A Month’s Worth of Simple Social Media Growth Hacks and Experiments

If you’re curious for ways to grow your social media numbers, to have more success, to get more followers and more clicks, the absolute best piece of advice we’ve found is to keep trying new things.

Always be testing. 

Need inspiration? I’ve drummed up 30 new, small, and simple experiments and growth hacks you can try this month to see what works for you. They’re all low-cost, big-potential. I’d love to hear which ones you’re interested in trying! (And which ones work for you.)

My must-have tool for trying out new experiments is a simple, powerful social media dashboard. Get a free Buffer account and start testing today!

1. Embed a tweet at the bottom of a blog post

One of our favorite recommendations for getting more followers and engagement on social media is this:

Make it easy for website visitors to connect with you on social.

I’m excited to share a small, secret tip that Buffer’s co-founder Leo Widrich has been trying. Here’s what he’s done (and a sample):

1. Publish a new blog post
2. Share the new blog post on social media
3. Embed that tweet or update back into the blog post

Here’s an example for this very blog post:

22 Free Content Marketing Tools To Drive Your Content Marketing Plans: http://t.co/sVjKj2MFPM

— Kevan Lee (@kevanlee) October 2, 2015

What you end up with is a great-looking piece of multimedia at the end of your article, and a smooth way for folks to follow you, engage with your tweet, and continue the conversation!

(You can find the embed option by clicking on the three dots underneath any tweet.)

2. Post during non-peak hours

The Brafton blog took a look at the most popular times that marketers post on social media and the most popular times when posts are shared (thanks to some great data from Track Maven).

We’ve found this to be true with our own social media research studies, and while a lot of different variables could be at play here (for instance, the effect of big publishers sharing into the evenings), it’s cool data to experiment with.

The idea would be to post when people aren’t posting. Post at non-peak hours.

Here’s how I’ve set this for my personal social media sharing.

3. Pin a Twitter card to the top of your profile

Twitter cards are these rich multimedia, interactive experiences wrapped up beautifully within a tweet. With 9 different card types to choose from, you can use Twitter cards to ask your audience to do things like:

• Sign up for an email list
• Register at a website
• View and use a coupon
• Visit a landing page
• Download an app

You can make them for free (here’s how) and then share them with your Twitter followers just as you would any other tweet.

Not only that, you can also pin them to the top of your Twitter profile so that the tweet is there for anyone who visits your profile directly.

I pinned an email signup form to the top of my profile, and I’ve added 220 subscribers this way (1/3 of my personal list!).

4. Share evergreen content from an archive page on your blog

We’re big fans of sharing your content more than once to social media. For this simple hack, we’d love to encourage a quick dive, deep into your archives to share again.

Click to the second page of your blog, and notice the URL that appears. For us at the Buffer blog, it’s https://blog.bufferapp.com/page/2 (we use WordPress).

Choose a random page number, preferably 3 pages deep or more.

Type in the URL directly to visit that page. For example, with us this could be https://blog.bufferapp.com/page/9.

Once there, take a look around for any evergreen content and add it to your Buffer queue to share again.

5. Create an image for a quote (using Pablo)

Images are some of the most engaging content on social media. Quotes are some of the most liked, favorited, forwarded updates out there.

How about combining the two?

I find myself often sharing a favorite quote and not even thinking of the opportunity I’m missing by not making the quote visual. Time is the big one for me; it’s quick and easy to just drop a text quote into a tweet or Facebook update. Well, with Pablo, it’s just a few more seconds to turn that quote into an image.

Here’s how:

1. Open Pablo.
2. Paste in your quote.
3. Choose a background image.
4. Fiddle with any settings you’d like.
5. Done.

And here’s the finished product:

6. Test your Open Graph stuffs

This great post from Unbounce about social media tips offers some keen insight into what makes a post clickable:

There are eight aspects of this post which determine my likelihood to click:

1. Who posted it
2. The description they wrote about it
3. The post image
4. The post headline
5. The post description
6. The host domain
7. How many people have liked it
8. The comments (or lack of)

Where does Open Graph fit here? Open Graph is all the cool text and images you see when you share a link to Facebook and other social media sites.

And here’s what all you can edit if the story you’re sharing is yours (many of which mesh with the Unbounce list above):

• Headline
• Description
• Image
• URL
• Author

You can edit and experiment with these manually, adjusting the HTML code on the page itself. We use the WordPress plugin Yoast SEO to tweak things on a post-by-post basis from within our WordPress post editor.

As far as the experiments to try? Here’re a few ideas:

• Test an image with text, without text, with a person, without a person, abstract, meme, stock photo
• Test a long headline, a short headline
• Test a keyword-heavy description, test a light & entertaining description

7. Change the color of your profile picture

What’s one of the most looked-at elements of your social media presence? The profile picture! And what a cool place to test and see if one pic works better than another. Moz’s Cyrus Shepard has one of the most famous experiments here, finding that even things like color can impact the attention and engagement on a profile pic.

If you’re able to get a cutout of your profile picture, you can add it onto any color background you choose (like Cyrus has done here).

Aas an alternative to a color change, another hack to test could be adding a logo onto your profile picture. Buffer’s founder Joel does this, along with many others.

To make this happen, you can hop into a program like Canva, add your profile picture as a new image, then upload and insert your logo (so long as it has a transparent background) right on top.

8. Add a UTM link to your bio

Some folks include a link back to their blog, some their website, still others a newsletter signup form. You can choose whatever link you’d like, then when you’re ready, add a UTM code to the link so you can track the effect and engagement of the bio.

Pick a link.

Add a UTM. (Google’s URL builder is helpful here. You can use twitter-bio-test as the campaign name.)

Shorten the URL. (bit.ly is a good option.)

Add to your bio.

Follow up in Google Analytics to see the results.

9. Add a hashtag or @-mention to your bio

The bio—on Twitter especially—offers even more neat ways to customize.

You can add a hashtag to your bio to help increase your visibility through search.

You can add an @-mention to your bio to link yourself to where you work or who you’re connected with, giving a bit more credibility and authenticity to your profile.

10. Create a GIF

Does a GIF give more engagement for the updates you post on social media?

We’re thinking it might. We’ve already heard tell of experiments that saw GIFs bring in great results, and Twitter itself suggests that animated GIFs get more engagement.

You can find and share an existing GIF (we’ve made that process as easy as pie here). Or you can create your own using some simple tools.

• GIPHY cam
• Gifmaker
• Makeagif
• Gifs.com (Gifs from YouTube videos)

I’ve found Gifmaker to be the easiest, no-frills tool for me. I can create a series of images in Canva, all the same size, then add them all to Gifmaker and set the order and speed of the animation however I choose.

The result:

11. Ask a Which, Who, Would question on Facebook

Asking questions as a general strategy on social media is a great one. We’ve got an intuition (backed by a bit of research) on which questions to ask specifically.

Which

ex., “Which of these social networks could you not live without: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest?”

Who

ex., “Who knows how to find a great Twitter chat?”

Would

ex., “Would you ever let a friend run your social media accounts for the day?”

12. Add your social media info to your email signature

How many emails do you send each day? (I’m near 25 on a busy day.)

Each email you send can be an easy mention for your social media profiles. You can build this into your email signature manually with a text link here or there.

Or you can grab a tool like Wisestamp, which lets you add social media profiles (and a whole lot more) in a completely custom way.

13. Follow everyone who emails you

If you grab a tool like Sidekick, you can see right away all the great information about the social media profiles of the people who are emailing you.

Then you’re just one click away from following or friending. Since these are folks who may have connected with you already over email, chances are good that you’ll get a followback if you reach out first.

14. Boost a post on Facebook

We’ve seen declining Facebook reach on our Buffer page for quite some time now.

One idea to test the waters: Boosting a Facebook post.

When we tried this with a $5 budget, we nearly doubled our reach—and I think I could have done a lot better with the strategy and techniques there. Could the results be even better with a more strategic approach? What results can you get anyway with or without one?

To boost a post, you can click on the Boost button from any of your posts, or you can log into the Facebook Ads Manager and step through the process there.

15. Build a pinnable image in Canva

I find an incredible amount of visual inspiration whenever I scroll through Pinterest. People create some beautiful stuff!

And I’ve never really thought I could do the same, at least not without a bunch of time and training. Turns out, I can build a pretty sweet Pinnable image, design skills or not, using Canva’s premade templates.

(The Canva blog uses tons of great imagery in its Pinnable posts. This one, for example, has been pinned 26,000 times!)

Choose the Pinterest size at Canva.

Grab a template that looks great.

Edit the text.

Change a background or a color (for variety).

Share to Pinterest.

(We’re also excited to include Pinterest sizes in Pablo as well, so you can build a Pablo Pinterest image in just a few seconds.)

16. Don’t post anything

17. Post way more of everything

These two experiments are completely opposite of one another, but with the same intention in mind: Challenge your posting frequency.

You can turn off your scheduling completely.

You can double your scheduling.

Trying out both ways will be a great learning experience. You can see how it affects your social media engagement by looking at engagement per post and per day. And what I also might be curious to learn here is how your follower count moves on the days when you publish nothing versus everything. Check out this overlay graph in Buffer:

We’d love for you to have a chance to test this tip out! Grab a Buffer for Business trial to spend 30 days analyzing and learning from charts like these.

18. Share a screenshot of text

Text updates tend to be some of the less-engaging types of social media updates to share, because the same fonts, typography, and styles are shared by every update.

To get around this, you can share a screenshot of text from another website, which’ll help it stand out in the News Feed or timeline.

The ideal image sizes for each social network: http://t.co/Bz4ZVU5ZXU pic.twitter.com/tzcx5mEO12

— Buffer (@buffer) August 16, 2015

To take a screenshot on a Mac, press Command + Shift +4.

To take a screenshot on a PC, press Alt + Print Screen.

To take a screenshot of your iPhone screen, press Power + Home.

To take a screenshot of your Android screen, press Power + Volume Down.

19. Tag (and hashtag) in the comments

When a social media update is out there, you can share it in a couple ways: by retweeting/resharing natively or by mentioning and tagging others in the comments or replies.

The latter strategy is a popular one on Facebook and Instagram, where users might add a comment to tag people or add hashtags:

To mention specific people or pages on Facebook, you can type an @ sign followed by the name of a person or page. Same goes for Instagram, too.

20. Share multiple pics

One thing I’m personally excited to learn more about is the effect of multiple images in an update. If you share two or more images with an update, might you get more engagement?

Testing out @twitter's photo collages! What better test than dog pics? (via http://t.co/hAos6SA2Q0) pic.twitter.com/J8s4bqEKT6

— Kevan Lee (@kevanlee) August 30, 2014

I’m experimenting with this now (I’d love to know if you all have noticed any effect here).

On Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, you can share mosaics of images by uploading multiple images at once. This is one of our most-requested additions to Buffer; you can follow the progress here.

On Instagram and Pinterest, you can use apps like Layout, InstaCollage, or Pic Collage to build these multi-image images.

21. Include a text emoticon like (つ☯ᗜ☯)つ

To spice up a plain-text update (and to stand out in the Feed or timeline a bit), you can insert a text emoticon.

You might be familiar with a couple of the more popular text emoticons like the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and the table flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻.

There are heaps more.

Sites like Emojicons and Donger List (above) have a searchable archive that you can hunt by emotion or keyword and then copy-paste easily.

22. Unfollow old accounts

To help keep your follower/following ratio balanced, it can sometimes help to take a peek into who you’re really following.

Whenever I do, I tend to notice a number of accounts that are either inactive, empty, or who have yet to follow me back.

Using a tool like Crowdfire, you can get this info quickly and easily—and go ahead with the unfollowing and managing straight from the tool.

23. Join (or start) a live chat

One way to find more exposure and connection on social media is to join a chat. You’ll get to interact directly with fellow users on a topic you care about. And as a fun side effect, you might gain more followers or contacts.

There’s a great list of Twitter chats here, and we’d of course love for you to join us for #Bufferchat every Wednesday.

24. Repost your top tweet

Here’s a look at the top tweets we’ve sent at Buffer in the last 90 days.

Yep, they’re the same!

We find that we reach 4 percent of our Twitter followers with each tweet, so we’ve found a lot of success and value in resurfacing our best stuff for people who may have missed it the first time.

To see what tweets are tops, you can jump into your social media management dashboard and sort by engagement. Here’s how this looks within Buffer:

25. Remix your top Facebook update

Similarly to reposting your top tweet, you can repurpose a popular Facebook update for posting again. There’s a possibility that the Facebook News Feed might notice an exact replica of a post, so it’s best to change things a bit – new update text, new photo, etc.

26. Write a headline of 5 words or fewer

The team at Ad Espresso looked at 37,259 Facebook ads to find out how the best Facebook advertisers create and optimize an ad. One big takeaway: Shorter headlines are most popular (and often lead to the best results).

Here’s an example that the Ad Espresso team pulled. See the short headline here for “Become a Full Stack Developer”:

What this might hint at is a chance to experiment with shorter headlines, both in the Open Graph settings of the links you share and in the main update text for sharing links to Twitter and other networks.

I’ve found this to be the case for me, as this short tweet was one of my most engaged from the past 90 days:

27. Use a popular Instagram hashtag

Hashtags are great for visibility, and visibility of course will lead to follows, likes, clicks, and more.

Websta keeps a running tally of the day’s most popular Instagram hashtags. If any of these fit with what you’re posting, it could be a good experiment to see the effect a popular hashtag has on your engagement!

Today’s Top 10 tags:

1. #love
2. #instagood
3. #tbt
4. #photooftheday
5. #cute
6. #me
7. #beautiful
8. #happy
9. #follow
10. #followme

28. Find your Next Big Thing network

Which social networks send you the most traffic?

You can find out by logging into Google Analytics and looking at Acquisition > Referrer. In our case at Buffer, we get the most traffic from Twitter, then Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

What’s cool to see is which other social networks are gaining steam.

If these networks are growing for you (you can compare to last month’s stats to see), perhaps this could be a good sign to spend a bit more time there and kick up the traffic to the next level.

29. Make a SlideShare

When we went a month without posting new content, we found SlideShare to be a really wonderful use of our free time. In some cases, SlideShares got more views and traffic than most any blog post.

Bonus: SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn and fits seamlessly with the sharing there. And Twitter has SlideShare support so that slide decks are embedded automatically within tweets.

To build a SlideShare, you can create a presentation in PowerPoint, or you can build one in Canva with the presentation template (just export as a pdf and you’re set!).

30. Add multimedia to your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn profiles have grown beyond just a resume. There’re now chances to display all sorts of different media on your page and to reorder things so that the most visual elements sit up top.

I’ve added a few links to some of the blog posts I’ve written here for Buffer and I’ve also included the posts I’ve published to LinkedIn Pulse.

Over to you

What experiments have you been trying on social media?

Which hacks and tips have made the biggest impact for you?

I’d love the chance to learn from what you’re trying. Feel free to leave any comments (or questions) here, and we’ll jump right to them!

Image sources: Brafton, Ad Espresso, Pablo, IconFinder, Pexels, Moz

The post A Month’s Worth of Simple Social Media Growth Hacks and Experiments appeared first on Social.

How and Why you should Limit Login Attempts in your WordPress

From time to time hackers may try to break into your WordPress site by guessing your admin password. By default, WordPress allows users to try different passwords as many times as they want. This is also known as brute force attack. However, you can change this and add an extra layer of security to your WordPress site. In this article, we will show you how and why you should limit login attempts in your WordPress.

Why you need to Limit Login Attempts in WordPress?

By default, WordPress allows users to enter passwords as many times as they want. Hackers may try to exploit this by using scripts that enter different combinations until your website cracks.

To prevent this, you can limit the number of failed login attempts per user.

For example, you can say after 5 failed attempts, lock the user out temporarily.

If someone has more than 5 failed attempts, then your site block their IP for a temporary period of time based on your settings. You can make it 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 24 hours, and even longer.

How to Limit Login Attempts in WordPress?

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Login LockDown plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Login LockDown page to configure the plugin settings.

First you need to define how many login attempts can be made. After that choose how long a user will be unable to retry if they exceed the failed attempts.

You can also define the lockout period for IP range blocks. The default value is 60 minutes, you can adjust that if you need.

The plugin will allow users to keep trying different invalid usernames. Click on yes under lockout invalid usernames option to stop this.

By default, WordPress lets users know that whether they entered an invalid username or invalid password on failed logins. You can hide this by clicking yes under mask login errors option.

Don’t forget to click on the update settings button to store your changes.

Pro Tip

The first layer of protection to your WordPress sites is your passwords. You should always use strong passwords on your WordPress site. We understand that strong passwords are difficult to remember. But see our beginner’s guide which shows the best way to manage passwords for WordPress users.

If you run a multi-author WordPress site, then see how you can force strong passwords on users in WordPress.

No website is 100% safe because hackers always find new ways to get around the system. That’s why it’s crucial that you keep complete backups of your WordPress site at all times. We recommend BackupBuddy plugin. Here’s a list of the best WordPress backup plugins.

If your website is a business, then we strongly recommend that you add a firewall which takes care of the brute-force attacks and so much more. We use Sucuri which guarantees our safety and if anything happens to our site, then their team is responsible to fix it at no-additional charge.

We hope you found this article useful, and you have successfully added login attempts limit to your WordPress site. You may also want to see our list of 13 vital tips and tools to protect your WordPress admin area.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

To leave a comment please visit How and Why you should Limit Login Attempts in your WordPress on WPBeginner.

Which Ranking Factors are Important for Mobile Sites?

Mobilegeddon doesn't seem to have had the impact some predicted, but a new study shows some small changes in the mobile search rankings.

Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

A concept we've covered regularly is what we call flywheel marketing, where the organic traffic, shares, and links you get from publishing one piece of content makes it easier for later pieces to see some success. One of the key pieces of that flywheel is the ability to get those social shares, and based on a recent study, we're ready to admit it: We were completely wrong about that key piece.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why, and that the real value may lie in engagement.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about an assumption that I think many of us have made over the years. I know I have. In fact, I've amplified that. I might have even covered it on Whiteboard Friday. Thanks to some research that we've done together with BuzzSumo, as well as some research we've seen from our correlation study this summer, you know what? It's looking like we were just dead wrong on this very important aspect of how SEO and social media and content marketing fit together.

You've probably seen me present on this either here on Whiteboard Friday or in one of my slide decks or in a blog post. It's this idea of flywheel marketing, where you create some great content, you amplify that content via social media and your social channels, you attract visitors through that, you naturally earn links from some of those people who visit your site, and you grow your social following. Now, the next time your audience potential is bigger and your rankings potential is also bigger, because you have more links coming to your site, and that helps all the other pages on your site. You have a bigger social audience, so now there are more people to amplify to.

You know what? It actually looks like this is totally broken and wrong. The idea that you are naturally earning links from people who come via social looks to us like it was a bunk belief in its entirety. Let me show you.

First off, BuzzSumo did the vast majority of the work. I appreciate them including Moz as well. We did participate in some of our link metrics. The BuzzSumo crew did a bunch of this work. They looked at articles that received social shares, in fact a million articles that were taken from their database, and then they looked at the number of shares and the number of links those received.

The vast, vast majority received zero links. In fact, 75% plus of all articles they looked at received zero, not a single one, social shares. Same with links, by the way. I think it was 90% plus for links or maybe even more.

This is a like a power-law distribution. You're essentially seeing that a few articles get all the shares out there. Everything else really gets nothing. If you're not going to be in the top 10% of content that's created, don't even bother. You're not going to get shares. You're not going to get links. You're not going to get traffic. Forget it. A lot of content marketing is probably spent in vain. Granted, maybe a lot of that is learning what actually works and experimenting, and that's fine.

Then they looked at the correlation between links and shares.

As you can see from this crudely drawn scatter plot, no correlation whatsoever. If you were to draw the line here, it would probably be something like, "Oh look at that total crap correlation." Here are the numbers. Facebook, 0.0221. Twitter, 0.0281. Ooh, slightly better, but still in the realm of totally insignificant. Google+ 0.0058. You're just talking about numbers that suggest essentially that there is virtually no correlation between links and shares.

Now they did look at places where there were lots of shares and links, and those tended to be a few things. I'll let you read the report, and you should. I think it's one of the most important reports to come out in our industry in a while. Credit to BuzzSumo for putting it together.

We know from our research. We've done experiments looking at whether anchor text still moves things. We've done experiments looking at whether URL mentions move the needle. URL mentions don't, by the way. Once you turn them into live links, they do. We've looked at whether you can actually rank content without any links at all. It turns out almost impossible, so next to impossible that we couldn't find a single credible example of a page that ranked without any links unless it was on a site that had lots of links pointing to it.

We know we still need links to rank.

In fact, notably ranking correlations with links haven't dropped over the last few years. Even though we all feel like the algorithm's getting a little less link centric, and I think it is, links are still clearly very, very powerful. So we have to worry about things like outreach and link focused content and embeds and tools and badges and competitive link analysis and all the other many link building methods that the marketing industry has come up with over the years.

I have a theory about why this is.

I think Google is honest when they tell us, "We don't look at social shares to determine rankings." I think what Google sees is something Chartbeat showed a few years ago. This was another excellent study that I encourage you to check out. Chartbeat basically analyzed engagement on socially shared content. What they saw was a plot that looks like this. Very, very few social articles have high read time. Even the ones that have lots of social sharing have very little read time.

It turns out a ton of things that people share socially on the Web, they don't read at all. They may click Retweet. They may even include the URL. They might share it on Facebook. But they, themselves, may never have even visited that content. Sounds crazy, but I bet you've done it. I bet I've done it. I bet I've been like well, you know, it was probably a good edition of Whiteboard Friday, I'll go share it out, having not yet watched the video and seen whether I did a good job or not. That's just the way of the Web.

I think Google cares much more about the engagement than they do about the social share counts themselves.

So you can see lots of things with social shares not performing well. But once they start to get engagement and start to earn links from that engagement, now they're suddenly ranking.

Hopefully, with this knowledge in mind, you can go back to the drawing board a little bit if you've built up, like we have, this mental model of how the flywheel works. Look, I'm not saying that this works for no one. This actually works pretty well for Moz. It works pretty well for us in this industry, but I think, and clearly the data is showing, that across the vast majority of the Web it's statistically extremely unlikely this will work for you or for everyone else.

I think we need to revisit this. We probably need to revisit our link building. We need to think about social in a different context of how and whether it's earning people who will actually come to our site and want to link to us and people who will come to our site and want to engage, or whether it's just a vanity metric.

All right, everyone, I look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Do Social Media On-the-Go: The Best Strategies and Workflows of the New Buffer iOS App

We’ve been studying and learning the best ways to reach a social media audience on mobile—where 60 percent of social media time is spent!

How does one go about implementing mobile into a social media marketing plan?

To really get to know the best strategies and workflows on mobile, we asked. A half dozen Buffer for iOS users were so kind to share how they go about mobile social media, using Buffer’s app for iPhone and iPad (newly updated to version 5.0!).

We’d love for you to have a look at these wonderfully efficient workflows (it’d be fantastic to hear yours in the comments), and check out the big improvements and updates to the latest version of the Buffer app.

The all-new Buffer app for iOS 9

New: Brand new design for iOS 9

We’ve redone the design of the app, ncluding a new layout for the composer. See everything you’re sharing right within a single view.

New: Video upload, schedule, and share

We recently launched Buffer support for videos, and it’s now available on your iOS device too. Upload video right from your Camera Roll and schedule to post natively to any connected profile.

New: Buffer from your wrist!

That’s right, we’ve bundled in a brand new Buffer app for the Apple Watch so you can keep up to date on how many updates are in your Buffer accounts and even top them up using dictation.

New: Support for the awesome iOS 9 iPad multitasking

Now you can Buffer alongside the article you’re sharing or while viewing your favorite cat gifs.

Additionally

• You can now connect Pinterest accounts directly from within the app when you’re on our Awesome plan.
• The app uses the brand new Safari browser to make viewing your links a joy, along with the ability to share them to your other favorite apps!
• You can now change plans and upgrade from within the app.

How to do mobile social media with Buffer

Inspiration for how to schedule and share on-the-go

We’re so grateful to have been able to ask a great group of Buffer iOS users for their insights into their daily workflows and strategies. (If you’d like to join our group of beta testers, we’d love the chance to learn from you!)

Here are some of the great stories and strategies of how it works to share to social media on-the-go.

 Mara Averick – @dataandme

Circa 2008, the Batpig entered my world:

(Technically, the Batpig’s a French Bulldog, but I find it hard to believe that he and my lab are the same species— so he’s a batpig). The absurd, and adorable moments of life with the Batpig yielded the occasional share-worthy photo. And behold: a blog was born.

Soon after, my fun little hobby of posting cute pictures of Frenchies on Facebook and Twitter had an audience who, among other things, were sending me lots and lots of cute Frenchie photos.

The secret sauce of keeping myself, the Batpig, and his adoring fans happy is my Buffer workflow.

1. I peruse the Frenchie photos sent to Batpig & Me and/or from our other Frenchie friends on social media etc. at my leisure (usually lying in bed in the morning, or on the subway on the way to work)
2. I put my favorites into Buffer, add a (sometimes) witty caption, and cite my source (because I’m not a monster)
3. Said photos fly off to Facebook and/or Twitter three or four times a day, as per my Buffer schedule.
4. I drag and drop/re-order photos to mix things up (god forbid there were three fawn Frenchies in a row, or puppies only without a fully grown dog in sight— again, yes, people actually complain about these things).

I do a lot of “Share Next”-ing. Usually, whatever I’ve just seen seems imminently important (read: especially cute), and I want it at the top of my queue.

Sometimes there are “topical” posts (e.g. football jersey-wearing Frenchies) that I’ll either schedule for a specific time (if I’m feeling generous), or keep at the bottom of my queue until the right moment arrives. On rare occasions, I’ll do this through manually re-ordering, but my affinity for adding to the top makes this a bit impractical.

***

 Ben Brausen – @BenBrausen

To make my messages stand out, I try to include images with almost every one. Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets. It’s clear that including them in your social mix is a must.

When I find an image I want, be it on the web or in an app, I simply use iOS sharing to send it to the Buffer app. Thanks to Extensibility added in iOS 8, there’s no longer a need to save the photo to my Photos first. Just select the share button and send it to Buffer in an instant. Then all I need to do is add the text, a link if I like, and I’m set to send it to my Buffer.

Jumping into the analytics, Buffer 5.0 makes it easier to see what went well, and what may need some massaging for better performance next time. Rescheduling past performers is now quicker too.

Managing more than than a dozen accounts in Buffer is a snap now that I can simply slide the account screen in from the side. It makes choosing the right account(s) for a message fast and easy. It also makes it easy to see which have plenty in queue and which I should look to fill.

***

 Alex Beaton – @alexbeaton

I use the Buffer app for lots of things! I create posts natively within the app on occasion, but more often than not, I create new posts using the Safari extension. I’ve found that to be my favorite feature by far!

I also manage social accounts for several different companies, each with different teams. I travel a lot, and use my travel time to approve contributions from different member of each of the companies. I can quickly approve posts, rearrange the publishing order and edit on the go. It’s a huge time saver!

***

 Miro Sarkissian – @itsaMiro

Working as a social media and content manager in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles means I’m always on the go and prepping for and covering events. From pre-production, promotion, and actual execution and activation at events, I rely heavily on Buffer to manage and excel on our social platforms. While on the run, the iOS app is vital in making sure posts go out on time and making quick edits while away from my trusty laptop.

More importantly, the iOS app is vital for live tweeting and covering events.

Just two weekends ago, I covered a massive music festival in Las Vegas, and couldn’t have done it without Buffer iOS app. I was able to attach pictures and videos in my posts, and schedule them out. I was able to schedule similar posts for later in the week, as well as re-buffering the popular posts—and of course, access all the stats and analytics.

***

 Tom – @Tomleejr

We use Buffer App and website primarily at this point to add feeds to our multiple (eight and counting) Twitter accounts, managed for industrial (Oil & Gas) business clients.

In our example all of the client’s industrial websites get their corresponding Twitter accounts so managing across different content feeds is challenging. Nice aspect of Buffer is we can cross-post from different feeds in the event they are relevant for different website/Twitter accounts.

This allows us to get them started with content marketing until we can help them develop original material.

Full support for Android users, too!

In addition to mobile sharing on iOS, Buffer for Android can also make social media on-the-go easy and efficient for Android users.

Download the free app here –>

Over to you

What are your favorite mobile social media workflows?

What can we work on to help make sharing on-the-go even easier for you?

We’re excited to keep improving all our mobile apps and build out more and more awesome features for you. Any ideas? Let us know!

Image sources: PlaceIt, IconFinder, Pablo

The post How to Do Social Media On-the-Go: The Best Strategies and Workflows of the New Buffer iOS App appeared first on Social.

My Problem, And How It Benefits You…

My problem, besides the fact that this photo is blurry and totally unfocused (lol), is that I have some extra time on my hands for the month of October.

It's a sad, sad story. One you probably don't want to hear. Heh. The short version: I was engaged, I was happy, we were meant to move in together last month, he bailed, it's over. There ya go.

Unlike the photo, I am focused.

Sure I'm struggling. This has been the kind of hell nobody would want to go through. Yes, it sucks.

That said, I'm handling it like a champ. After the necessary state of shock, I sat down and made a "Lynn List" - basically a "here's what you do now!" list.

It includes a lot of sunshine, serious workouts, ambitious goals, traveling, and all the GOOD things life should hold.

What I do NOT want to do is sit around twiddling my thumbs...

I refuse to let this consume me, derail me, or keep me down. It's far too easy for that to happen when life throws you a curve ball - but I am NOT that person.

I want to use this time to do some GOOD. That's where you come in...

In the best of timing this falls at the beginning of Q4, and right when we're going into the highest profit months of the year. This is the ideal time for you to buckle down, finish the year strong, and close out 2015 out with record sales & growth!

I Can Help You Achieve Your Q4 Goals

It's rare that I offer private consulting or personal mentoring. Especially at such a low rate! But I have set up a seriously sweet deal for a short time. If you need a BIG boost for this final quarter, you'll want to get in touch with me ASAP.

See the two new buttons at the top of this page:

http://www.clicknewz.com/private-brainstorming-hour/

This is limited to the first 10 people that take action (3 are already claimed). If you don't see the buttons, those spots have been taken.

Why am I being so generous?

I need something worthwhile to do to fill my extra time. I need something positive to focus on. I love making a difference. It is a total pick-me-up to know that I've helped someone else achieve their goals! I especially love working with action-takers that are excited about starting a business, or taking their business to the next level.

Letting me help you... will help me too. So thank you in advance!

This May Not Be Right For You...

Maybe it's not right for you, or maybe it's just not the right timing. I get that. You may not be right for me either, in which case I would simply give you a full refund. LOL. The deal won't last long though, so if you think it's something you'll want to take advantage of "soon" - I can give you up to six months to schedule your session(s).

This may be a better option for you:

My Private Brainstorming Group is the absolute BEST deal if you want serious hands-on help with your blog or business, with personal mentoring and accountability. You also get access to my popular Social Marketing Results training program, and my step-by-step Niche Success Blueprint.

I have reopened the inexpensive monthly option at only $37, which makes it a no-brainer to join and get personal help directly from me in my private forum.

Why You Should Let Me Help You Succeed

I'm the kind of person you want to work with. I'm driven, motivated, disciplined, I push through my fears and doubts, I get things DONE, and I'm successful at what I do.

I actually DO what I teach, too. It's rare you'll find that in a mentor or coach. I work online myself, in the trenches. I've been working online for almost 19 years in a variety of niches and business models, plus I've been blogging for more than 11 years.

Whatever you're struggling with, whether you're just starting out or have a six-figure business already, whatever you want to accomplish... I can help you with that.

Ready To Get Started? Let's Talk!

First, click here. Scan over the page and decide if that's the right option for you. If you need personal one-on-one private coaching, it IS the right option for you.

Also check out my Private Brainstorming Group while the rates are still super low. I host a live Brainstorming Hour twice a week, and work with every single member personally. The group is actually a great addition to your private session, as I would love to continue working with you step-by-step to achieve your goals.

If you have any questions, email me!

Sometimes you get in a rut - trust me, I've been there...

I can get you OUT of that rut, FAST, and back on a serious roll!

I look forward to working with you.

In the meantime, I'm off to master my inbox then work on a new product - because this woman does NOT twiddle her thumbs. LOL. Have a great weekend!

Best,

p.s. Be sure to read http://www.clicknewz.com/12973/finish-strong/ and do the quick 5-Question Brainstorming Exercise on that page, because we're already into the 4th Quarter... and you can't afford to waste any more time. *cheers*

What 1 Million Tweets Taught Us About How People Tweet Successfully

Given 140 characters, how can you make the absolute most of every single word, hashtag, and link in a tweet?

We’ve been excited to test and experiment with answering that question by trying out headline ideas, power words, psychology, science, and more.

Now we’re happy to share the quantitative numbers—based on 1 million tweets from Buffer users—about what seems to drive the most clicks, retweets, and engagement on Twitter!

tl;dr

The top takeaways from Buffer’s study on ideal tweets

We’ll dive deep into all the Twitter data and findings below. Up top, I’d love to share the overall takeaways that we discovered when looking at the success of Buffer users on Twitter.

• For tweets with images, shorter tweets of 20 to 40 characters did best
• For tweets without images, longer tweets of 120 to 140 characters did best
• The most popular tweet length was 110 to 120 characters
• Tweets with images received more engagement than tweets without images
• Tweets without links got more retweets, favorites, and replies than tweets with links
• Engagement for tweets with hashtags seems to rise steadily all the way to 4 hashtags per tweet.

We are so grateful to have partnered with Lemonly on creating the infographics and charts for this research. Here’s the beautiful design the Lemonly team came up with:

See below for more detail on each of these findings.

A note about engagement and data

In this study, we define engagement as the sum of retweets, favorites, and mentions divided by the number of followers of the account.

We chose to exclude clicks from our engagement measure because clicks were only recorded for tweets that included links (around 70% of the dataset), and we wanted to be careful to not skew the effects of our independent variables by giving so much weight to the link factor.

The dataset includes more than 1 million tweets sent between February 1 and February 17, 2015, in the Pacific time zone. (Toward the end of the article, I’ll share some of the limitations and caveats that a dataset like this might entail.)

Now to the results…

How long are the most engaged tweets?

What the data says about tweet length and engagement

You may have heard that the best practice regarding the length of a tweet is to use 100 to 120 characters, plenty long to get your message across while leaving room for others to add their own comments when retweeting you.

As Twitter has evolved, we were curious to find out if that recommendation still holds true.

From looking at the Twitter data, we noticed a couple of interesting trends:

1. For tweets with images, shorter tweets tend to receive more engagement.
2. For tweets without images, longer tweets tend to receive more engagement.

(We defined engagement as the sum of retweets, favorites, and mentions, divided by followers. We excluded clicks from engagement as the data included both tweets with links and tweets without.)

For overall tweet engagement by length—regardless of whether a tweet had an image or not—we looked at the results from all 1 million+ of the tweets we analyzed.

(This scatterplot chart shows the relationship between engagement per follower and character count, and the blue line running through the data is a smoother, to better visualize the relationship between tweet length and engagement per follower.)

You might notice here that although there seems to be a slight rise in engagement when the character count is less than 40 or greater than 120, the increase isn’t significant enough to quite warrant a claim that tweets with less than 40 characters are best.

In terms of raw numbers, tweets with 20 to 40 characters get around 60 percent more engagement per follower than tweets in the 60- to 80-character range.

We’re a bit hesitant to fully claim that 20 to 40 characters leads to more engaged tweets, due to a number of extraneous factors that could be influencing engagement also. For instance, one of the most significant factors to consider here is how many of these shorter tweets include an image. And it’s possible that fewer tweets have these shorter character lengths so the averages are more volatile.

So how many characters do tweets usually have?

Generally-speaking, most tweets are 80 characters or more.

From our Twitter data, the volume of tweets started rising steadily just after the 40-character length, and the volume peaked between 110 and 120 characters (the long-held idea for best length), with another spike just below the 140-character limit.

In another look, we cleaned the text field by removing hashtags, punctuation, URLs, and empty whitespace. We thought this might help better represent the true message of a tweet, minus the branded/business elements.

After cleaning the text we can see that the character count is more normally distributed around 60 to 80 characters.

Our best ideas about what this means

The first thought that comes to mind:

There are many factors that might influence the amount of engagement a tweet gets (e.g. sentiment, tone, multimedia, etc.). It can be tough to say if one tweet length is better than another, so we definitely recommend testing and seeing what works for your tweets.

To try to get a sense of what else might be affecting engagement, we can look at the top performing tweets where engagement tends to be higher in the data above.

Top Tweets by engagement per follower

Here’s a list of some of the top tweets we found in the study (and a thought or two on what makes these great).

Possibly the world's greatest pie chart. pic.twitter.com/C4AZW9WeBF

— Ink Tank (@InkTankMedia) May 16, 2015

What’s great about this: A fantastic, funny image that acts as the focal point of the tweet (the update text here amounts to a really great caption).

When you're playing wii, but then you have to go sing in the Super Bowl pic.twitter.com/orb1ml8aFZ

— Dory (@Dory) February 2, 2015

What’s great about this: The content is timely (our Twitter analysis was pulled during February, which included the Super Bowl), entertaining, and visual. Again, like above, the image and the text go together to make the joke.

This golden retriever GIF is a straight up daymaker. pic.twitter.com/38bOO7wtyt

— The Animal GIFs (@TheAnimaIGifs) February 5, 2015

What’s great about this: Dogs! The subject matter probably helped quite a bit. It’s also benefitting from the animated image and the funny factor.

And here’s a quick chart of all the top tweets:

My first thought when looking at the top tweets here is that almost all of the tweets include images! The number of tweets that included links (12) wasn’t too different from the number that did (8), but 18 out of 20 of the top tweets included a photo.

Which brings us to …

How does including an image affect engagement?

One of our favorite Twitter tips is to include images with your tweets. We’ve noticed a significant increase—sometimes as much as 150 percent more retweets—when we’ve tried this with our @buffer Twitter account.

Does this advice hold true for all users?

In our dataset of roughly 1 million tweets, around 42% of tweets included an image and roughly 58% did not.

How did the amount of engagement compare for tweets that included images and tweets that did not?

Tweets with images consistently received more engagement than tweets without images.

The above chart looks at engagement per follower, which is a way to analyze the data comparatively for those with tons of followers and those with less.

Tweets with images receive approximately 22.8% more engagement than tweets without.

We also ran the higher-level numbers here on average engagement in total. It’s possible that the stats here could possibly be skewed by bigger accounts or outlier results, though in this case, the charts seem to tell the same story – and maybe even to a slightly greater degree – as the one above.

Does including a link mean more engagement?

We know that including a link leads to more clicks (as there’s nothing to click without the link). But what is the effect on retweets, favorites, and mentions?

We found: Tweets with links tend to receive less engagement than tweets without links.

Around 70% of tweets in our dataset included a link, and the remaining 30% did not.

What does engagement per follower look like for these two types of tweets?

Tweets that do not include links received approximately 25.1% more engagement, on average, than tweets that did include links.

The average engagement per follower suggests that tweets without links tend to receive more engagement, and just in case you were wondering about what the average of total engagement looked like:

Our best ideas about what this means

Seems a bit counterintuitive, right? Tweets without links get more favorites, retweets, and replies than tweets with links.

I was fortunate to have the eyes of my Buffer teammate Tom on this data, and he had a really great thought as to what might be afoot here.

My hunch is it could be partly related to how behavior differs across various Twitter accounts.

I have a feeling that businesses and brands might use Twitter moreso to promote external content through the use of links while personal accounts might be more conversation-focused.
Thinking how this might work on Facebook, for instance, if a company with 1,000 followers posts out a promotional link, it might get 10-15 likes while a personal post to 600 friends might get 50-100 likes.

We took this idea and explored a bit further. What is the breakdown of tweets with links vs. tweets without links, based on different follower tiers?

It’s really fascinating that large accounts do post links in the vast majority of their tweets (around 70-80% of all tweets for accounts with up to 16,000 followers), yet the huge accounts—16,000 followers and up—post a relatively large amount of tweets without links!

Could it be that some of the huge accounts are having more conversations than smaller accounts?

It’s an interesting theory and a good reminder that the data we’ve explored here includes everything from everyone who shares with Buffer—both brands and individuals.

A couple extra thoughts:

• Should brands start composing tweets without links? It’d be a good test to try. My best guess is that there’s likely a lot of factors that would be hard to predict. For example, are people less likely to engage with a conversational tweet because it’s from a business vs. from a friend?
• It might also be interesting to mention that tweets with images were less likely to contain links than tweets without images. Since we learned from the earlier takeaway that image tweets get great engagement, it’s possible that images could play a big role in the engagement effect of tweets with or without links, too.

Can including a hashtag improve the amount of engagement you get?

We’ve mentioned in past articles that hashtags help your tweets. We’ve highly encouraged you to give them a try.

Does our new data support this?

Yes!

This plot below shows the average amount of engagement per follower for tweets by the number of hashtags included. It’s fascinating to see a clear positive relationship here. The positive effects of adding more hashtags seems to rise steadily all the way to 4 hashtags per tweet.

So how many hashtags do people usually use?

The majority of the tweets in our dataset, roughly 500,000, don’t contain any hashtags, and slightly less than 200,000 contain just 1. It’s interesting that there seems to be a clear positive relationship between the number of hashtags and the amount of engagement, yet most tweets don’t quite take advantage!

Further notes about methodology

In addition to the way that we went about measuring engagement (retweets plus favorites plus replies), one might also be tempted to give more weight to retweets because they are often considered to be more valuable than favorites or replies. An engagement measure like (2 * retweets + favorites + mentions) / followers could account for this difference in value, for instance. The challenging part was thinking about exactly how much more valuable a retweet is than a favorite or mention. Is a retweet really worth two favorites? We decided to try to keep the measure simple and minimize the number of underlying assumptions and estimations.

Reflecting on our engagement measure, we thought of other factors that might skew the amount of engagement that a tweet gets. The first such factor that came to mind was the number of followers that an account has.

If we think of engagement as retweets + favorites + mentions, then large Twitter accounts are naturally likely to receive more engagement than smaller accounts, even if the smaller accounts follow the best practices of tweeting.

To control for the effect of followers, we used a similar approach used in Dan Zarrella’s awesome study of hashtags, measuring engagement per follower. Using this as a measure of engagement, rather than just retweets + favorites + mentions, helps control for different follower counts and levels the playing field for smaller Twitter accounts.

Further notes about the data

It was fun to look at a slice of tweets from the U.S. West Coast set of Buffer users. Here’s why we chose this particular dataset:

With 1 million tweets we were able do a lot of manipulation quite quickly with a sufficiently large sample size. (Most of the analysis was done on a single computer, and analyzing many millions of tweets on one machine could get quite slow. ) We would love to include many more millions of tweets in the dataset, so we’re looking into using some advanced technologies (Spark and the SparkR package) to scale the analysis. Stay tuned.

Among the limitations that occur with a dataset of this particular size and scope:

• All results will be skewed toward the sharing habits of U.S., West Coast users.
• Seventeen days of data provided a sufficiently large sample, though in the bigger picture it’s somewhat of a short timeframe. It’s possible that other takeaways could have been found if looking at a different or longer set of dates.
• We did our best to analyze the data to account for differences in the size/following of a profile. We weren’t yet able to distinguish between different industries or topics (which we imagine could be quite a helpful next step for future studies).

Over to you

We’re incredibly grateful to share this data with you (and to have Lemonly’s help with the graphs and graphics), and we’re eager to hear your great thoughts.

Our previous data study had such amazing reactions in the comments. I’d love to be available to bounce around some ideas with you here as well.

What questions does this data bring up for you?

What insights might you take away?

What can we help to clarify or explain?

I’ll be hanging out in the comments along with our data scientist Julian to help with anything we can. Excited to chat this through with you!

Image source: IconFinder, UnSplash, Pablo, Lemonly

The post What 1 Million Tweets Taught Us About How People Tweet Successfully appeared first on Social.