All posts - page 63
A collection of 2,592 blog posts
This week in #bufferchat, Buffer’s social media manager, Brian Peters, stopped by to share his expertise all about Instagram marketing. We were super excited to discuss strategies, share advice and swap tips, the day after we launched Buffer for Instagram! In the chat, we talked about the kinds of posts that get the best engagement, our essential Instagram tools, and much more! Catch our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat, at TWO times every Wednesday for valuable industry insights and networki
This post originally published on September 22, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new extensions, images, and a Product Hunt collection. There are a few actions I perform over and over again as I work through my social media marketing plan. Do you know the feeling? You click on the same few buttons or type in the same URL. And then, one day, someone shows you a browser extension that completely rocks your world for the better. I’d love to share some of those world-rocking browser extensions wi
Instagram has fast become one of the largest, most lucrative social networks: 400 million people use the app every day, more than 15 million businesses use Instagram and Instagram’s users spend more in purchases than any other major social network. That’s a huge audience and a huge opportunity! We’re thrilled at the chance to help you succeed there. There are many different tactics and strategies for finding success on Instagram—timing, consistency, hashtags, links, and more. Being able to ac
There’s only one shortcut in life, according to David Cancel. The serial entrepreneur (and sometimes Buffer advisor) is currently working on his fifth startup, Drift, which allows you to talk to your website visitors and customers in real-time, from anywhere. But his biggest passion—and his top secret to a great life—is continuous, voracious learning. It’s a topic he explores in his own podcast, Seeking Wisdom. (It’s one of our CEO, Joel’s, favorites!) His startup background runs deep: He’s f
It’s easy to get tunnel vision as a marketer. You’ve got lots of goals to achieve, and only so many hours in the day to get there. So you put your head down, get focused, and get results. At the same time, it’s important to let yourself be inspired by others. Our industry can be creative, groundbreaking and a lot of fun. If you’re in need of a marketing recharge, here are 28 amazing marketing campaigns and experiments—and the amazing people who dreamed them up. Read on, and get inspired to ad
This week in #bufferchat, we all shared our content curation workflows! We discussed the value of including curated content into a marketing plan, how to make time to discover and read new content, tools for managing and sharing content, and much more. Catch our weekly Twitter chat , #bufferchat, at TWO times every Wednesday for valuable industry insights and networking with nearly 400 other smart marketers and
When you think about your coworkers, ask yourself: How many of them are happy? Who’s frustrated? Unchallenged? Looking for another job on the side? How do you gauge employee happiness, anyway, or turn what you learn into action? At Buffer, we’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with the employee engagement tools from OfficeVibe. Our friendly Slack bot (more on him later) asks teammates 5 questions each week, right from Slack, about how things are going at work. For some reason, it’s surprising
“Join us!” “Sign up!” These phrases litter the huge variety of email newsletter boxes you’ll come across online, and they generally serve the same purpose: Click here to give us your email address. They serve the same purpose, but do they say the same thing? Can one word change the way you feel about a button? In my experience, yes. I subscribe to the copywriting school of thought where every single word is absolutely worth stewing over and A/B testing because one single word can change ever
I often think I have a lot to do with managing my own social profiles. But managing 60? (mind blown) The team at Creative Click Media manages 60 social profiles for their clients, driving big results in traffic, leads, and sales with their team of three. How do they pull it off? Adam and Amanda from Creative Click were kind to share their workflows and processes for driving these results: everything from how they save time with social media management to how they iterate on blog posts and top
The goal of Facebook’s News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them. That’s no small task when you have over 1.65 billion people to keep happy and over 1,500 stories per day to prioritize for each of those individual users. Now, Facebook has announced one of their most significant News Feed shuffles. On Wednesday, Facebook shared that the News Feed algorithm is going to shift so that it will more favorably promote content posted by the friends and family of users. The
At Buffer, our workplace environment looks a bit different: our “water cooler” is Slack, we utilize transparent emails, we offer free, unlimited Kindle books and host monthly book clubs via Zoom. Customers are starting to care more and more about the company behind the product. And at Buffer, it’s part of our vision to create the most fulfilling place to work. In the past five-and-a-half years, where we’ve gone from 0 to nearly 90 employees, we’ve experimented with many aspects of our company
Millions of blog posts are published every day. A small percentage gain traction and attract readers. And among those readers, 55% will read the blog post for 15 seconds or less. (If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking with this one!) The internet is a daily battle for attention. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to share the latest marketing hacks with many of the same points echoed repeatedly. I’m guilty of it myself, and I completely understand why many of us write articles th
Angers activates. That’s the quote a friend shared with Christina Morillo, and it stuck in her mind. So when she set out to find some stock photos for the side project she had started with her friend Stephanie Morillo, she recognized what she was feeling when she couldn’t find them: Anger. The project, Women of Color in Tech Chat, is a community for women of color and non-binary people of color in tech. The goal was to build a simple splash page. “When we went to build a website and we found
Productivity on its own can be a tough challenge for anyone, even if you work from the same space every day. And what if you’re jumping workspaces every week? Every day? Every couple hours? Digital nomads and remote workers have a very unique productivity puzzle to figure out. I’ve been fortunate enough to be working remotely full-time for nearly 6 months now, and my desk has sometimes changed every couple days — or even every couple hours! As I’ve gone from place to place, I’ve been jotting d
I believe you can learn something from everyone—as long as you’re listening. We’re always building on the legacy and lessons of those who have come before us. For marketers, this is quite a legacy indeed. Although the discipline of marketing only emerged in the 1900s, it builds on a foundation of sales, advertising, copywriting and relationship-building that is much older. Some of its wisest teachings are hundreds of years old. Some of its big lessons happened only months ago. And for every br
When I first started out in marketing, I didn’t quite predict that I’d be a part-time designer, too. Now, in 201, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content and it’s become obvious and even necessary for all of us marketers to have at least some basic knowledge of key design terms. Thankfully, we live in a wonderful world where anyone can make the jump from novice to inte
Ai Ching Goh didn’t know what kind of company she wanted to start. She just knew she wanted to stop having the “Monday blues.” So together with her husband, the experimental psychology student and former Procter & Gamble corporate exec founded Piktochart, a web app that helps non-designers tell visual stories through images and infographics. Today, Piktochart has grown from 4 people working in a small Penang-based warehouse to more than 50 people serving more than 5 million users. Naturally, t
You might’ve heard the advice that your call-to-action should have one job, your email subject line one job, your blog post one job. Focus, with online marketing, is key. Turns out focus has a wonderful effect on building a business and driving results. Gather Social, a digital agency based in Nottingham, UK, takes this focused approach with every new client they bring on. The single thing that Gather Social wants to achieve for you on social media is an impact to your bottom line revenue. A
The last 3 weeks have been challenging and emotional for everyone at Buffer. We made the hard decision to lay off 10 team members, 11% of the team. I’d like to share the full details of how we got here, and the way we have chosen to handle this situation to put Buffer in a healthier position. I believe most startup founders are, by nature, optimistic. We want to solve problems and we believe in going from nothing to something. The attitude of most successful founders is that something previousl
I consider myself a pretty lucky guy. I have the amazing privilege of speaking with social media managers from a variety of brands and industries around the world on a daily basis. Listening and learning about the projects they’re working on, their biggest challenges, and what their aspirations are on social media now and in the future has helped me tremendously along the way. But then it dawned on me — I’ve never taken the time to write any of this incredible information down to share with ot
GIFs are great. And they’re everywhere. We use them at Buffer in our customer service tweets, our emails, our Slack channel. We include GIFs in marketing emails and team announcements. Anywhere there’s a message; there’s the chance for a GIF. And what’s more, we’ve found GIFs get great results! GIFs in tweets are one of our top tips for more Twitter engagement. One of our most popular transactional emails we send to customers features a GIF. Want to know how to create GIFs yourself? And know
The CEO and founder of Clef is trying to get rid of passwords forever. But Brennen Byrne, better know simply as B, still found a few hundred extra hours to build Clef’s company handbook from scratch—even though the company is currently a team of 7. “We take building a company really seriously,” he told CultureLab. “Even as a small team, so much of what gets done at Clef isn’t me. It’s important to us to build a great company at the same time as a great product.” Clef provides secure two-facto
Follower count is often considered one of the vainest of vanity metrics. I can relate. I’ve had my fair share of ego tied to that golden number on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn—one day I’ll point out my follower growth to a friend and the next I’ll feel all insecure about the number not being big enough. Still, despite the vanity, there is value in follower count. While it seems like a smug number to chase, followers have a proportional impact on how far and wide your message sprea
The transparent monthly reports from Buffer were one of my first introductions to the company, and I’ve loved them ever since. Before I joined the Buffer team, I waited like Christmas morning for a new report to come out so that I could take a peek behind-the-scenes into the way Buffer worked. Once I came on board, I eagerly anticipated each and every new report and the chance to share with and learn from the awesome folks who took time to read what we were up to. I’d love to get back on a reg