Tips / How To - Page 4
A collection of posts on Tips / How To
As marketers, writers and crafters, we spend hours on bringing our content ideas to life and after all that effort, want our content to be seen. Writing powerful social media copy to grab people’s eyes and win their hearts is a challenge, though. And often, when our content isn’t breaking through the noise we can fix it with a few slight edits and tweaks. Editing content and copy is a key part of the creative process but is often overlooked. In this post, I’d love to share 11 editing tips and
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
Social media management can be extremely time-consuming. But there are also so many ways to boost your social media marketing and improve your social media profiles in just a few minutes. In this post, I’d love to share 15 ways you can improve you social media marketing in under an hour. Some of these tips are super-quick optimizations and others focus on experimentation and trying new things. (I’d love to hear which ones you’re interested in trying out!) Let’s get started! 1. Optimize your
A great social media marketer today and an awesome advertiser in the 1960s have much in common. David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, was famous for spending an inordinate amount of time on headlines. Why? Because that’s the line that people read the most, so it mattered a lot. Ogilvy was a master at stuff like this — prioritizing what was really important. If he lived through the age of social media, I’m fairly certain Ogilvy would say something like: On the average, many more people eng
When 50 fashion influencers on Instagram posted a picture of themselves in the same Lord & Taylor dress, it sent out signals that this dress was a must have fashion piece. The following weekend the dress was completely sold out. This Lord & Taylor campaign is a perfect example of the power of influencer marketing. 65% of brands now run influencer campaigns and according to an infographic by The Shelf, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people—even if they don’t know them person
Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That’s nearly one-third of our planet’s total population of 7.125 billion! As social media marketing professionals, we’re lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media. Everywhere we look it appears that brands and companies have it all figured out on social media. Wit
Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to publishers of all sizes. In this post, we’ll guide you through the ins and outs of Facebook’s publishing platform and how to get started. The announcement that Instant Articles were being opened up to all publishers came in February 2016, and they were officially opened for all on April 12, at Facebook’s F8 conference. A Facebook-native publishing platform has been rumored since the social network changed its News Feed algorithm to favor “quality conte
Just like you, I read all of those blog posts about how to get more Twitter followers. And while these articles all contain great, actionable advice, I definitely acquired a lot of my Twitter followers by accident. Seriously. I’d love to share with you how I accidentally started acquiring Twitter followers, and how you can adapt these methods to start getting followers on purpose. Looking for more Twitter followers? Buffer’s social media management can help! Schedule your social media posts
Pinterest has released a new set of advertising tools for small and medium sized businesses. These tools give businesses new ways to promote their content and advertise on Pinterest. Around three-fourths of the content on Pinterest comes from businesses already and opening up their ads product to all SMBs feels like a great way to enable businesses to get the right content in front of the right people. Pinterest users regularly save their favorite Pins (including adverts!) to their own boards,
Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to publishers —of any size, anywhere in the world. This post guides you through how to connect your WordPress blog and Facebook Instant Articles. To make publishing to Facebook easier for the 25% of the web that uses WordPress, Facebook has teamed up with Automattic, parent company of WordPress, to build a free plugin for Instant Articles. This plugin enables anyone with a WordPress blog to seamlessly share their content as Facebook Instant Articles. If
Social media has evolved to become inherently visual, with text, video, and photos dominating on almost every platform. Sharing a great looking photo on Instagram is quick and easy, as is sharing a video to Facebook, but until now, creating and sharing audio content has been very difficult. Anchor is looking to change that. Anchor is a free iOS app that makes it easy to broadcast short audio clips in seconds. Listeners can talk back, sparking instant group conversations. In this post, I’d lo
Over 1.5 billion people regularly use Facebook. And as the social network has grown, the rate at which Facebook shares news, and releases new features and products has accelerated. It can be a little hard to keep up sometimes. With this in mind, I’d love to share 11 Facebook tips, tricks, and facts with you. This post will give you plenty of great stuff to help you get the most out of and better understand Facebook. From why you get shown certain ads and which types of posts get the most eng
Instagram has now released one of its most requested features. The ever-popular photo sharing app announced that following the release of version 7.15 for iOS and Android users will have the ability to switch between multiple accounts. This news is sure to make power users and social media managers jump with joy as managing multiple accounts for brands (or your pets) has been a time-consuming task up until now. Here’s a super-quick guide on how to add and manage multiple accounts on Instagram
“Could you pop into a quick morning standup, Ash?” “I’ll be there in a minute,” I’d reply. “I’m just finishing up a Facebook post.” As a community manager, most of my mornings would start along these lines. One of the toughest, and most time-consuming, tasks in community and social media management is finding a stream of high-quality, engaging content to share with your audience every day. A social media calendar is an excellent way to keep on top of this. But staring at a blank calendar can
If you’ve been on social media for any length of time, you may be well aware that images can help boost your online engagement. But while it’s true that a picture can add some pizazz to your posts, it’s not always easy to determine the best type of image to publish. They can also take a long time to create, especially when you’re not sure what you’re trying to communicate. Thankfully, deciding which format best suits your posts can be a straightforward process. In this post, I’ll outline a few
The Internet is becoming increasingly cluttered. In 2005, we were reportedly exposed to over 3,500 brand messages per day. Nowadays, that figure is closer to 10,000 (if not already higher). 5.3 trillion display ads are shown online each year, 400 million Tweets sent daily, and 4.75 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every day. This relentless stream of content makes it harder than ever for your message to cut through the noise and get attention. And while there’s no secret formula
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. – Anne Lamott This quote from Anne Lamott resonates with me quite a bit. I seldom know what I’m doing until I’ve done it. I also seldom know what other writers are doing either. I recognize what I enjoy reading … aaaaand I’ve little idea why I enjoy it. That’s what makes the topic of linguistics and language so fascinating to me because it helps explain all the whys behind the writing I love, the tweets I read, the upda
Hi there! Buffer has evolved a lot since we wrote this blog post back in 2015. Some of the content and screenshots are now out-of-date. Check out the new-and-improved Buffer at buffer.com. We do not often write articles focused on Buffer here on the social blog, but we wanted to try something different this time around and hope you will find it useful! If you are already using Buffer to share on Social Media (THANK YOU!!) and are looking for some tiny tweaks that could make the experience bett
Nowadays, in order to grow an audience on social media, it’s not as simple as just posting when you feel like it. Audiences have become more sophisticated over time and as a result it is important to have some sort of social media strategy. In order to start implementing that strategy, a schedule is a must for a lot of businesses. A sharing schedule can help you double your traffic and provide your audience with consistent and valuable information that will make them more likely to follow and
What sets winning businesses apart from the competition? Automation is one edge. The Lenskold Group found that 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation. What is an underrated way to drive more conversions? Again, automation. Companies that use marketing automation also see 53% higher conversion rates than non-users, according to the Aberdeen Group. All of which raises the question: What kind of marketing automation are these winning businesses doing? An
On social media—whether you’re a business, a brand, or an individual—you’ll likely come across plenty of different conversations — each presenting a unique challenge. For instance: How do you appease an angry commenter? How do you handle a technical question? What to do with a troll? It can feel overwhelming. If you take a step back and examine the emotions and psychology in play during each conversation, things can become a lot clearer and you can start to formulate your replies in a more
Have you ever wondered what percentage of people actually see your Tweets or Facebook posts? The data shows it can be as low as 2%. This is in line with our findings at Buffer — on average our 10 most recent Facebook posts have reached around 2.4% of our fans with our highest reaching post being seen by 5.25%. When you work hard to produce and share great content, it’d be great if people could see it! I’m excited to share some things we’ve found that can help your content break through and re
I try to read as much as I can, and every morning I put aside 30 minutes to check out the latest posts from my favorite blogs and writers. In 30 minutes, you can only take in so much. Some posts I read thoroughly, others I open and close again within a matter of seconds. My favorite ones, I load into Buffer and share. Often, my decision to read a post and then subsequently share it relies a lot on the formatting: Is it easy to read? Can I scan through? In this post, I’m excited to share with
If you’re curious for ways to grow your social media numbers, to have more success, to get more followers and more clicks, the absolute best piece of advice we’ve found is to keep trying new things. Always be testing. Need inspiration? I’ve drummed up 29 new, small, and simple experiments and growth hacks you can try this month to see what works for you. They’re all low-cost, big-potential. I’d love to hear which ones you’re interested in trying! (And which ones work for you.) My must-have