m pretty sure one or two slipped down a YouTube wormhole. Does this sound familiar? It seems like my multi-tab madness is right in line with the status quo. We all love to have multiple tabs open at once, adding more and more as we find new articles to click and sites to visit. Pretty soon, it’s likely we’ve forgotten what we were online for in
One of my favorite visual social networks—and one that probably flies under the radar compared to other visual spots—is SlideShare. Browse through the featured slidedecks, and you can find big ideas and helpful strategies condensed into a couple dozen simple, succinct slides. There are few better ways to consume killer content so quickly. In writing about how to create a SlideShare presentation that gets results, I ran across a number of presentations that inspired me, educated me, and wowed me
I have a blog post to write. This blog post, to be exact. And in the course of researching, outlining, writing, editing, and writing some more, I also have other hats to wear. Email marketing. Social media strategy. Blog promotion, blog design, and anything else that should happen across my plate. I’m sure you wear a lot of hats, too. How do you find time to put them all on? One of my tasks that I’m currently optimizing is implementing a social media strategy at Buffer. In the midst of writi
We tend to read a lot of content at Buffer. And I mean a lot. Inside the Buffer product, we aim to solve the problem of “what should I share next?” by providing the content suggestions for you—25 of them, each and every day, hand-picked by Courtney and our suggestions team. We share 25 stories per day. We read even more that don’t make the cut. Where do we turn to find so much shareable content? I’ll be happy to let you in on our not-so-secret sources—some of our favorite newsletters, tools,
Awesome news: 490 people saw a tweet I sent out this week! Awesomer still, 16 people either clicked the link, left a reply, or favorited the tweet. And as for the other 474 people? I couldn’t tell you. Did they enjoy the tweet? Did they notice it? Did it delight them? Did it—eep!—offend them? And perhaps most importantly, what can I learn from these quiet observers so that, when I send my next tweet, those 474 followers find a reason to click, reply, retweet, or favorite? Meet social media’s
Since visual content arrived on the scene back in 2012, it has showed no signs of stopping. Best practices on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter always reference images and videos as key elements for driving engagement. Graphics and visuals on blog posts are one of the best ways to get the most value and deliver the best experience for your content. Visuals are a big deal. If you need any more convincing, or if you’d simply like to hear the argument in a beautiful visual form, I roun
Whenever I find myself doing research for new social media tips, the studies and resources I find are always fascinating. Not only is the intense depth of academia inspiring, the methods that researchers use for collecting information are so intriguing. I often wish I could be involved in studies like these, just so I can take the tests, try the quizzes, and see how I’d be evaluated. Some of the most fun ones to consider are those that involve different types of social sharing. They seek to pr
Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, we all start our day at some point. And we all seem to start it differently. Some of us hop online to check social media, others dive in to email, still others eat breakfast, exercise, or pack lunches for the kids. There’re a million different ways a morning could go. Which morning routine might be best? While there’s probably not an ideal morning routine that fits everyone, we can learn a lot from the morning routines of successful people as we
One thing I’ve learned at Buffer is that being open to not knowing things seems to be the best way to learn quickly and teach others at the same time. So many of our biggest hits on the blog have come from saying, “We don’t know the answer. Let’s find out!” On many matters, we haven’t any authority. Is this an OK way to get by? We’ve found great success in not knowing, and there’s no reason why you can’t, too. While we can certainly see the value in establishing yourself as an authority in yo
If you have ever wanted to pop an escape hatch or teleport to distant worlds just to get out of a meeting, take heart. There are ways to hold a better meeting. Forward-thinking companies have found creative ways to get their teams together, and their lessons and structure can be easily duplicated in meetings anywhere. These creative methods aren’t just clever for cleverness’s sake: Most of them are science-backed and all of them are grounded in successful experience. With just a handful of ha
A saying you’ll often hear around Buffer’s content team is,”There’s probably a plugin for that!” We’re often chasing new ways to work smarter, faster, and more productively—and the same is true of our Buffer blog. We’re quick to grab any and all WordPress plugins that can give the blog an extra edge or can wire up a feature we’d love to test. Whenever we dream something up to try on the blog, the first place we turn is WordPress plugins. We’ve collected quite the list of favorites. How about y
Just the other day someone introduced me to a blogpost that could have fit right in on the pages of KISS Metrics or HubSpot. Instead, it was published on a brand new blog. And I started thinking, how might this blog get from unknown to well-known if it’s already got quality figured out? Provided we’ve got the goods, what’s to help you or me stand out from the crowd? Quality, in many ways, has become a commodity—a mass-produced, ubiquitous good in large supply. Social media marketing and conten
Imagine you’ve got a week’s vacation planned this summer (lucky you!), and you’d love nothing more than for your social media efforts to keep humming right along while you’re gone. No problem. There are a handful of social media tools that can assist with your out-of-office marketing. Automation techniques can help fill your queue, and the 10 tools below can help you keep tabs on your profiles, engage with your audience, and communicate with your team. Here are 10 time-saving social media tool