Research
A collection of posts on Research
In this article, Nupur Mittal shares insights into four research methods that help her find content ideas and identify unique takeaways.
Facebook marketing in 2019 isn’t dead. On the contrary, it’s far from it. Now removed from the dim outlook that businesses faced at the beginning of 2018, Facebook has and will remain an essential tool for brands’ marketing strategies moving forward. In our big State of Social Media 2019 Report, we found that 93.7 percent of businesses use and are currently active on Facebook — the most among any other social media network. And although we continue to see a dramatic rise in the usage
An incredible 500 million people around the world use Instagram Stories on a daily basis (with that number rapidly growing by the minute). Besides being an interesting and fun way to connect with friends and family, Stories offer businesses a unique opportunity to capture the direct attention of audiences and potential customers. But where do you start? And what makes for great stories content? We partnered with Delmondo to answer these questions, and more! Together we analyzed more than 15,0
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
Social media is changing at a rapid pace. For example, the content format Stories was introduced on several major social media platforms slightly more than a year ago. Now, it’s one of the most popular content individuals are posting. More than 300 million people are sharing stories on Instagram and WhatsApp separately every day, and 70 million people were posting daily to Messenger Day just six months after its launch 10TechCrunch, 2017a; TechCrunch, 2017b . Due to its popularity, many
We’ve just launched out 2019 State of Social report: Check out the latest social media data, and learnings here. What’s in store for the social media industry in 2018? The way consumers use social media channels is constantly evolving and as marketers and entrepreneurs, we need to adapt to these changes. To better understand these changes, plus what’s ahead for 2018 and beyond we teamed up with Social Media Week to collect data from over 1,700 marketers and create the State of Social Media 20
At Buffer, we’re big fans of using data and research to guide our social media strategy . So when it came to finding the best Instagram strategy, I turned to social media studies . I read through more than 20 studies on Instagram marketing from companies like Facebook, Simply Measured, and News Whip. Some analyzed the top Instagram accounts while
Quick note: This post was written in May 2017 and updated in March 2018. The tips and strategies listed below continue to work for us despite the recent changes to the Facebook algorithm . Enjoy! In October of 2016 we dramatically changed our Facebook posting strategy. A gradual, but noticeable shift in the Facebook and Instagram algorithm, plus an influx of
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
We are very grateful for all the research that has been done on social media. Social media studies have given us great ideas to improve our social media marketing, helped us understand the psychology behind social media behaviors, and made us better marketers. To help you better understand the ever-changing social media landscape, we jumped into the latest social media research papers, hoping to discover some under-the-radar insights to help supercharge your social media marketing strategy as
Imagine being able to predict the next big thing on social media, knowing what social media will look like in 2017 and beyond and how will brands use social platforms to connect with their audience. As someone who works with social media every day, this information would be invaluable. At Buffer, we’re always eager to dig up new research into social media marketing — things like how marketers are using social media and what they’re excited about heading into 2017. To better understand how soc
How active is your brand on Pinterest? With 150 million monthly active users spending an average of 98 minutes per month using the platform, Pinterest can be an underused network for some, while a primary source of website traffic for others. Earlier in 2016, we did a study on brand marketing (studying over 16 million social media posts from 100,000 brands) and learned that Pinterest, in particular, holds a lot of potential for brands. This inspired us to dive even deeper into what’s happening
What would happen if you were to “like” everything you saw on social media? The developer Rameet Chawla found out when he built a script that liked every photo that passed through his Instagram feed. * He grew his followers by about 30 a day * He got invited to more parties * He got stopped on the street by people who recognized him from Instagram * He got message after message from friends encouraging him to post more. He said it was “almost like they were frustrated, like they were longi
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.” 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 learned with marketers everywhere. Now
At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels. To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media. We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of o
You’ve crafted the perfect blog post: Well-researched, SEO optimized, contains the ideal keyword ratio with trustworthy outbound and internal links, and it even has a nifty infographic that you spent hours to create. All you have to do is queue it up in Buffer and watch it take off, right? I’ve been there, and I wish it were true! Social media managers and marketers know that sometimes even the most epic material requires love and hard work when it comes to promoting content across social med
Updated 5/4/2016: Added some new insights and learnings into the blog post here on the best times to tweet. We’re so grateful for the chance to learn from the community on this! Imagine removing all guesswork when you schedule your tweets, knowing the best times to experiment with tweeting for maximum clicks and maximum engagement. As someone who is working on social media marketing strategy or shares frequently to social media, this info would be fantastic to have! We’re always eager to dig u
Whenever I hop onto Facebook to do something specific—find a link I saved for later or see what’s happening on Buffer’s Facebook page, perhaps—something strange happens. Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my goal, I get sucked in. Suddenly I’m checking my own notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting why I came to Facebook in the first place. This isn’t entirely by accident. There is science and psychology that explains why so many o
The truth is, there’s so much to do on social media that, as a social media manager, I have to choose my battles wisely when it comes to steering my time and deciding which creative strategies to pursue. Luckily, there are an unlimited amount of resources out there to help social media marketers like us to decide which strategies will provide the biggest payoff when it comes to Facebook marketing. But, more often than not, those resources give a general overview of various social media strateg
Wow, how time flies! It’s been just over a year since we shared a behind-the-scenes look at Buffer’s social media strategy and stats The feedback from the community on that post was amazing, and we learned so much from the comments, many of which ended up shaping future Buffer articles like “How to Create a Social Media Report and Explain It to Your Boss or Client” and “What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook Ads. Since then, we’ve tried our best to learn about what’s working well for us on s
The Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2015 was in fact not a word. It was the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji. This one ? You’ll no doubt recognise it – here’s how it looks across different platforms: This feels like a significant acknowledgement that the way a large number of us communicate is shifting. It’s no longer just teenagers or younger people who are using emoji’s, hashtags and neologisms – they’ve reached the mainstream. In this post, we dig a bit deeper into how ou
Social networks are always making updates and tweaks to their platforms. And in a recent update, Twitter removed share counts from their Tweet buttons, affecting many bloggers and publishers. As some data has started to emerge on how the has change affected content sharing on Twitter, we wanted to dive below the surface of this update and see how this change could affect marketers. Let’s get started. Meet Twitter’s new share buttons Like other recent Twitter changes, this one appears mostl
It’s easy to feel like you can grow a loyal audience in no time using the latest growth hacks or Twitter and Facebook tricks. But the truth is, it’s not that simple. Growing an audience is hard. You have to have talent. You have to put in a lot of work. And there’s no 1–2–3 solution. In this post, I’m happy to share some of our experiences from building an audience at Buffer alongside six key ingredients to successfully building an audience. Let’s get started! Why it’s difficult to build