Results for Author: Courtney Seiter

The Everything Guide to Twitter Cards: How to Choose, Set Up, Measure Them And More
By Courtney Seiter September 2, 2014

Here’s a riddle: When is a tweet more than a tweet?

We’re all pretty familiar with Twitter’s 140 characters—and of course, a photo is always an eye-catching addition. But what if your Twitter audience could sign up for your email list without ever leaving Twitter, or directly download your new app straight from a tweet? What if a photo and article summary could travel alongside every post of your content?

And what if you could do all of this for free, right now?

Twitter cards offer all this potential and more. In this post, we’ll go over everything a marketer or small business owner needs to know about Twitter cards—how to understand which types are best for you, how to set up and verify your cards, how to analyze and measure your cards and a few caveats and best practices to know to make sure your Twitter cards stand out from the crowd.

Let’s get going!

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Case Study: How Fortune Magazine Found Social Media Success With Buffer
By Courtney Seiter August 18, 2014

At national business magazine and website Fortune, there’s a lot of news being reported, published and shared every day by many different editors and reporters.

With that much going on, a few social media pileups might seem inevitable.

“The problem we kept running into was if we had three stories going up at the same time by different editors, each editor would publish a tweet and not pay attention to when last tweet occurred,” says Franchises and Social Media Editor Heather Muse. …

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7 Social Media Psychology Studies That Will Make Your Marketing Smarter
By Courtney Seiter August 13, 2014

One of my favorite things about social media is that it’s still such a young and new form of communication. It feels too early to take anything as a given, so we’re all experimenting, testing and learning together.

Every day seems to bring exciting new studies as research shows us more about how social media is changing the way we relate to one another, share information and even form our identities.

I’ve been collecting a few of these studies and thinking over how they might relate to making us all better marketers (and hopefully better people, too). I thought I would share them with you today. Here are the major findings of 7 social media psychology studies that will make your marketing smarter.

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Introducing Groups: The Easiest Way to Manage All Your Social Media Accounts With One Click
By Courtney Seiter August 7, 2014

Introducing Buffer GroupsSocial media managers work pretty darn hard.

You’re keeping up with all the latest changes to Facebook and Twitter (and LinkedIn and Pinterest and Instagram). You’re checking out emerging new platforms. You’re posting links, answering questions, and engaging communities all over the place.

And when you’re doing all this with an ever-growing list of social media accounts, things can get kinda crazy.

We wondered if we could make things a little easier for all you hard-working, multi-tasking social media managers out there.

That’s where Buffer’s new feature, Groups, comes in. It makes it one-click simple to gather selected accounts into a handy bundle so you save time and energy when you’re posting to social media. And it’s available right now for all Buffer Business customers! Let’s take a closer look.

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10 Unique Insights to Look For in Your Social Media Monitoring
By Courtney Seiter June 17, 2014

Social Media Monitoring GuideOne of the most fascinating things about social media is its ability to clue you in to things that you might otherwise have had no idea even existed—there are tons of conversations, communities, articles and so much more just waiting to be discovered online.

The trick is: How do you find all of the information online that’s relevant to you and your interests and bring it back in such a way that you can make use of it all?

The answer, for many brands and individuals, is social media monitoring. With the tools and strategies of basic social media monitoring, you can always keep an eye on whatever’s important to you, wherever it is on the web.

Social media monitoring—sometimes also referred to as social media listening—is more than simply responding when you’re mentioned online. The best social media monitoring strategies not only help surface conversations but also help you understand them more deeply so you know how best to use the knowledge you gain.

You might use social media monitoring for many different reasons—to find great content to curate for your audience, to keep an eye on your competitors or other folks in your space, to provide amazing customer service, to look for opportunities to grow and improve your products or service, or maybe all of these!

For all the benefits and opportunities social media monitoring provides, it’s a surprisingly small investment of time and energy. You don’t have to spend hours a day to get all the benefits. All you need is the right plan in place – and a few tools to make sure everything you want to see is coming in, with all the noise filtered out. Here’s a quick guide to help you get started reaping all the benefits of social media monitoring.

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Case Study: How Business Insider Grew Its Facebook Page to 1M+ Fans With Buffer
By Courtney Seiter June 4, 2014

When you’re a small news team with a big workload, how do you keep social media updates flowing steadily around the clock?

For U.S. business and technology news website Business Insider, the answer was Buffer. Paul Szoldra was a fan of Buffer’s simple scheduling power even before he became Business Insider’s West Coast Editor.

“Basically, I pitched Buffer to everybody,” Szoldra says. “Once I started at BI and took over with the social media, I recognized that Buffer was going to make …

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Case Study: How About.com Saves Hours Every Day on Social Media With Buffer
By Courtney Seiter June 4, 2014

It’s a great problem to have—tons of content and lots of social media channels to connect to your audience.

That’s where About.com—one of the most visited sites on the Internet—found itself. Team members wanted a way to streamline their social media publishing process so they could have more time to connect with fans and build relationships with users.

Buffer’s simple scheduling and intuitive team management quickly earned it an important place in the About.com team’s workflow. Now members work more efficiently and …

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53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts
By Courtney Seiter May 14, 2014

Here on the Buffer blog, we think a lot about visual content.

We’ve shared our own study on the importance of images in Twitter posts for more social sharing. We’ve explored tools that help anyone create visual content. Our free social media management tools incorporate image posting because we know how important that element is is to engage your followers and fans.

But there’s one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free, good quality images that are cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content?

It’s a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution or even create your own image from scratch.

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A Scientific Guide to Writing Great Tweets: How To Get More Clicks, Retweets and Reach
By Courtney Seiter May 6, 2014

3101950593_ba8d85d770Last week Buffer had the great pleasure of co-hosting a webinar with Twitter (yes, THAT Twitter!)

During the webinar, I talked with Jimmy Hang of Twitter for Small Business about how to make your Twitter content work harder for your business, focusing on three major areas:

If you weren’t able to make it but still want to write must-click content on Twitter (and really, who doesn’t?), here’s your guide! (Psst: You can scroll to the bottom to check out the slides or watch the entire video presentation).

What do people want from brands on Twitter?

According to Twitter, there are 255 million active Twitter users generating more than 500 million Tweets per day. Link clicks are by far the biggest way users interact with content, accounting for 92% of all user interaction with Tweets.

Twitter users follow a median of 6 brands on Twitter, looking for things like interesting and fun content, news and updates, discounts and promos and more.

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8 Winning Headline Strategies and the Psychology Behind Them
By Courtney Seiter April 17, 2014

headlines shatteredRecently I dug into all the research I could find about headlines for a Mozinar on The Science of Writing Must-Click Headlines on Social Media.

I found plenty of data about what words are used in the most shared headlines and social media posts, how long headlines should be and more.

What was especially interesting was to dig into the psychology behind some well known headline formulas to begin to understand what makes them so irresistibly clickable. Here’s an overview of what I discovered—8 winning headline formulas and the psychology behind them.

1. Surprise

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, list surprise as one of the six principles of ideas that are really sticky. According to their research, presenting something unexpected—breaking a pattern—will help you capture attention. This works in two parts: surprise captures our attention, and then interest holds it.

Surprising headlines are winning headlines because our brains love novelty. The brain’s pleasure centers are more “turned on” when we experience unpredictable pleasant things, compared to expected pleasant events.

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