Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 259 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 11
From the moment you join the Buffer team, you are encouraged to read. In fact, the welcome email implores you to read early and often, and you receive a Kindle Paperwhite and free Kindle books just to make sure there are no obstacles to reading as much as you want. (Sound like something that might interest you? We’re hiring!) And once you are part of the team, you continue to see the deep impact that reading has on the goals and improvements of all of us. When we share our weekly improveme
Buffer runs seven days at a time. Many of our improvements, metrics, experiments, and tasks fit into one-week slices, which helps us to move quickly on new ideas and to revisit our results right away. Instead of it being early April around here, it’s just Week 14. This weekly perspective has some big advantages across all our departments, including marketing. Reviewing and improving our marketing metrics week over week, for the blog and our social media accounts, lets us quickly experiment, tes
We analyzed over 10 million posts sent via Buffer, looking for a common theme among the most shared content. Our findings surprised us as much as they might surprise you. The clear winner: pandas. Panda content—photos, GIFs, and stories—made up nearly 18 percent of the top 500 posts sent through Buffer. These posts received an average of three times more clicks and 10 times more retweets than content without pandas, and the gap between panda content and the next-highest viral ingredient, monkey
UPDATE: See a newer, updated version of this post with a brand-new infographic. Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much? I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media, but I want to do it in the right way. Curious, I dug around and found some answers for the ideal lengths of tweets and titles and everyt
The word “audit” deserves more love than it gets. When I hear the word, my mind goes straight to tax season and the manila envelope crammed with receipts and forms that I keep stashed away in the closet. Audits seem to equal anxiety, which is too bad – because not all audits are created equal. A tune-up at the garage is essentially an audit for your car, a check-up at the doctor is an audit of your health. You can learn a lot from regular reviews like these. The same holds true for an au
We at the Buffer blog can vouch for LinkedIn’s growth as our blog has experienced a swell in LinkedIn referral traffic over the past year, up 4,000 percent from last year at this time. Part of that has to do with our emphasis on updates and sharing at LinkedIn, another part has to do with the popularity of LinkedIn contributing a larger audience and more eyes to our content. Together, these factors have made LinkedIn a great source of visitors for our blog, and I’d imagine you might see a simila
There is no one way to create viral content. So many different variables go into a viral post—timing, emotion, engagement, and so many others that you cannot control. There is no viral blueprint. The greatest chance we have to understand viral content is to study the posts and places that do it best, figure out what worked for them, and try it for ourselves. Thanks to some incredible work by the team at Ripenn, we have access to headline analysis from four of the top viral sites on the w
hat does your ideal day look like? Would you believe there’s a scientifically correct answer to the question? Research into the human body—its hormone allotment, its rhythms, and its tendencies—has found that there are certain times of day when the body is just better at performing certain activities. Eat breakfast no later than 8:00 a.m. Exercise between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Read Twitter from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. (your fellow tweeters are more upbeat in the morning). Turns out our optimal tim
Of the many email statistics that blow my mind, I think this one wows me the most: Email reaches three times more people than Twitter and Facebook combined. That’s a lot of people! (3.6 billion or so.) Clearly email marketing deserves your time and attention. And like any aspect of marketing, there can be a learning curve to discover the ins and outs and best practices. Hopefully these answers to ten of the most common and important email questions can make the learning curve a little less st
Seeing your name in the phone book used to be the ultimate, I remember it clearly. As a boy, I dreamed of the day when I would have the independence, stability, maturity, and home phone to be listed on page “L” alongside my fellow human adults. I’d crack open the new Yellow Pages, thumb through the Lees, and lo and behold, there I’d be. A celebrity. My Yellow Pages dream has vanished. Now it’s all about Google. I want my face on a Google search results page. The ticket to my desired Internet
The cutthroat inbox of your standard consumer roils with marketing messages, competitive subject lines, and scores of attention-seeking emails. With over 144 billion emails sent each and every day, email marketing remains one of the elite channels for business communication. So how does the signal separate itself from the noise? To be sure, finding the key to a stand-out message is critical to your bottom line—whether that bottom line is cold, hard cash or community engagement or anything in be
What governs the way you write? Consistency in style, tone, grammar, and punctuation is essential to an enjoyable blog experience. Successfully done, these elements go unnoticed by readers who are too busy consuming the easy, breezy content. That’s the way it should be. Style guides create uniform content and allow that content to shine. Invisibility is the hallmark of a well-used style guide. You may not even notice the hundreds of subtle decisions that make browsing a blog seamless, but know
How would you like to be able to recall the name of a client or associate you just met? How would you like to go to the bank and not fumble for your account number every stinking time? Everyday scenarios like these are classic examples of our need for memorization. The function of memory has so many more applications, too—public speaking, schoolwork, studying, research, the list goes on and on. Memorizing is a key function in so many areas. Imagine if we could be better at it. Would you belie
Understanding the psychology behind the way we tick might help us to tick even better. Many studies and much research has been invested into the how and why behind our everyday actions and interactions. The results are revealing. If you are looking for a way to supercharge your personal development, understanding the psychology behind our actions is an essential first step. Fortunately, knowing is half the battle. When you realize all the many ways in which our minds create perceptions, weigh
It is Thursday afternoon. Hump day. You are being humped. The one thing you wished to accomplish today remains unaccomplished, sitting there as a painful reminder of your failure, goading you to check Tumblr just one more time. You lack motivation, clearly. This is not a problem you would have with, say, video games. And there’s your answer! Turning repetitive tasks into games is the secret sauce to getting things done. You’re not alone in thinking so. Gamification, the collision of gaming cu
“Customers may forget what you said but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Anon Welcome to the first Happiness Report of 2013! Each month we share how we are managing support here at Buffer, as well as take a look at how happy people are when using our product. We walk through what worked well, what perhaps didn’t work so well, as well as mention new things we’re trying as we push to improve how we deliver support and happiness. A look at our numbers in January Digging straigh
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.” ~ Donald Porter, V.P. British Airways Well hello there! January has zipped by super fast but there’s just enough time left to share with you our third Happiness Report and dive into how we managed support during December and also how happy people are when using Buffer. We’ll walk through what worked well for the team here at Buffer, what perhaps didn’t work so well, as well as new things we’re tryin
“Customer service is not a department, it’s everyone’s job.” ~ Anonymous It’s hard to believe another month has skipped by and it’s already time for our second Happiness Report, where we examine how happy people are when using Buffer. The first one was already super insightful and we made a lot of changes with the learnings from it. Especially with your great comments and suggestions! Before the holidays kick into high gear, we want to take a look back over Buffer support through November – wh
What does it take to be productive? It’s a question I often ask myself and to be honest I don’t have a great answer for it yet. One key discovery I’ve made over the past year or so is that I need to have great habits in place. That’s why I’m working on a solid running routine and on a set wake-up time and sleep time. These things have been incredibly helpful for me and I know both Joel and Leo have discovered the same. One other realization I had is that, as I now spend so much of my day worki