Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 266 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 8
You compete with millions of other blogs on creating and sharing craveable content. You manage multiple social media accounts, seeking that sweet spot of targeted, valuable, engaging updates. You do this all day, day after day. Imagine having some tools on hand that make these daily activities even easier. Tony Restell understands these challenges of social media sharing like few others. As founder of Social-Hire.com, Tony works with multiple recruiting clients at a time on their social medi
You compete with millions of other blogs on creating and sharing craveable content. You manage multiple social accounts, seeking that sweet spot of targeted, valuable, engaging updates. You do this all day, day after day. Imagine having some tools on hand that make these daily activities even easier. Tony Restell understands these challenges of social media sharing like few others. As founder of Social-Hire.com, Tony works with multiple recruiting clients at a time on their social media stra
The very first Buffer blog post—Want to Tweet While You Sleep?—was published in January 2011. Three-and-a-half years and 595 posts later, we’ve covered a lot of ground, learned a huge number of tips and tricks that make social media easier, and written a ton of helpful, actionable content. Many others have just as much—probably even more—awesome content sitting in the archives. If you’re just starting out, you’ll get to this point, too. When your archives are bursting with content, it could ve
Update – we launched Pablo a new tool to create beautiful images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds You can use Pablo right from the get-go, no need to login or create an account. Just quickly create amazing images super fast. You can try out the first version of Pablo right now – no login
How do you know when spaghetti is ready to eat? Throw a noodle against a wall and see if it sticks. It’s a super simple hack for Italian dinner night. It’s not such a great metaphor for social media goal-setting. That being said, I have participated in more than my fair share of spaghetti strategy sessions, often times contributing to the “see what sticks” mentality with my suggested goals. It’s an area I’d be keen to improve. Have you ever felt a bit unsure when coming up with goals for your
When you find yourself using a product or tool on a daily basis, you get to know the tool inside and out, including all the helpful shortcuts and little-known features. We’d love to share our Buffer secrets with you. Here are some of our personal favorite Buffer features that might have flown under your radar. Enjoy! 1. Share to multiple profiles in one click with Groups Imagine you’ve got an update to share with your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ followers. Imagine you typically share the
Social media advice seems to come in two flavors: what to do and how to do it. Take, for instance, the advice to reshare content from your blog’s archives. This strategy seems to pay big dividends for the accounts who’ve embraced it. They’ve seen more traffic, more reshares, and more engagement even though the content itself isn’t brand new. Sharing old content is awesome social media advice. So how exactly does one go about it? It’s a question I’ve been working to answer for myself as I sha
We’ve posted huge, helpful lists on social media tools for small business (61!) free Twitter tools (59!), and free marketing tools (29!). Facebook is next—though the list won’t be quite as huge. The built-in tools that Facebook offers to business pages and advertisers are robust and detailed. Hence, you’re likely to uncover a smaller stash of third-party tools than you might for a network like Twitter. Still, there are some fabulous Facebook tools out there, and they can help push your Faceboo
When I set up a daily to-do list, I often have a spectrum of tasks that need to get done. There are the big projects that figure to take multiple days to complete. There are medium-sized tasks that will require some long stretches of intense focus. Then there are the quick wins. I love the quick wins. These are the tasks that can be done in a matter of minutes. They’re super fast fixes or experiments that take little time but pay off with big dividends. And wouldn’t you know, quick wins are e
Rest, and think. What does your ideal day look like? When do you wake up? Who do you spend time with? What do you do? What does your ideal work look like? What do you create? How does it make you feel? Where are you when you’re creating it? What is your ideal life? Picture it. Embrace it. Bearhug the living daylights out of it. Then go out and get it. You can be anything you want to be This seems impossible, right? At the very least impractical. People don’t just visualize what they want
We share, share, share to social media. How can we tell what works? This is a question I ask myself each week as I review the Buffer social media stats. How can I evaluate and optimize my best social media content? Where do I even start? Having asked the question myself so many times, I’ve found a few different options for analyzing how social media content performs. I’m still experimenting with which way is best, and I’m happy to share with you all the many different ways I’ve tried so far.
Imagine you were compiling a course curriculum for a class on online marketing. What would be your go-to resources? In digging through my bookmarks and starred articles, I noticed a growing list of awesome stories and helpful links. If I threw them all together, it’d make for quite the collection! I’d love to share with you what I’ve got so far, and it’d be awesome if you’d consider adding any personal favorites in the comments. Here is what I’ve bookmarked as my must-read social media article
The ideal length of a blogpost is six minutes and 1,500 words. So every blog post you write should aim for that golden, gooey length, right? Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. We love digging up the latest stats and best practices on how to share better on social media. And our findings are just that: General statistics and ideas on what might work best in practice. Many stats are jumping off points for you to test and iterate on what’s best individually and personally for your sharing.
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