Online Marketing - Page 2
A collection of posts on Online Marketing
The Buffer blog brings in 10x the traffic of the Open blog. It has 50x the reach of our email courses. A single post on the blog reaches more people in a day than we reach on Facebook in two weeks. It is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it. We’re pivoting right now, as we speak! The latest change, which I’m excited to share below, fits with this remarkable culture of experimentation, where there are no sacred cows or off-limits areas. Everything is on the table to impro
Awhile back, a phenomenon swept the Internet where people shared pictures and video of what’s inside their refrigerators. This isn’t that, but it’s close. ? I asked 20+ wonderfully generous and incredibly talented marketers to share what’s on their smartphone home screens. In need of any app ideas? Looking for new ways to organize your phone? Check out our list of 20+ home screens and favorite apps. Hoping inspiration strikes! (And if you’re up for it, we’d love to see your home screen, too!)
We’ve been writing quite a bit about online video platforms lately here on the Buffer Social blog. We gave you 10 quick wins to get you started with Facebook video and a complete guide to YouTube optimization . Needless to say video is becoming more and more important as a tool for marketers. Perhaps you’ve wondered, “How do these people make such great videos?” And, “Is it at all possible for me to
Many successful marketing campaigns involve groups. Some companies have their own LinkedIn or Google+ groups, while others stick to participating in relevant groups and chats. Whichever strategy your company takes, being involved in groups is a great way to find community, engage current audience members and prospective customers, build your brand, add value to your customer’s lives, and keep track of the industry’s climate. And now, there’s a new alternative when it comes to social media grou
Say you want to get started on a new marketing strategy—collecting customer research, or creating cool images, or measuring ROI. Where do you go first to find the tools that’ll make your job as smooth as can be? I often turn to listicles and roundups that bundle together a big handful of helpful tools. And this is maybe why I love Product Hunt’s collections so much. Their collections are user-generated tools lists that are easy to browse and simple to find just the tools that I need. I’m happ
Hey there, podcast fans! We recently launched a new podcast of our very own, Buffer CultureLab! We’d love for you to check it out and share any thoughts, feedback or ideas with us! You can listen on iTunes here or Google Play here. ? OK, now back to the post! “Slack is starting a podcast for some reason.” That was the headline of a recent Fortune.com article. Author Tom Huddleston, Jr. wondered why Slack, “a hot Silicon Valley company with a fast-growing valuation,” would “make the most of i
You’ve likely got a great way to search the web for the best free stock photos. And once you know where to look, how do you decide which photos to choose? Should you go with abstract or specific? What is the best color profile? What is the best orientation? There are so many great sources for free photos. I find myself asking these questions most every time I pick a photo—how to identify the right stock photo for a project. There’s a good bit of research and advice out there on how to make
Hey there, podcast fans! We recently launched a new podcast of our very own, Buffer CultureLab! We’d love for you to check it out and share any thoughts, feedback or ideas with us! You can listen on iTunes here or Google Play here. ? OK, now back to the post! As someone who’s motivated by self-improvement and achieving more, I’m constantly trying to learn as much as I can. Books are naturally one of my main go-to sources of knowledge. But there’s also a wealth of information to be consumed i
So much of marketing, it seems, is geared toward growth and traction, particularly when it comes to startups and technology. We are pressed on all sides by tracking metrics, pivoting, learning, and growing—a sort of exponential growth mindset that envelops, well, everything: content, social, email, community. If you haven’t measured it, then it doesn’t count. If you can’t measure it, you’re better off without it. We’re surrounded by this movement at Buffer, kind of like a stone is surrounded by
The surge of videos on social media and content marketing channels has come quickly. In the past year alone, Facebook has averaged more than 1 billion video views each day. Video has become go-to visual content for a huge number businesses and brands. And I’d love to share how you can do video, too, no matter your resources or skills. I researched all the best and easiest video editing tools that are ideal for novice video producers with limited budgets and busy schedules. I tried each one ou
What do you do when you start a blog? Most people jump right in. They choose a theme, browse around for awesome plugins, set up Mailchimp and do all this other… stuff, before they sit down and think it through. I’ve learned that when you do this, it’s easy to end up with a really pretty blog….with very few readers. When I joined Canva a couple months ago,instead of writing a word or improving the blog’s design, I spent the first month simply building a strategy. Today I want to tell you abou
Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says: “Blue is the richest color for me; I can see all of blue.” Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions. After all, the visual sense is the strongest de
Have you ever wondered why, in spite of your best intentions, you just can’t resist a clickbait headline on Buzzfeed? What was it about #TheDress that got everyone up in arms? And what is it about Malcolm Gladwell that makes his work so interesting? Is it possible to replicate this kind of remarkability, or is it entirely unpredictable? The truth is there is compelling science behind the success of shareable content. The stuff that gets people talking isn’t quite as random as you might think.
Social media automation, when done with care and the right strategy, is awesome. It can amplify your great content while freeing up your time to create more of it! We’ve talked before on the blog about automating some processes through services like If This Then That and Alfred, and in this post I wanted to share some of our favorite uses of another fantastic automation tool: Zapier. Zapier integrates with more than 400 different web apps, which means most marketers are bound to be able to fin
I am writing this post to Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel—one of whom is likely you. You see, Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel are personas, created with a combination of raw data and educated guesses, representing slices of this blog’s readership. Dan could be you, and Mary could be your coworker. What these sketches provide is a touchstone for creating content : When I can put a name and a background to the people reading what I write, I c
Over the course of the last few years, I’ve come across a huge number of articles that list “The Best Marketing Blogs of 201X” or “Social Media Blogs You Cannot Miss Out On!” I find that a variety of the blogs that I would really like to see on these lists often get overlooked. Often, a fair amount of the mainstream blogs and their content is meant for those starting out in the marketing industry. That’s not a bad thing. These are important lessons, and there are plenty of social media market
You may have heard it said that understanding your audience on social media is one of the keys to success with social media marketing. (We may have even said it ourselves a time or two!) Makes a lot of sense. The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to deliver the kind of helpful content and updates they’re interested in. So what might be the simplest, most efficient ways of understanding an audience? This is the part where I often get stuck: Implementing the good advi
With a distributed team of 26 (and growing!) and 1.5 million amazing customers across the globe, a vast majority of our interactions are online and through a variety of apps and tools to keep connected. In addition to all these amazing ways to connect online, we’ve hosted several Buffer meetups. For the same reason our team bounds off for international working retreats every five months, we have found in-real-life meetups with our fantastic community members to be invaluable. Meetups (or if or
When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create. So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses. Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the words you use to
Every single day, 4.75 billion posts go up on Facebook. To put that number in perspective, there have only been 129 million books published since the beginning of time, with an average word length of 64,000 words. That means we are publishing more content (by number of words) every single day on Facebook than is contained in every single book published since humans have existed! For us marketers, it’s our job to
This may sound crazy, but here it goes… Building your email list isn’t as hard as you think. Really. In fact, when you know what to do and how to do it, list building is pretty darn simple. How do I know? I struggled with my blog’s conversion rate (1.4%) for over a year. That is, until I discovered the 5 secrets that I’m going to reveal to you in this post. Aft
💡Start Page by Buffer is a free, fast, and simple way to build beautiful landing pages. Build your page (in 60 seconds) here. OK, let’s be honest. While this may be a pretty darn good guide (if I do say so myself), it’s not going to be the last thing anyone ever writes about landing pages. So what’s with the “ultimate guide” stuff? Well, it’s part of what brought you here—which makes it one component of an effective landing page. You are, right this very minute, looking at a landing page. Te
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
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