Tips / How To - Page 6
A collection of posts on Tips / How To
When I first set foot in Disneyland, I race to the most famous rides first—Splash Mountain, the Matterhorn, Indiana Jones, all the biggest and best. Little do I know there are just as many hidden gems and overlooked attractions that I’ve likely missed in my sprint for the headliners. Social networks are a little like Disneyland in this regard. There’s so much to see and so much to do that some of the fun stuff is bound to slip through the cracks. Which features of Facebook, Twitter, and the ot
You know the feeling. You’re sitting there, staring at your hands, at the keyboard, at the screen, at the ceiling. You’re supposed to post something on Twitter, but you have no idea what to post. I’ve been there before. I think we’ve all been there. Everything that comes to mind seems lame. Slogans, links, articles, quotes, pictures—you have no clue. So you sit there wasting your time. We’re all too busy to afford this wasted time. Social media shouldn’t be a time waster. It should be a money
If you’ve been struggling with Facebook lately for your brand page, don’t think you’re alone. Between changes to the layout of brand pages, News Feed algorithm adjustments, and countless other tweaks and changes, marketers are constantly on their toes anticipating what’s coming next. A current issue that many are facing is the decline of a post’s organic reach. Marketers have had their organic reach cut by more than half with their Page’s published posts. This change is caused by a deeper und
If you’ve been to any of Buffer’s social media accounts recently (take Twitter, for instance), you may have noticed that the lion’s share of stories we share come from us. We tweet our own stuff. We toot our own horn. It would certainly seem that we are in the minority with this strategy. There seems to be a a fine line between sharing enough of your own stuff and sharing too much. Most people would rather err on the side of just enough (or even less) in their social media strategy. We all wan
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
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
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
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
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.
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
Talking about yourself is hard. Doing it in 160 characters or less is even harder. That’s probably why so many of us end up stressed about crafting the perfect professional bio for Twitter – or LinkedIn, Facebook or other social networks. It has to set you apart, but still reflect approachability. Make you look accomplished, but not braggy. Appear professional, with just a touch of the personal. Bonus points for a bit of humor thrown in, because hey, social media is fun! All that in just a fe
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: Pinterest just
When it comes to helping you out with Social Media, we often like to categorize things. For example, we’d write about the optimal timing of your posts, or how to come up with the best headlines, and the like. What happened over the last few weeks though is that we collected a number of awesome tips to post on Social Media, that didn’t quite all fit together. So we thought, why not creating a list of unique tips, that might not have that much in common, but are hopefully still very useful for yo
Facebook’s ranking algorithm decides which posts get shown to each user in their News Feed. The algorithm has gone through some major changes in the past , but the most recent one has thrown a lot of social media marketers for a loop. An Adage article [http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-admits-organic-reach-bra
I’m pretty well known for making mistakes. It’s kind of a known trait of mine. Just this weekend I walked into a door because I didn’t open it properly first. When it comes to social media, though, I try hard to learn from mistakes since they’re all saved for me to reflect on. Plus, I research and write about social media enough to have access to stats that make it easier to pick up and rectify these kind of mistakes. The funny thing about some of the mistakes I looked at for this post is that
This is the holy grail for every marketer, entrepreneur and any other professional on the internet: To go viral. At least, when I first started out writing articles and producing content, I could think of nothing else other than trying to figure how to get this post spread like mad on Facebook, Twitter and all the other important places. What I quickly found out is that it takes a little more than posting cute cat photos, although I keep questioning myself on that. A few months back, we did som
The following article is a guest post by Daniel Sharkov, an 18 year old student, marketer, blogger and a social media enthusiast. More about him at the bottom of the post. So, you are a business blogger or a marketer, who’d like to make more sales? Or maybe you simply want more people to read what you have to say? If the answer to those questions is yes, then there’s a good chance that you already have a Twitter account, where you share your content and get to know other folks in your niche. A
Update: Sad news – on September 6, 2015, Kippt shut down for good. Every day, well over 250 million Tweets get posted. This happens alongside 4 billion Facebook updates and comments. And yet, finding Tweets that you have shared a few weeks ago is almost impossible. Not to speak about the non-existent Facebook search. A lot of solutions let you archive or bookmark a link separately, after you’ve shared it. Personally, I’ve found that this can be a huge hassle to use two separate apps for shari
I’ve been lucky enough to have people ask me fairly often how I continue to share great content on Twitter on a regular basis. Over the last year I’ve built up a number of different methods for doing this, as well as ways to keep to both high frequency and high quality. I’ve found 15 times per day a good number to aim for, since it is a Tweet every hour in the peak times of the day for my followers, and once every two hours at other times. With my spontaneous Tweets from random thoughts during
This is a guestpost by Andrew K Kirk the Founder of Face The Buzz, more about him at the bottom of the post. The social web is awesome. And I’m not only talking about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or even social networks in general. Social has become part of the fabric of almost every web application and webpage. Through social sharing buttons, like those provided by Digg Digg, we easily share our world online with our followers, fans, and connections. However, we can run into a slight problem
This is a guest post by Mandy Kilinskis from Quality Logo Products. More about her at the bottom of the post. If it was possible, I would spend all day on Twitter. What can I say? I’m a fan of the quick communication and the ease of retweeting. But I, like all of you, know it’s not possible. We have jobs to do, blogs to write, and projects to finish for clients. And while engagement is essential to any kind of quality following, there are still things that you can do away from Twitter to bul
This is a guest post by Matt Hamilton, great blogger and Social Media enthusiast at Near Coast Media . More about him at the bottom of the post. It’s nothing new any more and I’m sure you have heard. At over 15 million users, Foursquare has recently grown up from nice gimmick to powerful business tool. In short, it is a smart phone location based app that allows you to ‘check in’ to businesses that you are visiting. The app shares these updates with your friends
Editor’s Note: Wow – a lot has changed since March of 2012! It’s always so much fun to look back on older posts like this one and to realize how far we’ve come in a relatively short period of time! We just wanted to take a few minutes to give you a quick how-to in today’s world, and we also wanted to share a couple of newer posts that we’ve written on emojis that you might be interested in ?? Emojis now come standard on our smart phone keyboards, and using them has almost become second nature f
With the rise of importance of having a brand (and personal) page on the two biggest social media platforms, I’ve always felt that much more attention was paid to high converting Facebook pages over Twitter accounts. Of course, I can understand why, given that most new Twitter followers come from Twitter itself (getting retweeted & mentioned, etc.), and that Facebook pages allow for a landing page and lots of customization. Even so, given the ease of creating an optimized Twitter profile, I th
