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Tips / How ToMay 9, 2017
How to Write a Great Social Media Manager Job Description (and Hire a Top Social Media Manager)

Writing a great social media manager job description is not an easy task. The job description is one of the first few things potential applicants read and a well-written job description can increase the chances of you hiring the best social media manager for your company. We’re thrilled that you’re looking to hire a new social media manager and would love to help you as much as we can! Here’s everything you need to know about writing a great social media manager job description (and more).

Tips / How ToMay 2, 2017
The Psychology of Marketing: 18 Ways to Use Social Proof to Boost Your Results

Science plays a key role in marketing, especially the science of psychology. We have written about the 15 psychological principles in marketing and studied seven social media psychological research. This time, we’d love to dive deeper into one of the most powerful and prominent psychological phenomena… Social proof. The use of social proof can be found in many areas of both offline and online marketing. In this post, we’ll focus on the use of social proof on social media to boost your marketi

Tips / How ToApr 25, 2017
Understanding the Instagram Algorithm: 7 Key Factors and Why the Algorithm is Great for Marketers

The Instagram algorithm, just like the Facebook News Feed algorithm, is so mysterious yet ingenious and brilliant in showing the best content to the most people. If you are creating great content, more followers — and non-followers — are going to see it. But how does the Instagram algorithm work? In this post, we’ll break it all down for you. We’ll go through the factors that could influence the ranking of your content on your followers’ feed and explain why the Instagram algorithm is

Tips / How ToApr 25, 2017
Optimal Timing, Videos, and More: 10 Easy Ways to Boost Your Instagram Reach

Since Instagram started sorting posts on users’ feed with an algorithm , many marketers have noticed a decline in their organic reach and engagement. But that doesn’t have to be the case for you. In fact, it could be possible for you to reach more of your followers now than without the new Instagram algorithm. In this post, we’ll share 10 straightforward ways you can use to increase your organic reach on Instagram today. Buffer for Instagram now c

Tips / How ToMar 30, 2017
How to Customize Your Facebook News Feed to Maximize Your Productivity

Facebook is still the leading platform for marketers. From our State of Social Media 2016 report , we found that 93 percent of marketers are actively using Facebook for their business. As social media marketers, we spend a lot of time on Facebook, managing our Pages , engaging our fans , finding good content [https://buffer.com/l

Tips / How ToFeb 28, 2017
11 Storytelling Formulas to Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing

Legendary marketer, Seth Godin, describes marketing as “the art of telling a story that resonates with your audience and then spreads.” If you look at some of the biggest brands around, you might notice that they are often amazing storytellers. * Apple tells stories of people challenging the norms * Nike tells stories of people doing the impossible * Airbnb tells stories of travelers living in homes around the world and belonging any

Tips / How ToFeb 14, 2017
All You Need to Know About Instagram Takeovers: How to Host a Takeover in 6 Simple Steps

Even though Instagram takeovers seem trendy now, they first started to gain popularity back in 2012 with brands like General Electric, Burberry and Food Republic inviting Instagrammers to take over their feeds for a day. What started out as a fun way for brands and Instagrammers to collaborate, has now transitioned into one of the valuable aspects of any Instagram marketing strategy . If yo

Tips / How ToFeb 9, 2017
Everything You Need to Know About Snapchat Geofilters (And How to Build Your Own)

Did you know you can now create your own Snapchat Geofilters? It’s only been a few months since Snapchat debuted this feature , and there are already some amazing results flowing in for businesses and brands of all sizes (we’ll share a few quick case studies in this post). Right now, Snapchat Geofilters can offer an enormous competitive advantage because 1) not a lot of brands are using them and 2) Snapchat users love to share f

Tips / How ToFeb 8, 2017
9 Powerful Time-Saving Tips to Help Grow Your Brand on Instagram

With over 600 million users across the globe, Instagram is quickly becoming a focal point for businesses of all sizes who use social media. 600 million! That’s a huge number. And the impressive stats don’t stop there… Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform and around half of its user base (more than 300 million people) use it every day. Brands on Instagram are also seeing huge amounts of engagement on Instagram. According to Forrester Research,  per-follower interaction rate i

Tips / How ToJan 26, 2017
How to Use Buffer for Social Media Teams: The Complete Guide

Having a team of people helping with your social media strategy can be a crucial asset in achieving your social media goals. Not only can it help you tap into multiple points of view and perspectives to bring a fresh take to your social media content – having a team of people contributing content to your social accounts can help you save a ton of time with content curation. Oh, and having a second set of eyes for proofreading always help too ? So how do you go about working with a team to exec

Tips / How ToJan 24, 2017
How to Build an All-Star Social Media Team in 5 Steps

We often talk about the importance of social media managers and the amazing people who handle social media as a team of one. But often, for agencies, larger enterprises, and even some small businesses, social media is handled by teams of people covering a broad range of skills. So how do you go about building an awesome social media team? There are so many things to consider: What skills do you need in your team? How should you structure the team? How do you hire new team members? We’d love t

Tips / How ToJan 23, 2017
48 Hours with Snapchat Spectacles: Our Full Review and 5 Tips to Create Better Snaps

Spectacles are the first hardware product from the company formally known as Snapchat. The camera-equipped glasses were announced in September 2016, at the same time as Snapchat became Snap Inc. and rebranded itself as “a camera company.” From the moment they were announced, Snap had the marketing industry, and more importantly, their key 16-24-year-old demographic, clamoring to get their hands on Spectacles. But, in what turned out to be one of the most creative marketing campaigns of 2016, Sp

Tips / How ToJan 19, 2017
How We Set and Measure Ambitious Social Media Goals at Buffer [2017 Version]

Do you have big goals you’d like to achieve in 2017? We do, too. In fact, this is our vision for Q1: Establish Buffer as the premier social media tool for businesses and teams via a focus on branding, content, and community. That sounds pretty broad, right? And how can social media help us to achieve that vision? The answer is goal-setting. The great thing about social media is that you can achieve so many different types of incredible results. From acquiring new customers to using social

Tips / How ToJan 18, 2017
9 Social Media Goals You Can Set for Your Business (and How to Track Them)

The thing we love most at Buffer is to help you succeed at social media. And a key part of social media success is knowing which goals and targets to set for your team. Without goals, it’s hard to know exactly how well your social media strategy is performing and where you need to iterate to continue moving forwards. Today I’d love to share with you a bunch of super-actionable social media goals you can use to help your team achieve great things. In total, we’ll walk through 9 very different,

Tips / How ToJan 16, 2017
7 Popular Goal-Setting Strategies That Will Help You Achieve Great Things on Social Media

Setting social media goals is hard. “How cool would it be to drive 300 sign-ups a month from Facebook Ads?” This is how I tend to go about setting social media goals. I pull an aspirational number out of the air and go for it. Would it be cool to have a regular, predictable stream of new users coming to Buffer via Facebook Ads? Absolutely! Is this the right way to set goals? Coming up with social media goals for our marketing team here at Buffer has often been a bit haphazard for me. Imagin

Tips / How ToDec 9, 2016
How User Generated Content (UGC) Grew Our Instagram Account by 400% in One Year

Have you ever stumbled across a company’s Instagram account and wondered how they have so many followers or where they got all of those amazing images from? If you’re anything like me, that’s a reoccurring thought! For social media marketers managing Instagram and other social accounts this is something we all certainly strive for – Gorgeous images, a huge following, and incredible engagement from our audience. With that in mind, I began studying hundreds of Instagram accounts, researching wa

Tips / How ToNov 10, 2016
5 Surprising Reasons To Reconsider Google+ (That You Can Act On Today)

Editor’s note: Google announced on October 8, 2018, that they will be shutting down Google+ for consumers in 2019. Farewell, friend! Here are some ideas on where you could share your content instead. I’ve personally always been a huge fan of Google+, but it’s been several years since I’ve been consistently active: It simply became too difficult to keep up with posting. Has the same been true for you? I’ve always known that Google+ is good for SEO reasons, personal branding, and content

Tips / How ToNov 7, 2016
How to Use Hashtags: How Many, Best Ones, and Where to Use Them

This post originally published on April 8, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new info, screenshots, and a special episode of the Buffer podcast – The Science of Social Media. Have you ever found yourself explaining how to use hashtags to someone whose only connection with the word is as a telephone button? Internet language has evolved considerably over the past few years as social media has taken off. Hashtags are a huge part of this evolution. What once was a telephone button is now a social

Tips / How ToAug 25, 2016
11 Simple Design Tips to Enhance Your Social Media Images

Humans are, by nature, very visual beings. In the brain itself, there are hundreds of millions of neurons devoted to visual processing, nearly 30 percent of the entire cortex, as compared with 8 percent for touch and just 3 percent for hearing. Each of the two optic nerves, which carry signals from the retina to the brain, consists of a million fibers, compared to the auditory nerve carrying a mere 30,000. That’s all to say that social media images are a vital part of your content reaching th

Tips / How ToAug 1, 2016
How to Grow a Twitter Chat to Reach 1 Million People: Learnings From Two Years of #bufferchat

From productivity and social media strategy to self-care and reflecting — even gifs! — we’ve had a blast getting to join with our community every week for the past two years in #bufferchat. More than one hundred chats later, #bufferchat has turned two! ? What began as a curious community experiment has grown into a pillar of our community efforts. We are so grateful to have an amazing community who keeps coming back each week, offers a breadth of knowledge and drives us to be a better company

Tips / How ToJun 12, 2016
6 Science-Backed Strategies to Get More Followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and More

Follower count is often considered one of the vainest of vanity metrics. I can relate. I’ve had my fair share of ego tied to that golden number on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn—one day I’ll point out my follower growth to a friend and the next I’ll feel all insecure about the number not being big enough. Still, despite the vanity, there is value in follower count. While it seems like a smug number to chase, followers have a proportional impact on how far and wide your message sprea

Tips / How ToJun 9, 2016
10 Golden Rules for Social Media Managers and Marketers

I was a bit nervous before writing this post because there are so many possible golden rules for social media managers. I wondered, how could I ever hone in on the most important ones? From golden rules like setting proper social media goals to truly understanding consumer behavior and implementing that into your marketing strategy, this post could have taken on a variety of shapes and forms. But then I realized, social media managers are in the market of verbs. Our entire careers are based o

Tips / How ToJun 8, 2016
5 Old School Social Media Tactics That Are No Longer Effective (And What To Do Instead)

There are few greater joys in a marketer’s life than experimenting with a new technique—and having it work like a charm. You feel like a cross between a scientist, an artist, and a magician, am I right? After doing a little celebrating, you officially add the tactic to your repertoire, update your dashboards, and then probably start searching for the next thing to try. And because you’re always looking forward, you might not notice that technique that worked so well when you first used it? We

Tips / How ToJun 7, 2016
The Silent Revolution: Facebook Video and the Importance of Consumer Behavior

Back in 1894 to 1929, before sound could be synchronized with video, silent movies were in their heyday. In silent films, the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards which contain a written indication of the plot or key dialogue. And if you scroll through your Facebook News Feed, you may notice that in some ways, we’re moving back to those days. Here’s a clip from a recent Tech Insider video: And a clip from Gary Vaynerchuk: You’ll notice that both th