Instagram is the go-to place for over 300 million people to share their photos, videos, and stories every single day. And as Instagram has grown over recent years, that’s left many business owners and marketers with one very clear and important question: How can we use Instagram for business? Well today, we’d love to dive head first into that topic and share: * How to set up a killer Instagram profile * The importance of goal setting and how to creat
The ability to create Twitter Moments is being rolled out to all users. Twitter Moments enable users to stitch together multiple tweets into slideshow-like stories. When they originally launched, Moments were intended to help Twitter users keep up with what the world is talking about at any given time without having to follow loads of new people or watch trending topics closely. The below video from Twitter explains a little more about how Moments work: pic.twitter.com/boP59z64dH [https://t
Twitter has just made a big change to the way tweets work. From today, Twitter is cutting back on what types of content will use up its 140-character limit. Now, @names in replies, media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) and quoted Tweets will no longer be counted against the valuable 140 characters that make up a tweet. This allows for richer public conversations that are easier to follow on Twitter and ensures people can attach media to tweets without sacrificing the charact
YouTube, the Google-owned video network, boasts over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. On mobile alone, YouTube reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. What’s amazing, though, is that only 9% of small businesses [http://www.emark
Over the past six months, Instagram has released some exciting updates, from a new logo to longer videos and even a new way to share everyday moments with Instagram Stories . Recently, Instagram announced another interesting (and long-awaited) feature: the ability to zoom in on photos and videos. Instagram users can now pinch photos and videos to zoom in and take a closer look. This
Most people don’t read content online. In fact, eight out of ten people will only read the headline . For content writers, that fact is alarming. But it also places extra importance on the headlines we choose for our content, as headlines have the power to influence readers even if they don’t read any more of the article. I don’t believe the perfect headline exists,
Instagram Stories is a feature that lets users post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. The feature feels much like Snapchat Stories, a Snapchat feature that was introduced in 2013 and a pivotal part of the company’s growth. And like Snapchat, the photos and videos shared in your Instagram Story are ephemeral and can’t be viewed once 24 hours have elapsed. Content shared to stories also won’t appear on your profile grid or in the main Insta
If you could travel back in time to when Facebook or Instagram first started grabbing mainstream attention, knowing what you do now about the opportunity they hold for brands, you’d jump aboard, right? Well, that opportunity is now on Snapchat. Snapchat, a platform built on short ephemeral messages, seems destined to become a long-lasting social media powerhouse. This future seems all the more realistic with the addition of Snapchat Memories — a way to share photos and videos captured outsid
One of our cultural values at Buffer , is to live smarter, not harder. We like to think this extends into our workflows as well. This is why marketing spreadsheets have been such a boon for us, helping us to track important social media metrics , see our blog growth , and get more work don
Across the globe, there are over 700 million Instagrammers — more than 300 million of whom use Instagram every single day, sharing an average of 95 million photos and videos per day. Those are huge numbers. And no matter who your audience is — age, gender, occupation, anything — you’ll be sure to reach them through Instagram. So the question becomes … How to promote your business on Instagram? How can you stand out among the other 95 million photos posted each day? How can non-designers and a
Did you know: Over 6 billion emojis are shared every day ! Clearly, using emojis within messages, tweets, and all kinds of communication has become very popular over recent years, particularly on mobile devices where emoji buttons and keyboards have become quite ubiquitous. But what if you’re working from a desktop and hoping to add an emoji or two to a message? We’ve got a little-known emoji tip just for you —
The goal of Facebook’s News Feed is to show people the stories that are most relevant to them. That’s no small task when you have over 1.65 billion people to keep happy and over 1,500 stories per day to prioritize for each of those individual users. Now, Facebook has announced one of their most significant News Feed shuffles. On Wednesday , Facebook shared that the News Feed algorithm is going to shift so that it will mor
Millions of blog posts are published every day. A small percentage gain traction and attract readers. And among those readers, 55% will read the blog post for 15 seconds or less. (If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking with this one!) The internet is a daily battle for attention. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to share the latest marketing hacks with many of the same points echoed repeatedly. I’m guilty of it myself, and I completely understand why many of us write articles th
When I first started out in marketing, I didn’t quite predict that I’d be a part-time designer, too. Now, in 201, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content and it’s become obvious and even necessary for all of us marketers to have at least some basic knowledge of key design terms. Thankfully, we live in a wonderful world where anyone can make the jump from novice to inte
GIFs are great . And they’re everywhere. We use them at Buffer in our customer service tweets, our emails, our Slack channel. We include GIFs in marketing emails and team announcements. Anywhere there’s a message; there’s the chance for a GIF. And what’s more, we’ve found GIFs get great results! GIFs in tweets are one of our top tips for more Twitte
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 these clip
At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels. To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media. We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of o
As marketers, writers and crafters, we spend hours on bringing our content ideas to life and after all that effort, want our content to be seen. Writing powerful social media copy to grab people’s eyes and win their hearts is a challenge, though. And often, when our content isn’t breaking through the noise we can fix it with a few slight edits and tweaks. Editing content and copy is a key part of the creative process but is often overlooked. In this post, I’d love to share 11 editing tips and
Want to make your business stand out on Instagram? Check out our complete guide to Instagram marketing and get the playbook that drives results for Instagram’s top profiles. Businesses have been using Instagram as a way to build their audience and connect with customers for a while now without too much insight on how their content is performing. But soon, they’ll be able to dive way beyond total likes and views. Instagram has officially announced the launch of its tools for business users, inc
It is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it. Kevan Lee, October 2015 And now things have changed again. We’ve flipped the switch, and our new design is here. From where it started with Leo over five years ago to where it stands today, the Buffer Social blog has evolved a great deal over the years, and we’re extremely grateful to have built up a great reputation and sizeable audience along the way. The Buffer Social blog now attracts over 850,000 readers and averages ove
Instagram changed its logo on Wednesday, and as with almost any significant change to a popular social network, the internet was split. Some loved it. Others disliked it. And the memes started flowing . The Facebook-owned company moved on from its old-fashioned camera icon and embraced a new, minimalist design across its suite of products: Instagram, Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse. The design changes swept through
It’s been another fast-paced, exciting week in the world of social media. In this latest weekly roundup, we’ll discuss the latest news from Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as well as share some super-interesting insights into how people are using Facebook Reactions. Let’s dive in! What’s new in social this week Facebook testing content categories Facebook’s mission is to make News Feed content as relevant as possible to users and as screenshots from Social times show, it appears they’re t
Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are sent on Twitter, which translates to over 500 million tweets per day! Did you know you could search every single one of them? (Plus the multi-million profiles attached to them!). Twitter has an amazing, yet somewhat little-known Twitter Advanced Search tool to help you find exactly what we’re looking for. Looking to
Social media management can be extremely time-consuming. But there are also so many ways to boost your social media marketing and improve your social media profiles in just a few minutes. In this post, I’d love to share 15 ways you can improve you social media marketing in under an hour. Some of these tips are super-quick optimizations and others focus on experimentation and trying new things. (I’d love to hear which ones you’re interested in trying out!) Let’s get started! 1. Optimize your