Guides & Courses

A collection of posts on Guided Courses

How to Schedule Posts to Bluesky and Cross-post from Other Platforms

This simple shortcut will help you cross-post and schedule posts to Bluesky with your iPhone.

Guides & CoursesSep 20, 2023
The Social Media Manager’s Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checklist

What should I work on next? This is a thought that pops up many times throughout the day while I’m working as the Social Media Manager at Buffer. I’ll check Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads to make sure I’m covering all my bases and spending time in the best way possible. And on the good days, I’m right in the groove where I know exactly what to do next and what are the most important tasks that need to get done. What really helps me is making a checklist for my social media activi

Guides & CoursesJul 31, 2023
10 Beginner Social Media Strategies

What are you working on today for social media management? Have you been trying to figure out your social media marketing plan and not sure where to start? One of our goals at Buffer is to always be iterating and experimenting with what we do on social networks and share different types of content. We’re up for trying all sorts of different strategies for social media! And many of these end up revealing great opportunities for growth. We’d love to help with some ideas if you’re just getting st

Guides & CoursesAug 29, 2022
Buffer in 2022: 51 Features To Help You Grow Your Audience

A complete guide to all of Buffer's features and integrations in 2022. Learn about Buffer's publishing, analytics, engagement, and landing page tools, and see what other features are coming soon.

IFundWomen's Guide to Cultivating an Inclusive and Engaged Digital Community

In this post, we give you a behind-the-scenes look at how IFundWomen, the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses, integrates their marketing and community building to foster inclusive digital spaces.

Guides & CoursesNov 5, 2018
7 Invaluable Marketing Skills That Help Teams Produce Consistently Great Content

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS In speaking with thousands of marketers and businesses over the past several years, we’ve learned that marketing has an incredible potential to impact people’s lives. In fact, the American Marketing Association defines marketing as: “The activity, set of institutions, skills, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large

FacebookOct 25, 2018
How to Use Facebook to Market Your Business

If you want your business to have a presence on social media, Facebook is probably one of the first orthefirst social media platform you think of. More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook every single day, and many multiple times a day. It’s almost certain that your potential customers are on Facebook and using it actively to connect with their family, their friends, and their favorite brands. Whether you’re running a brick and mortar store, an ecommerce site, an agency, or a software company

FacebookOct 3, 2018
How to Create the Perfect Facebook Page for Your Business: The Complete A to Z Guide

Facebook now has over 2.23 billion monthly active users. And as small business owners and brand managers, there’s a very good chance you’ll be able to reach and connect with your target audience through Facebook. Great! So where should you start? And is there an easy blueprint to follow? From creating our Facebook Business Page to posting several hundred times over the past few years, we’ve experimented a lot with various Facebook marketing tips

Guides & CoursesAug 23, 2018
5 Tried and True LinkedIn Tips to Grow your Company Page Followers 600% Faster

While much of the focus over the last few years on social media has been on Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn has been steadily growing its user base to more than 500 million users. And we’ve seen first-hand that businesses are working hard on perfecting their LinkedIn marketing strategy so that they can tap into the world’s largest professional network. A few months ago, we asked you (our readers) to let us know which social media networks you would like to learn more about – LinkedIn (53%) ca

Guides & CoursesMay 30, 2018
How to Use Pinterest: The Insider Guide for Businesses (With Strategies From the Pinterest Team)

Pinterest is one of the world’s leading platforms for sharing ideas and finding inspiration. Over 200 million people flock to the social network each month to discover new products, recipes, destinations, articles, influencers, and so much more. But Pinterest isn’t just for individual users like you and me. It also represents a huge opportunity for businesses and brands looking to

Guides & CoursesSep 7, 2017
What to Post on Each Social Media Platform: The Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Social Content

Not all content needs to be shared everywhere. And not all content is suitable for every social media platforms. It’s all right to post entirely different things on different platforms . In fact, it might even help you to boost your engagement . For example, if you take a look at our Twitter [https://twitter.com/bu

Guides & CoursesAug 3, 2017
A Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager: How to Spend Time on Social Media in 2017

One of the questions I get asked most as the social media manager here at Buffer is: How do you break up your day in order to get the most out of social media? Up until recently, I hadn’t really thought about it much. A little bit of content creation, curation, audience engagement, emails, outreach, and some Buffer scheduling. I kept wondering, is there really a social media manager formula for success? How are other social media professionals spending their time during the day? Do we share t

Guides & CoursesAug 2, 2017
The Complete Guide to Facebook Groups: How to Create a Group, Build a Community and Increase Your Organic Reach

Facebook has recently launched Groups for Pages, enabling the 70 million+ Pages on Facebook to create their own unique communities and feeds. This update provides new ways for brands to boost engagement and could go some way to countering the decline in organic reach Facebook Page owners have been experiencing for the past few years [https://buffer.com/resources/s

Guides & CoursesJul 25, 2017
The Complete Guide to Creating Effective Snap Ads with Snapchat Ad Manager

In the past, if you wanted to run Snap Ads (Snapchat ’s full-screen video ads), you would need to go through one of their ads partners. Now, though, you can create Snap Ads yourself through Snapchat’s new self-serve ads tool, Snapchat Ad Manager. Snapchat has even included a video creation tool in the Snapchat Ad Manager to make creating engaging, awesome-looking vertical videos a breeze. We’re thrilled by the possibilities that Snapchat Ad Manager has bro

Guides & CoursesJun 22, 2017
25 Days, 25 Expert Social Media Growth Strategies [New Email Course for Marketers]

What’s working for you on social media these days? One of our goals at Buffer is to always be iterating and experimenting with what we do on social media and in marketing. Whether it’s cutting our posting frequency, curating content, or creating square videos , we’re always up for trying new strategies ! Lots of times these experi

Guides & CoursesMay 25, 2017
How to Use Instagram Search & Explore to Boost Your Instagram Marketing

Instagram places a big emphasis on search and discovery of content. It’s one of the few social media platforms with a Search and Explore tab in its app. Being featured in the search results or in Instagram’s Explore section can be a great way to boost your success on the network with added exposure and the chance to reach new users who may not have otherwise seen your content. There are also several other ways you can use Instagram’s Search and Explore for your business — finding the best hash

Guides & CoursesMar 16, 2017
The Complete Guide to Instagram Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Instagram

Instagram offers incredible opportunities for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audiences. But as more and more brands join Instagram and the feed becomes more competitive, it can be harder to stand out. Imagine being able to reach the specific groups of Instagram users you want to connect with, engage them, and convert them into customers. Well, that’s totally possible! In late 2015, Instagram opened up Instagram ads. Using the Facebook

AnalyticsJan 27, 2017
So…Is That Good? The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Benchmarking on Social Media

If I were to tell you that a recent tweet of mine received 20 clicks, what would you think? Maybe 20 clicks sounds like a lot based on what you’ve found for your own accounts. Maybe 20 clicks sounds rather lean, considering what you know about clickthrough rates of big brands or your most successful posts. Checking out the raw numbers of your social media stats , free of context, makes it quite hard to draw any concrete conclusions.

Guides & CoursesJan 23, 2017
48 Hours with Snapchat Spectacles: Our Full Review and 5 Tips to Create Better Snaps

Spectacles are the first hardware product from the company formally known as Snapchat. The camera-equipped glasses were announced in September 2016, at the same time as Snapchat became Snap Inc. and rebranded itself as “a camera company.” From the moment they were announced, Snap had the marketing industry, and more importantly, their key 16-24-year-old demographic, clamoring to get their hands on Spectacles. But, in what turned out to be one of the most creative marketing campaigns of 2016, Sp

Guides & CoursesOct 4, 2016
Instagram for Business: 30 Tips to Grow Your Audience and Stand Out on Instagram

Instagram is the go-to place for over 300 million people to share their photos, videos, and stories every single day. And as Instagram has grown over recent years, that’s left many business owners and marketers with one very clear and important question: How can we use Instagram for business? Well today, we’d love to dive head first into that topic and share: * How to set up a killer Instagram profile * The importance of goal setting and how to creat

Guides & CoursesSep 8, 2016
How to Curate Content: The Secret Sauce to Getting Noticed, Becoming an Influencer, and Having Fun Online

How great is the Internet! One of the most impactful, viral, influential services you can perform online is to read stuff and tell people what you like. It’s true! If you’re looking for a competitive edge, a way to establish your authority, a way to get more followers, one of the best, proven paths to online success is content curation. It’s both as simple and as difficult as finding great content and sharing it with your audience. The difficult part is that there is a lot that goes into a wo

Guides & CoursesAug 18, 2016
Event Marketing 101: How to Keep Attendees Engaged Before, During and After Your Event

Taking an event from idea to sell-out is no easy feat. And half the battle of organizing an event is marketing it. When it comes to the marketing channels that drive attendance, hype, and engagement, social media is right near the top. Best of all, social media event marketing isn’t as time-consuming as you may think. You can do it! One of the greatest feelings in the world is walking into one of your own

Guides & CoursesJul 18, 2016
Why Do Tweets Go Viral? Our 10 Most Successful Tweets and the Psychology Behind Why They Worked

If you’re anything like me, there are only a handful of things more exciting for a social media marketer than when a Tweet “goes viral.” Tina Fey sums up the feeling nicely: And so I set about with the audacious goal for this post of trying to unravel the great social media mystery of virality: Figuring out the formula for Twitter’s most successful tweets. Better yet, I hoped to determine the formula for Buffer’s most successful tweets so that I could repeat the process and share what I’ve le

Guides & CoursesJul 14, 2016
A Complete Guide to Instagram Marketing: Get the Playbook That Drives Results for Instagram’s Top Profiles

Across the globe, there are over 700 million Instagrammers — more than 300 million of whom use Instagram every single day, sharing an average of 95 million photos and videos per day. Those are huge numbers. And no matter who your audience is — age, gender, occupation, anything — you’ll be sure to reach them through Instagram. So the question becomes … How to promote your business on Instagram? How can you stand out among the other 95 million photos posted each day? How can non-designers and a