News and Trends
A collection of posts on News and Trends
Tips, news & Buffer updates for your social media journey
Get the latest updates in the social media industry and creator economy – with a side of Buffer flavor.
From AI stickers to Broadcast Channels, here's everything you need to know about Instagram’s latest features, with a step-by-step guide to using them all.
Get the latest updates in the social media industry and creator economy – with a side of Buffer flavor
Get the latest updates in the social media industry and creator economy – with a side of Buffer flavor.
Get the latest updates in the social media industry and creator economy – with a side of Buffer flavor.
If there’s one thing we love to check on at the end and beginning of any year, it’s the trends. Who got what right — or wrong? What did no one see coming? It’s all fascinating to witness. Perhaps antithetical to my love for trend-watching, the biggest lesson I’ve learned from predictions is that no one can tell the future. We can only make observations based on data and the cultural landscape and cross our fingers. Keeping that in mind, we — along with experts — outline what we’ve noticed peop
Social commerce is one of the hottest trends in social media today, and it looks to have an even bigger impact in 2020. Get all the details here.
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS 2019 is here and gone are the days where generating audience engagement on social media was primarily a passive process. The always-online audiences of today want to be involved, interact, and co-create. The brands that are successful in delivering personalized experiences to their audiences are the brands that are likely to thrive with their social media strategies in the coming year. But in order to be able to capita
In life and business, though, change is inevitable. And just as popular culture, music, and fashion move on, Facebook should too.
Today, Facebook has announced that it’s rolling out Facebook Stories Ads to advertisers globally. More than 300 million people use Facebook Stories and Messenger Stories every day. Since Snapchat debuted the Stories format back in 2013, it has taken over the social media landscape. Facebook first introduced the format to one of its properties in 2016 with the launch of Instagram Stories [https://buffer.com
What a year for Business Pages on Facebook! It sure feels like every time we as marketers and business owners think we have our Facebook marketing strategy figured out, a major algorithm change is announced or a new tactic becomes the latest trend. Over the years, we’ve learned that the best way to reach our audiences on Facebook is to study the data, experiment constantly, be open to learning, and take a growth mindset. In the spirit of learning, we partnered with BuzzSumo to analyze more th
Too busy to read? Just click the play button below to listen to Hailley and Brian discuss the Instagram algorithm on our podcast. How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud [https://soundcloud.com/the-science-of-social-media/instagram-igtv-television-for-the-mobile-generati
Instagram has released a new way for users to easily share feed posts to stories. More than 300 million users now use Instagram stories daily and this update will enable them to share any post from their Instagram feed directly to stories. In the feature’s launch blog post Instagram explained : When you come across something in feed that inspires you — like a post from
F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, returns this week (May 1 and 2) in San Jose, CA at the McEnery Convention Center. F8 offers developers, marketers, and anyone with a keen interest in the future of social media, a glimpse into what’s ahead for Facebook in both the short and long-term. Last year, Facebook wowed onlookers with a range of eye-catching VR features, Messenger updates, and camera upgrades. So what’s ahead for this year’s conference? Recap: Check out our full F8 2017 rundo
Putting your trust as a marketer or brand in 3rd-party social media tools to manage all of your posts can be a bit scary. You might be wondering: * Are my posts getting optimal reach and engagement? * Do social media platforms penalize 3rd-party tools? * Are 3rd-party tools really worth the cost? These are some of the most common questions our Customer Advocates receive on a daily basis. And up until this research, we haven’t had any concrete data to say “yes” or “no” to whether or not 3rd
If you do Facebook marketing , one thing that you might want to understand is the Facebook algorithm. The Facebook algorithm helps make sense of the huge number of posts that people and businesses share every day and chooses the posts to show in our News Feed based on a huge number of factors. We want to help you understand how your Facebook posts get viewed on Facebook. So we’re collecting all the relevant Facebook algorithm factors, updates, an
Do you remember your first social media profile? Or, how about your first social media post? My first profile was on Myspace, my first friend was “Tom from Myspace,” and my first post was something like, “Myspace is awesome!” The rest is history. Social media has changed and evolved so much since the early days, it’s almost hard to believe how far we’ve come. How people use social media has changed as well. Gen Zs (now beginning to enter the workforce) only know a world with social media, com
We’re making the camera the first augmented reality platform. — Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook F8 conference 2017 Facebook’s F8 conference was once again filled with incredibly exciting announcements. Augmented reality (AR) could be seen as the main theme of this year’s conference. From augmented masks and special effects to 360 video camera to Facebook Spaces (an app where you can hang out with your family and friends virtually), Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook want to enable us to connect with one
Ninety-three percent of marketers we surveyed are actively using Facebook for their business. And almost everything that Facebook does to its family of products can have a great impact on marketers. From releasing stories across Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger, to going all-in on live video, Facebook’s product decisions affect billions of people globally. Imagine how it may feel like to know about Facebook’s upcoming developments and begin to plan how you can utilize them — perhap
Facebook Stories are short user-generated photo and video collections that can be viewed up to two times and disappear after 24 hours. The story format, originated and made famous by Snapchat , has been on Facebook’s radar for some time, with the Menlo Park-based company first testing a Snapchat Stories clone within Messenger in September 2016. Now, Facebook users can share s
In an effort to get to the bottom of what makes videos successful on social media, we set out to answer two not-so-simple questions: * Where does video perform best? * In what format does video perform best? What we found is that there are so many ways to go about it! Video format, length, content, captions, and graphics (to name a few) all play a big part in the success of your video content [https://buffer.com/library/video-market
Instagram has today released two major updates to their product: Instagram live video and disappearing photos and videos for groups and friends in Instagram Direct. Instagram Live lets you broadcast video to your followers in real-time as part of Instagram Stories — a feature that launched in August and is now used by 100 million people every day [http://blog.instagram.com/post/15347442
This year alone, Instagram has released business profiles and features like Stories and Zoom. Lucky for us, Instagram has something new to share again: Shopping is coming to Instagram! Starting this week, Instagram is testing a new way for users to learn more about products they discover in the app and to purchase those products if they wish to. The entire e-commerce flow from discovery to purchase is contained within Instagram, which may potentially help solve one of the biggest Instagram que