Kevan Lee
Former VP of Marketing @ Buffer
A collection of 251 posts by Kevan Lee - Page 6
Sharing transparently about all aspects of what we do at Buffer—pricing, salaries, fund-raising, earnings, hiring, and more—has been an amazing opportunity to connect with and learn from others. We get such great ideas and encouragement from sharing openly. We’ve shared before about our content marketing goals, numbers, and adventures, and I’d love to continue these stories in regular blog posts here! I’ll be sharing how we’re doing, what we’re up to, what we have planned for the future, and a
How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette? For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting, and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media, I had just the most basic rules and intuitions. Even now, I feel like I learn a new quirk or quibble on a near-daily basis. It’s hard to know which rules exist, which ones are real, and which ones are okay to break or follow. I’d love to help shed some light here so that you can
It seems like a great portion of the social media research we do at Buffer often comes back to a few big questions for social media sharing. How do I get more followers ? What should I share? When should I share it? And how often s
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
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
💡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
The bookshelf in my office holds a single shelf of paperback books that are very special to me. Amidst the nearby clutter of boxes and miscellany (I find the bookshelf is seldom used for books anymore) sits a row of my favorite writing books and reference guides, stacked chronologically from the time I bought them, each one brought down once a year or so for a fun refresher. Some folks read the same novel multiple times for fun. I tend to read the same writing books [https://blog.bufferapp.com
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
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
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
We find that self-improvement and reading go hand-in-hand. Many of the books we seem to grab at Buffer tend to be related to our current tasks, our new ideas, our passions and pursuits, or even just a nice sampling of good writing and entertaining topics to keep us tuned in and engaged. We end up reading a deep and wide assortment of inspiring stuff. As a team, we read 656 books in 2014. I’m happy to share the 19 most popular ones from our reading list. Note: One of the neat perks we have o
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
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
When I can find the time to do so, I love to plan ahead. I’ll write out tomorrow’s to-do list. I’ll add ideas to our content calendar. And I’ll schedule the next day’s social media updates—or even the next week’s, if I’m feeling ambitious. Maybe some day I’ll get to the point of scheduling a month or even a year ahead! Scheduling part of your social media content in advance is well worth it. And I’ll be happy to share with you some strategies, tips, and tools that can help you get organized a
There are days when I spend loads of enjoyable time writing new blogposts, creating images to share, and checking analytics, and then when I’m just nearly ready to close the laptop and sign off, I remember: I need to schedule social media posts for the next day. Or, I need to follow-up with mentions. Or, I need to curate some content. Or, I need to do one of the myriad tasks of a social media manager, and wouldn’t you know it I’m just about out of time. Saving time on social media is a big goa
You’ve likely heard the advice to add visual content to your blogposts whenever possible. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media. So I added images to blogposts. And I learned there’s quite a bit more to it than that. Adding images to blogposts is a great start. You’re likely to see increases in social sharing and time on page. Images just make everything more readable and shareable. Adding images also brings with it another checklist of things to look
When it comes to hearing great social media advice, I seem to have a bit of a preference: I quite enjoy finding the advice that fits my questions specifically. And wouldn’t you know, my questions are likely to be different than your questions and yours different than the next person’s. Social media is a brilliant puzzle to solve, and we often seem to be working on different parts of the picture. So what are social media’s biggest questions? To find out, we asked. We solicited feedback and qu
When you’re just starting off on social media—whether as an individual or a brand or a company or otherwise—the potential of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all the various other social media channels can be hugely exciting. And for the social media pros, the questions exist, too. What to do first? Where to click? What to upload? What to share? These are questions I’ve had each time I’ve started on social media with a new venture. Where to begin? And what resources will I need to take
To help with the inevitable noise surrounding a new post on social media, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ allow you to pin a post to the top of your page or profile, giving new life to old content and providing a quick win to get your most important updates even more love. Pinning seems like a very useful feature to have—and a feature ripe for experimentation. What are the best practices for pinning a post to the top of a Facebook page or a tweet to the top of a Twitter profile? How much extra e
Having all the best blogging tools and resources, having a plan to share your amazing content on social media, having everything in place to put your marketing strategy into action still requires one thing: You must create the content to be shared, loved, and engaged with. The blank page must be conquered. Coming up with an endless supply of blogging and writing ideas would be great, right? Fortunately there is a solid list of useful strategies, techniques, and questions that can always keep a
When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create. So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses. Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the words you use to
How do your interactions differ between the online world and the offline? Away from the computer, we may have a better feeling on how to interact with one another and build relationships. Online? It’s a bit of a different world. As a distributed team at Buffer—meaning we all work from wherever we’re happiest—our interactions together and our relationships with one another take place online. The same goes for many of the connections we make on social media. So it seems worthwhile to have a bet
How does your audience decide what it wants to click, share, favorite, and purchase? Understanding a bit of behavioral psychology can go a long ways toward a better understanding of your audience and why they do the things they do on social media and on your website. There’s tons here for marketers to discover, and the psychology of human interaction can lead to some quick wins in the way you compose your social media updates and communicate online. I’ve collected 15 of my favorite psychologic