Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 273 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 9
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 writin
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
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 b
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 th
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