Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 259 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 10
What does Skrillex have to do with blogging? It took us awhile to put the pieces together ourselves. We’ve been thinking a lot about the optimal way to produce content for the Buffer blog. We’ve pivoted the blog multiple times before—the latest came just in the past two months when we shifted from lifehacking and productivity to a purer focus on social media. The blog is both a huge driver of conversions for us and an ongoing experiment. What kind of content works best on the blog? And, more j
Is SlideShare part of your content strategy? Truth be told, we have yet to fully integrate it into our content creation process here at Buffer. We’ve felt lots of great nudges, though. We’ve heard tell of the amazing opportunity on SlideShare, how it’s a primed network of highly engaged influencers just itching to find and share your stuff. What might ultimately sell us, though, is the response we got from a single slide deck, created in a hurry, that garnered over 5,000 views in one weekend.
Live smarter, not harder. This principle is one of the 10 Buffer values that form the backbone of our company culture. We love experimenting with new ways to live out this value, and we’ve found productivity tips to be instrumental in this equation. What are some of our best productivity discoveries so far? We’ve written about a few before on the Buffer blog. • Ultradian rhythm and the 90-minute work cycle • How we’ve turned a 2-day writing process into a 4-hour process • The valu
Variety is the spice of life … and digital marketing? Variety can certainly make a digital marketer’s life a little easier. When you’ve worked hard to create a perfect piece of content, you can help that content go the extra mile (and then some) by repurposing and recreating the content in a huge number of ways. Is it easy? Well, I wanted to find out. I took a favorite piece of content from our Buffer blog, “How Often Should You Be Posting to Social Media?” and I hacked together 21 variations
Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It’s a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re blogging about perfect blogging. So I hope you’ll still trust the advice here even if you don’t find this post itself to be flawless. I’m sure we’d all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection—however it is that you measure perfection—so I researched
We love setting goals for improvement here at the Buffer blog, and one of our most recent challenges has been this: Every post gets an original image. This might not sound like such a tall task until you consider that Courtney and I are journalism majors whose skills lie in painting pictures with words and not so much in painting pictures with Photoshop. We try our best, in the name of visual content. You’ve perhaps heard of visual content? The term seems to be everywhere these day
Can one ever have enough Twitter tips? I know I can never get enough of them. Twitter is a constantly evolving, constantly challenging place to experiment, enjoy, and discover, and we all have a unique approach to the way we get things done with our tweets and followers. I’ve shared some of my favorite tips before—both for beginners and for intermediates—and we thought it might be fun to tap you all to share your expertise! Below you’ll find some tips from the Buffer community, as well as a f
Do you know what you’re posting, sharing, and blogging this Thursday? How about two Thursdays from now? Thursday of next month? Thursday of next year? We don’t have things figured out quite to that extreme here at Buffer, but we do have some idea of what’s ahead. (Those of you who are yearly planners, our hat’s off to you!) Planning content far into the future is a common element of many marketing strategies, and the erstwhile content calendar—in its many shapes and forms—fits this role perfec
I manage the family budget with speed and efficiency. My spreadsheets are slick, my workflow is fast, and I’ve learned enough tricks along the way to shave hours off my process. I’ve also never bothered to teach anyone else how I do what I do. Don’t worry, this post isn’t about money management. (Phew!) Rather, I find that it can be hugely helpful to share the tools, tips, and tricks that make the things we do on a regular basis as efficient as possible. Using Buffer for social media managemen
Being a columnist means something a bit different to me than it did growing up. When I started down my writing path, I adored magazines and newspapers and the superheroes who wrote weekly or monthly columns in the op-eds or the back pages. Now, I adore those who write at my favorite blogs and websites. The back page of Sports Illustrated has become, for me, the featured spot on Huffington Post. And the most amazing news of all is that being a columnist online is a dream that anyone—you, me, yo
Heads up! This is an older post and we’ve since retired the Buffer bootcamp. Feel free to see the latest information here, including all the reasons why we made this change! We’re Retiring The ‘Buffer Bootcamp’ Period For New Teammates – Here’s Why Some call it a trial. Some call it a probationary period. We call it the Buffer Bootcamp. Our intro period for new hires is something we often reference in our monthly updates and hiring reports, but we’ve yet to really take you inside how this pro
Among the many superpowers I wish I had, one that would be quite useful is the ability to understand social media metrics. I know enough to get by, and I love learning the new techniques to get more from these numbers—and to make sure I’m seeking the right numbers in the first place. In an effort to understand the little bits I can, I’ve done some research into all the many different social media stats you might track and which ones are worthwhile. Wouldn’t you know it, social media stats aren’
What are we really talking about when we’re talking about conversions? Persuasion, right? Influence. When we talk about conversions, we are—most of the time—discussing ways we can be more persuasive, more influential. We’re interested in meeting the needs of customers, fans, and followers and doing so in a way that truly speaks to them. So how can you persuade—i.e., convert—better? Perhaps not surprisingly, the hacks for conversion and persuasion begin with psychology. Understanding why some
Few social media practices escape the arm of experiments here at Buffer. We love testing, iterating, and testing again to find ways to boost our metrics and explore new ways to interact better with our audience. Now Google+’s turn has finally come. We have made pushes on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to grow our numbers, and most recently we’ve been trying out some new tactics with Google+. And while doing so, we noticed that many others are talking about and testing out Google+ right alongs
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning schedules customized just for you * Track and measure repins, likes, and comments Anyone can try out this fun new feature! Authorize your Pinterest account now and try scheduling to Pinterest for 7 days free: What should I be d
The line between a beginner Twitter user and a seasoned pro is a fine one indeed. The distinction changes daily—sometimes hourly—for me. One minute I feel like I’ve got this Twitter thing figured out and the next I find myself overwhelmed by how little I really know. When I dove headfirst (or feetfirst? either way my eyes were closed) into Twitter, I tried just about everything to find the best strategies for a beginning tweeter. Now I’m ready for the next step. Seeing how much the Twitter e
Banana Republic and Susan’s Neighborhood Shirt Shop could be using the same social networks—Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.—but their marketing plans and their marketing tools are likely quite different. Enterprise solutions are great for the big guys, but the rest of us are in the market for something more our size. Small businesses are eager to find valuable tools that take a lot of the time and trouble out of social media marketing and that do so without costing an arm and a leg. I think we
Change is coming to your Twitter profile. Big, beautiful change. Twitter is currently rolling out a profile redesign to all users, a redesign that puts an even greater emphasis on the great Twitter content that you share and one that provides some bonus opportunities to make a branding splash. Visual content will get a big boost. Top tweets will get a bump. And we’ll all be scrambling to find out what works best on this extreme makeover of our Twitter homes. While you wait your turn to find yo
A good tweet peaks at 18 minutes. An evergreen blog post lasts for years. It’s crazy to see the disparity between two pieces of content that we all create on a regular basis. It’s a little reassuring, too, that some things we make online have a chance to endure. Having this long-lasting content on your blog and in your archives is a boon to traffic, social sharing, and more. Chances are good your site already has some evergreen articles, whether you intended to make them evergreen or not. Thes
Nowadays, when I endeavor to check my Facebook statistics, I do so with the window open, birds singing, a pint of ice cream at my desk, and party jams playing on my jambox. I must balance the bad news with some good. Checking Facebook statistics has been bad news for a lot of us lately as we wrestle with declining numbers and shrinking reach. As the Facebook algorithm continues to change and adapt, we continue looking for answers. Why can’t we reach more fans with our updates? What kind of con
Among the many ways to stand out on social media—killer content, amazing visuals, specific formatting, and more—one that often gets overlooked is voice. We don’t want brands talking at us as if we are dollar signs. We want authentic communication. Finding a voice for your social media marketing can be difficult because the concept is somewhat unlike other optimization strategies online. Voice is not a statistic you can track or a design element you can tweak. Voice goes deeper than that.
Do you ever wonder how often you’re being A/B tested? The practice is so commonplace among websites and marketers these days that at any given point at any given website you could be part of a grand experiment in optimization. I often hope this is the case. I love the science and analysis behind improvements—both on the web and in the real world—so I find myself clicking a blue button and hoping my participation is making a website better. I love participating in A/B tests, and I love performi
Social media sharing doesn’t just happen at a desk. It happens in the car, on the train, during a holiday – anywhere and everywhere. At Buffer, our goal is to provide you with the easiest possible way to share to your social accounts – even on-the-go. That’s why today we’re ecstatic to show you a project that’s been five months in the making here at Buffer: the completely redesigned Buffer app for iOS 7. Complete details on all the app’s upgrades are below – or if you just can’t wait, download
March was an incredible month for the Buffer blog, not only in terms of traffic but also in terms of change—so much so that calling this update the Buffer Blog Report doesn’t seem to do the month justice. At the very least, we’d have to call it the Blogs Report (plural on blog; more on that below). Big changes were afoot in March: blog strategies, audits, goodbyes, and so much more. It’s exciting to share this all with you and see what you think. So without further ado … Quick summary of the