Resources - Page 25
A collection of posts on Resources
Do you have a favorite author or blog whose content is always so amazingly useful that it earns an automatic read every single time something new comes out? Rand Fishkin is one of those authors for me. And Moz is one of those blogs. Rand’s slide deck on content marketing is one of our favorite content resources here at Buffer. His article about individual contributors has been hugely impactful for the way I view my role at Buffer. Moz’s blog posts on measuring social media success and sorting
In February of 1999, Mari Smith needed a sign from the universe. It showed up in the form of … cake. The Scottish-Canadian had arrived in San Diego on a borrowed round-trip plane ticket (“That’s how broke I was!”) with 50 British pounds in her pocket and a feeling that she was supposed to start her nascent seminar business in the U.S. instead of Scotland, her former home. But she was running out of time. She could only come into the country for 30 days without all her immigration paperwork don
When you sign up for a new app, what are the first steps you take? Customizing your settings? Installing add-ons and extensions? Setting up your profile pic? (<– this is a personal favorite) The steps you’re asked to take—click here, customize this, try that—are referred to as onboarding, the process of helping a new person get accustomed to a new place. You’re likely to experience onboarding in many different cases. There’s onboarding in the new apps you download and services you use. Ther
When it comes to social media, lately I’ve been surprising myself by how often I’m turning to LinkedIn. With the addition of LinkedIn Publishing, there seems to be more awesome content on the business social network than ever before. And I don’t think I’m alone. LinkedIn has more than 347 million users across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. We’ve written before about some of the best practices to make the most of your LinkedIn marketing, but I’ve recently discovered even mor
💡Looking for an easy way to save all your best ideas? Check out Ideas from Buffer → Some of my favorite tools posts end up being the ones where people share the specific tools they use to get jobs done. There’s power in knowing the tools that others find useful and important enough to make part of their regular workflow. For content marketing, I seem to take a particularly keen interest because I’m always on the hunt for new and amazing products to try, and I also appreciate a thoughtful rec
We’ve been having a lot of fun hearing some of the amazing feedback on how many of you are using Buffer. One of the key areas that we heard about where we felt we could improve was our social media analytics area. We then reflected and brainstormed with many customers about how we could make analytics better. Today, I’m really excited to unveil one of a series of planned analytics improvements for paying Awesome [http://bufferapp.com/awesome?utm_source=socialblog&utm_medium=launchpost&utm_
It’s 5:02 a.m. on Friday as I am writing this. The dog is on the floor licking…something (he likes to lick a lot!) and my wife is asleep beside me in bed. The last 10 minutes have gone something like this: • What’s happening on Twitter? Boring. • How about Facebook? Someone else got engaged. Yay for them. • Any new emails? Delete. Delete. Inbox Zero! • Hmm… Then I opened up the Buffer iPhone app (forgot I even had that installed). When you are looking for mindless wastes of time, you get
Starting a new social media presence from scratch can feel like a big challenge. As I launch my own side project right now, I’m poring over my Buffer analytics as I start at the very beginning to build a following everywhere. Things look very different in these early days as compared to what it must feel like for big, established names who have thousands or millions of fans. Here on the Buffer blog, we’ve written about some great strategies to get your first 1,000 followers that I’ve been foll
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 soc
At any given moment, any one of Buffer’s staff of nearly 30 could be on our social media accounts chatting with customers, answering questions or scheduling posts for the days or weeks ahead. Thanks to Buffer’s social media management tools and the many other awesome tools that help us out, social media is a team effort here. Maybe it’s the same where you are? We’ve talked about how one person can handle multiple social media accounts on the blog, and now it’s time for the other side of the co
Whether you’re starting a social media marketing plan from scratch or redefining an existing social media strategy, we’ve found that taking a moment to reflect on some key questions can be a really valuable exercise. These Big Important questions—capital “B,” capital “I”—can help point you down the best path with your social media efforts and ensure that the time you spend is aimed at the right places and toward your top goals. I’ve listed here 25 of the questions that I’ve found most helpful
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
This post originally published on February 13, 2012. We’ve updated it here with the latest, newest information and screenshots. How do you get someone to click on your links on Twitter? This seems like one of the most pressing questions I see coming up day in day out. And rightly so. Figuring out how to attract more people that like what you are posting is one of the most important aspects of being successful on Twitter. While a higher click-through rate is certainly not the only thing to be
Do you remember seeing your first emoticon? The first documented use of “:-)” dates back to 1982, when Scott Fahlman proposed that it be used as a “joke marker” on a message board for Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists. Here’s his Internet-changing message: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: “:-)” Read it sideways.” Today, emoticons need a bit less explanation. As social media has grown (and character counts have shrunk), these pictorial representa
If you’ve ever suffered from writer’s block, procrastinated when you supposed to be writing, or criticized your writing too harshly, this post is for you! Blogger and app developer John Saddington of @DeskPM recently joined us for Bufferchat to discuss writing tools, habits books and more. Catch the full Bufferchat recap on Storify here! What writing tools are essential to your routine? From John: * The first, I use a # of web tools. MediaTemple for hosting a lot of my personal blogs. And
Many of the social media tips we share—the ways to create a marketing plan from scratch, how to get more followers, how to get more clicks—often focus on the small business side of social media marketing. Now imagine achieving social media success when the brand you’re trying to promote is you. Personal branding on social media is a topic we’d love to dive into a bit deeper, starting with this overview of tips and strategies. I’m grateful to have found a number of useful tips on how building a
This post originally published on May 15, 2013. We’ve updated it here with the latest, newest information, screenshots, and videos. The retweet function has been a favorite way of ours to give appreciation and acknowledgment to the tweets we love. And we’ve often wondered: What happens when we love a lot of tweets? Or when we find an awesome tweet at an odd hour? Being able to schedule your retweets gives you an awesome opportunity to show your support and engagement for other people’s tweets—
What are your digital marketing goals for the months ahead? If you’re looking to increase your content’s social shares (as so many of us are), we’ve got some amazing new research to share on how to create an ideal outreach strategy for your industry. BuzzStream and Fractl have collaborated to give you a jumpstart on optimizing your outreach for social traction. We analyzed 220 high- and low-engagement websites from 11 major verticals that produce content. The result? A roadmap for planning fo
One of our favorite ways to improve our results on social media is to try new things. We dream up a new idea or research a possible change in strategy, we test it out, and we see what happens. The testing phase is one of the most important stages for us—not only the “what to test” but also the “how to test.” We’re grateful to have learned some helpful lessons about testing best practices as well as a host of ideas of what to test in our social media marketing. I’m happy to share with you what
You want to be the world’s best online writer, a David Ogilvy of the blogs, a Shakespeare of the social media. Or maybe you just want to be good enough to get by on freelance writing. Where do you get your education? How do you improve? I’ve faced these same questions, and I still face these questions as I aim to keep improving as an online writer. I majored in journalism in college. There wasn’t a content marketing course back in the day. Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught. And I
“So, when is this content marketing thing supposed to kick in, exactly?” As a marketer, you’ve likely heard about how great blogging and content marketing is for driving leads and results. So you dive right in: you work hard, brainstorming and writing article after article, hoping that it has some effect, that it’ll move some needle somewhere. Content marketing can be hard. It takes time and you might make a lot of mistakes along the way. The good news: You get to learn from those mistakes an
The end of each year is always one of my favorite times. I love the reflection that comes along with the close of a time period, and the hope that comes with looking ahead. I also really enjoy all the best-of lists that tend to accompany the end of a year. Browsing through them, I realize how many things I’ve missed throughout the course of the year. It’s great to have a chance to catch up! If you’re afraid that any of Buffer’s most useful social media marketing blog posts might have slipped b
One of the best ways I’ve found to learn new things on social media is to try new things. We experiment, we make mistakes. We succeed, and we fail. And we get a better feeling for how things might work and the best strategies, ideas, and experiments to try next. I’ve had the privilege of trying out a number of these new strategies and experiments this year, learning tons about the best way to share on social media. I’d love to share with you what I’ve learned! Keep reading for my list of the
Social media expert Rebekah Radice joined us for Bufferchat to look back at social media trends in 2014 and look ahead for the best tips for your 2015 strategy. Check out the full Storify recap here! Why is a social media strategy important? From Rebekah: * A social media strategy allows you to be intentional and strategic, giving you focus and purpose. * Strategy means you’re productive, not busy. You implement a daily plan that propels your business forward. * Strategy focuses on telli