Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 251 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 9
I sometimes find myself getting lost in a sea of marketing advice. There’s just so much out there. We produce four to five marketing posts on the Buffer blog every week, and we are just one of many sources of social media marketing advice. Multiply our handful of weekly posts with the countless blogs, tweets, updates, and emails, and the social media tips grow exponentially. How can a marketing idea or bit of advice stand out from the crowd? We’ve certainly been eager to experiment with answe
At any given time, I have a side project running. It’s often a new blog or a Tumblr or a book or a newsletter. Sometimes I try to design WordPress themes. Other times I try photography. This ethos of new projects and new improvements runs throughout our Buffer team. We love to find ways to grow, excel, and improve through side projects and hobbies. I have yet to create the next Uber or Gmail—million-dollar and million-user enterprises that began as side projects. The good news: You don’t have
When I choose someone new to follow, when I compose a new tweet, when I share and favorite an update, I seldom think about the why. My following sessions would probably seem haphazard to an outsider, and my favoriting technique comes and goes from one strategy to another. Even so, the way I use Twitter is far less random than I thought. There is science and psychology behind the way we all tweet. Researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Twitter—favori
Do you measure the return on your social media investment? It seems blasphemous not to, yet that’s exactly the direction we’re experimenting with at Buffer. We’ve recently shifted our focus toward email list building along with continued traffic growth. These metrics are common enough; it’s what we’ve stopped measuring in lieu of email that is most unique and notable. We no longer focus on social media ROI. It’s strange but true. We’re a social media blog that does not emphasize social media
Important update: We’re retiring the Daily app and Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… Buffer’s mission has always been to do one thing really well: make it super easy to share great content. We think our web app and mobile app make it pretty easy to share, so what about the second part of our mission? How can you stock up on great articles and photos to share? Finding great content—the kind that moves you, makes you think, or st
Where do blog post ideas come from? This one came from someone else’s headline. We are constantly inspired by the amazing work of others, and we owe a lot to the deep thinking and amazing resources that are readily available within the industry. How can we get more ideas more consistently? There’s inspiration everywhere. We’ve just got to keep our eyes open. Copyblogger gave us the inspiration for this post. One of their recent headlines mentioned “idea curation,” a new-to-us term that really
How do you balance the necessity of highly secure passwords with the utility of easily recalling them all? It’s a question I mull each and every time a security breach happens. When the Heartbleed vulnerability was discovered last spring, the mandate was for everyone to change all their passwords right away. It’s still on my to-do list. I cringe at the thought of getting hacked, and I also cringe at the thought of taking the time and mental energy to do a complete overhaul of my favorite passwo
We love to make decisions and form strategies based on statistics. It’s why we A/B test and how we change directions on our social sharing. Who doesn’t love a good statistic, especially one that has an actionable next step? You’re likely to find a sea of statistics for social media—I know I’m amazed at how many are out there. My favorite finds are those that are just a bit surprising or unique or even counterintuitive. I’ve saved some of the best social media stats I’ve found over the past fe
If you’ve been to any of Buffer’s social media accounts recently (take Twitter, for instance), you may have noticed that the lion’s share of stories we share come from us. We tweet our own stuff. We toot our own horn. It would certainly seem that we are in the minority with this strategy. There seems to be a a fine line between sharing enough of your own stuff and sharing too much. Most people would rather err on the side of just enough (or even less) in their social media strategy. We all wan
How would you like everyone on your team to see every email that you send? At Buffer, we love it! Our value of transparency extends all the way to the inbox. Every email is public within the team. Every bit of communication gets shared. Everyone knows everything. There are no secrets. If this seems like a radical idea, well, it kind of is. I came from a traditional office environment where email was as standard as it comes: You emailed only those people who needed to know. You cc’ed folks some
Notice anything different about your Facebook page? Facebook is in the process of rolling out a series of changes for all business pages, tweaking the design and layout in a number of small but significant ways, giving opportunity to marketers to make the most of what’s new. So what is new? And how can you optimize your page to get the most value from what’s changed with the Facebook Page redesign? I collected the changes and differences from this Facebook page to the last, including all the
We have dozens of ways to measure a successful blog post or social media update, and I’d imagine you’re familiar with all of them. You can track blog traffic by digging into analytics. You can view engagement data on every update you send. The measurable aspects of an ideal blog post and social update are substantial. What about the immeasurable elements? These are the elements that you can’t really quantify, which might be why they don’t receive the same emphasis. It’s hard to pitch a story t
How do you choose which social media networks to participate in? Certainly, there’re a ton to choose from. Are you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn? Are you on Pinterest and Tumblr? Instagram and Vine? How many social media networks can you handle? Instagram makes a strong case, if you’re interested in raw numbers and unique appeal. Instagram has 200 million active users and provides a huge asset for visual content, which we all know is driving social like none other. It’s one of t
I spend my days writing content from my desktop computer for people who will read the content on their smartphones and tablets. Go figure. Mobile devices are fast becoming the preferred method of reading, sharing, and engaging with online content. It’s strange to think that the content we create on desktops and laptops will end up on dozens of different screen sizes before all is said and done. It’s a good lesson to keep in mind. When I share to social media, what will my sharing look like to
Where do email subscribers fall on your list of priorities? We’ve recently pushed email toward the top of our most valued sources, and it doesn’t seem like we’re alone in that. While social media might be the hot place to push your marketing efforts, there are many who choose to rely instead on building a valuable email list. And they couldn’t be happier. Here’s Michael Hyatt, speaking about his email list of 115,000: I have literally built a multi-million dollar business on the strength of m
I’m pretty big on words. As Buffer’s content crafter, I guess that kind of comes with the territory. However, I’m not alone on this. Words are an extremely valuable component to the way we get work done at Buffer. As a distributed team, the words we use in our communication with each other carry extra significance. As a company focused on culture and customer support, the words we use are vital to getting across our message in the most accurate, positive way. As such, we’ve developed a bit of
What does Skrillex have to do with blogging? It took us awhile to put the pieces together ourselves. We’ve been thinking a lot about the optimal way to produce content for the Buffer blog. We’ve pivoted the blog multiple times before—the latest came just in the past two months when we shifted from lifehacking and productivity to a purer focus on social media. The blog is both a huge driver of conversions for us and an ongoing experiment. What kind of content works best on the blog? And, more j
Is SlideShare part of your content strategy? Truth be told, we have yet to fully integrate it into our content creation process here at Buffer. We’ve felt lots of great nudges, though. We’ve heard tell of the amazing opportunity on SlideShare, how it’s a primed network of highly engaged influencers just itching to find and share your stuff. What might ultimately sell us, though, is the response we got from a single slide deck, created in a hurry, that garnered over 5,000 views in one weekend.
Live smarter, not harder. This principle is one of the 10 Buffer values that form the backbone of our company culture. We love experimenting with new ways to live out this value, and we’ve found productivity tips to be instrumental in this equation. What are some of our best productivity discoveries so far? We’ve written about a few before on the Buffer blog. • Ultradian rhythm and the 90-minute work cycle • How we’ve turned a 2-day writing process into a 4-hour process • The valu
Variety is the spice of life … and digital marketing? Variety can certainly make a digital marketer’s life a little easier. When you’ve worked hard to create a perfect piece of content, you can help that content go the extra mile (and then some) by repurposing and recreating the content in a huge number of ways. Is it easy? Well, I wanted to find out. I took a favorite piece of content from our Buffer blog, “How Often Should You Be Posting to Social Media?” and I hacked together 21 variations
Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It’s a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re blogging about perfect blogging. So I hope you’ll still trust the advice here even if you don’t find this post itself to be flawless. I’m sure we’d all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection—however it is that you measure perfection—so I researched
We love setting goals for improvement here at the Buffer blog, and one of our most recent challenges has been this: Every post gets an original image. This might not sound like such a tall task until you consider that Courtney and I are journalism majors whose skills lie in painting pictures with words and not so much in painting pictures with Photoshop. We try our best, in the name of visual content. You’ve perhaps heard of visual content? The term seems to be everywhere these day
Can one ever have enough Twitter tips? I know I can never get enough of them. Twitter is a constantly evolving, constantly challenging place to experiment, enjoy, and discover, and we all have a unique approach to the way we get things done with our tweets and followers. I’ve shared some of my favorite tips before—both for beginners and for intermediates—and we thought it might be fun to tap you all to share your expertise! Below you’ll find some tips from the Buffer community, as well as a f
Do you know what you’re posting, sharing, and blogging this Thursday? How about two Thursdays from now? Thursday of next month? Thursday of next year? We don’t have things figured out quite to that extreme here at Buffer, but we do have some idea of what’s ahead. (Those of you who are yearly planners, our hat’s off to you!) Planning content far into the future is a common element of many marketing strategies, and the erstwhile content calendar—in its many shapes and forms—fits this role perfec