10 Top Tips for Smarter Social Media Marketing with the Buffer Mobile App

How often do you read and share an article on your phone? Or how often do you snap, edit, and share a photo with your phone?

If you like creating and scheduling social media posts with your phone, we would love for you to try our mobile apps. They will make social media marketing on the go super easy and smooth for you.

In this post, you’ll learn more about the Buffer mobile apps (Android and iOS) and the top 10 features for smarter social media marketing.

Let’s get started!

Getting started with Buffer on mobile

If you don’t have our app installed on your phone already, you can download the Android version from Google Play or the iOS version from iTunes.

Adding your accounts

When you open up the app, select “I’m new to Buffer, let’s signup” if you are new to Buffer. You’ll be able to sign up with one of your social network accounts (Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn) or your email. Tap on your preferred signup option, and log in to give Buffer access to your account.

Once you have signed up, you’ll be brought to your Buffer mobile dashboard. You can connect more social accounts by tapping on your profile image in the upper-left corner.

From here you’ll be taken to the relevant network to log in and give Buffer access to your account. Then you can choose which profile or page you want to add.

6 social network integrations

With our recent addition of Instagram, you can now connect social accounts from the six major social media platforms.

With the free Buffer account, you can connect up to three social profiles. For instance, you could connect three Twitter accounts or one Twitter account, one Facebook profile, and one Instagram profile.

Here are the 10 different social accounts you can add to your Buffer account:

• Twitter profile
• Facebook profile
• Facebook Page
• Facebook group
• LinkedIn profile
• LinkedIn Page
• Google+ profile
• Google+ Page
• Instagram profile
• Pinterest profile (only for Awesome or Buffer for Business account)

To upgrade to the Awesome or Buffer for Business plan, tap on your profile image and scroll to the bottom. Tap on “Upgrade to Awesome” to find out more about the Awesome and Small Business plans and purchase a subscription.

Using Buffer to manage your updates on the go

Setting up your schedule

First, it’ll be great to set up your schedule according to your preference. We would have set a default schedule for you, which you can keep or change.

To change your schedule, click on the settings gear icon in the lower-right corner and tap on “Posting Schedule”.

Here, you can select the days and times you want to have in your social media sharing schedule.

Sending your first update

Let’s add your first update from the mobile app!

Tap on the plus icon at the bottom and you’ll see the composer where you can type your update, attach photos or video, and select the accounts you’d like to share the update with.

When you’re done, tap on the “Buffer” button to add the update to your queue, or tap “Share Now” to send it right away.

If you are on the Awesome or Buffer for Business plan, you’ll also have the option to schedule your post (Schedule Post) or add it to the top of your queue (Share Next).

Managing your queue

Tap on the Content tab to see your queued social media posts. You can tap on a post to edit it, or tap and hold with your finger to rearrange its position in the queue.

10 top features to make the most of the Buffer mobile apps

Now that you’ve learned the basics of the Buffer mobile apps, let’s check out some of the more advanced, more powerful features.

1. Share from any app

Our app takes advantage of the built-in share menu that shows up in most apps, to let you add updates to Buffer from anywhere on your device. Once you have Buffer installed, just tap the share menu inside another app, such as your browser or Pocket, and tap on Buffer to send an update to your Buffer queue.

Here’s an example of how this looks when sharing from Safari on iOS:

For iOS, you’ll first have to turn on the extension. You can do so under “Settings” > “Set up Extension”, where you’ll see a set of short instructions.

2. Schedule native retweets

Here’s another cool thing you can share quickly via the mobile app — native retweets.

When you see a tweet you want to retweet or quote, tap on the menu arrow in the upper-right corner of the tweet, select “Share Tweet via…”, and tap on Buffer.

If you don’t add any message with the retweet, we’ll post it as a native retweet. If you do, it’ll become a quote tweet with your additional comment.

3. Get reminders for Instagram posts

Unlike most social media platforms, Instagram does not allow apps to post directly to Instagram. While Buffer cannot post to Instagram on your behalf, we would love to help you at every step.

Whether you add an Instagram post to your Buffer queue via the desktop or your mobile, the Buffer mobile app will send you a notification when it’s time for you to post. After you tap on the notification, Buffer will load your photo into Instagram and have your prewritten caption saved to your clipboard.

4. Drag and drop to copy posts across social accounts

Besides dragging and rearranging posts in your queue, you can also copy a post from one social account’s queue into another social account’s queue by dragging and dropping it into that other queue.

With the multitasking feature in iOS, you can even drag and drop images to Buffer to start a draft in Buffer immediately.

5. Pause queue in times of emergency

There might be times when you want to pause your social media posting urgently because of any breaking news and events that have happened.

You likely have your smartphone with you more often than your laptop. And that’s why there’s a pause button in the mobile apps. Anytime you want to pause your Buffer queue, just whip out your phone and toggle the pause option in “Settings”.

Pausing is done on a per social account basis. So if you have multiple social accounts that you’d like to pause posting for, you will need to pause each queue individually. You can read more about how pausing and unpausing work here.

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The following few features are available in the Awesome or Buffer for Business plan. You can upgrade to either of these plans within the mobile apps or from the web dashboard.

6. Quick re-Buffer to boost your reach

One of our favorite social media tips is to re-use your top social media posts. While these posts have performed well previously, not all your followers might have seen them. Resharing them allows more followers (and even non-followers) to see them.

Here’s how to do that swiftly with the Buffer mobile app:

• Tap on “Analytics”
• Tap on “Recent” beside the date and select “Most Popular”
• Find the post you want to share again
• Tap on the tiny arrow in the upper-right corner and select “Rebuffer”
• Edit the post as you like

You can then share the post immediately or schedule it for later.

7. Shuffle queue to mix things up

If you often share a few quotes from the same article or a few links from the same site in a row and want to mix them up, you will be happy to know that you can shuffle your Buffer queue.

The shuffle button is located just above your queue in the app. When you tap on “Shuffle”, you’ll see a confirmation message. Once you tap “Yes”, the posts in that queue will be shuffled randomly.

8. See how your posts are performing

We hope to make it easy for you to check your social media performance as and when you want. Just open up the mobile app and tap on “Analytics” at the bottom of the screen. Buffer for Business customers will get these three reports.

Posts Report: You’ll see a history of your published posts and each of their key engagement metrics. There is also a comparison with your average post performance from the past 30 days to help you instantly understand if the post is performing better than previous posts. (Read more about the Post Report here.)

Overview Report: This report gives you an overall view of your engagement levels, as opposed to the per-post basis that you would find in the Posts Report, for your Twitter account and Facebook Page. (Read more about the Overview Report here.)

Insights Report: You’ll find charts of engagement metrics, such as clicks and reach, over time in this report. If you tap on any of the points on the chart, you’ll see the absolute figure of that point.

9. Get a preview of your Instagram gallery

This is one of our most requested Instagram features — the Instagram Grid Preview.

With this preview, you can see how your upcoming posts will look like on your Instagram gallery, alongside the published posts. You can even drag and drop your scheduled posts in the preview to create your perfect Instagram gallery.

10. Share articles from your Content Inbox

Curating content is a great way to provide your followers with valuable insights, establish your authority, and get more followers.

You can easily discover great content and immediately schedule them using the Content Inbox feature within the Buffer mobile app. The Content Inbox can be found in the Content tab, last from the left in the top navigation bar. (You might have to swipe the navigation bar to the left to find your Content Inbox.)

Once you have set up your RSS feeds, you’ll see all the new blog posts from the websites in your Content Inbox. You can then tap on the link to check out that blog post and tap on “Add” to Buffer that link.

How can we improve our apps?

It’ll be great to hear from you. If you have tried our mobile apps, what do you like most about it? How can we make it better for you and your business?

If you have not tried our mobile apps, we would love for you to try them (Android or iOS) and experience better social media marketing on the go.

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Image credit: Unsplash

This blog post was originally written by Belle Beth Cooper in 2013 and has been updated to reflect the improvements in our mobile apps. 

Thank 10 Top Tips for Smarter Social Media Marketing with the Buffer Mobile App for first publishing this post.

How Effective is Twitter Promote Mode? We Tested It for 30 Days.

“@buffer, you’re invited to our beta program”

Late last October, we received an email from Twitter with the above subject line. We were lucky to be the few selected for Twitter’s new automated ads beta program, Promote Mode.

The idea is simple:

For $99 a month automatically promote your Tweets and profile to expand your audience and attract new followers.

At Buffer, we are always excited to experiment with new things, especially around social media marketing. So we jumped right in! We paid $99 upfront and tested the Promote Mode for 30 days.

In this post, you’ll learn about how Twitter Promote Mode works, and we’ll share our results from the 30-day experiment.

What is Twitter Promote Mode?

The official name for Twitter’s automated ads program is Twitter Promote Mode. Here’s how it works:

For a flat monthly fee of $99, Twitter will automatically promote your tweets according to your preferred targeting (interests or locations).

This program is great for people who want to promote their brand or products on Twitter and want to save time and hassle from running Twitter ads manually.

According to Twitter, “accounts with up to 2,000 followers will see the most value“, and Twitter is working on higher price plans for accounts with larger following.

Here are more details on how the Twitter Promote Mode works, according to Twitter1Twitter, 2017:

• All you have to do is tweet as per usual.
• Each day, Twitter will select up to your first 10 tweets that meet its quality requirement and promote them to your selected audience.
• Retweets, Quote Tweets, or replies will not be promoted.
• The ad creation is automated. You don’t have to create the ads yourself but you don’t get to choose the tweets to promote, too.
• You can still run Twitter ad campaigns alongside your Promote Mode subscription.
• On average, accounts will reach 30,000 additional people and gain 30 followers each month. (But performance may vary.)

How to set it up

It’s super easy to set up the Twitter Promote Mode; it takes only four quick steps. If you want to follow along, you might be able to find the “Promote Mode” option when you click on your profile image on twitter.com.

Otherwise, you can try this direct link: https://ads.twitter.com/subscriptions/mobile/intro

1. Select your country and timezone

The Twitter Promote Mode is currently only available in the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. As I was able to subscribe to the program from Singapore, it’s likely that the program is available outside of the three countries stated.

But you will have to pay in one of the three countries’ currency and have to pay any applicable taxes of your selected country. Also, Twitter will only promote your tweets to people in either of these three countries.

Note that you will not be able to change your country and time zone once you start the subscription.

2. Pick your targeting

You can have your tweets promoted to either people who like certain categories, such as “Pets” or “Travel” (i.e. “Interests”), or people in specific locations (i.e. “Locations”).

3. Refine your target audience

Then, you can choose up to five interests or five areas in your selected country, depending on your selected targeting option in the previous step.

4. Enter your credit card details

Finally, once you’ve checked your settings and checked the agreement at the bottom of the page, click on “Proceed”. You will be prompted to enter your credit card details. Twitter will review your account before it starts your subscription.

When Twitter approves your subscription, you can sit back, tweet (or Buffer your tweets), and enjoy automated promotion of your tweets.

Checking your results

The easiest way to see your results is through the Twitter mobile app. Tap on your profile photo, and then tap on “Promote Mode”2The GIF is taken from Twitter.. These are the data you can see on your dashboard:

• A progress bar for the 30-day period
• The number of people your promoted tweets have reached
• The number of followers you’ve gained through the promoted tweets
• The number of visits to your Twitter profile from the promoted tweets
• The number of tweets promoted

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Our Twitter Promote Mode experiment

Our results

Over the 30-day period, I took a screenshot of our results almost every day to track our progress. At the end of each week, I would record the results up to that point. Here’s how the tracking document looks like:

At the end of the 30 days, here are our results from the Twitter Promote Mode:

• 28,686 people reached
• 34 followers gained
• 230,092 profile visits
• 170 tweets promoted

Additional data points

Besides looking at our data, I thought it might be helpful to also look at the results of others who have tested Twitter’s Promote Mode.

During Twitter’s three-month pilot program, Bruce D. Sanders “gained over 30 new followers and reached over 30,000 additional people each month”3Twitter, 2017.

Matt Navarra, Director of Social Media for The Next Web, achieved similar results — 26 new followers gained and about 36,000 additional people reached. (For context, Matt Navarra mentioned that he usually gain about 600 to 1,000 followers organically every month.)

Today is the last day my account has Twitter’s Promote Mode active.

Here’s what 30 days of the $99 p/m Twitter feature generated pic.twitter.com/G8SWxxwfNY

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 29, 2017

Rhys Gregory, Digital Director at Effective Communication, did a quick video review of the Twitter Promote Mode and shared his results — 43 new followers gained and about 36,000 additional people reached.

Evan Kirstel, a social media consultant,‏ tweeted his results halfway through a month of the Twitter Promote Mode. Assuming the results would double by the end of the month, he would have gained 24 new followers and reached about 50,000 additional people.

Anyone else signed up for #Twitter‘s new promote mode? What’s been your experience? #socialmediatips #SocialMedia pic.twitter.com/q953mWyyRt

— Evan Kirstel (@evankirstel) December 6, 2017

The performance of the Twitter Promote Mode seems to be fairly consistent and in line with what Twitter promises — “On average, accounts will reach 30,000 additional people and add 30 followers each month.”4Twitter, 2017

The decision

Near the end of the 30 days, we decided that we would not renew our subscription. (When you cancel the subscription, the promotion would continue to run until the end of the 30-day period, unless you pause it.)

We based our decision on three main factors.

1. Performance

Besides looking at the results in isolation, we compared them with our Facebook ads performance. The Twitter automated ads performed slightly better than our recent Facebook engagement ads in terms of the reach per dollar spent.

But it might be helpful to note that the automated Twitter ads are not scalable. We cannot spend more money to get more results, unlike Facebook ads. So based on our results, we can expect to reach about 29,000 additional people every 30 days for $99.

We can also see that each new follower from the automated ads cost us about $3, which is pretty expensive.

2. Limitations

The Twitter Promote Mode also has several limitations.

Limited targeting options: Firstly, we can only choose either interest targeting or location targeting (and not both). I feel that this makes the audience a little too broad for the ads to be effective.

Secondly, only two of the interest options, “Business” and “Technology and computing”, make sense for us. Furthermore, they aren’t exactly our audience’s interests — marketing and social media. So the people that we’ve reached might not have been our actual target audience. A case in point: despite reaching more than 28,000 additional people, only 34 followed us.

 

Unable to select which tweet to promote: I believe this is meant to be an advantage of the program, where the promotions are on auto-pilot. However, as we tweet very often, it’d be great if we could select the tweets for promotion. For example, it might not be useful for us to promote a #bufferchat question.

3. Ease

Finally, the automated nature of the program provides a great ease for individuals and small business owners who might not have the time to manually create ads. We can just set and forget…

… only to a certain extent.

It could be possible for the program to promote an inappropriate tweet, such as tweets about Buffer’s downtime or our condolences for world tragedies. During these times, we’ll have to manually pause the promotion. (Yes, you can pause the promotion anytime but that won’t pause your subscription.)

That said, this situation is quite unique to us. If all of your tweets are suitable for promotion, you won’t face this challenge.

Will you try it?

Overall, we believe that the Twitter Promote Mode could be more valuable to accounts with a small following (up to 2,000 as suggested by Twitter). We’d also be keen to check out the additional plans Twitter rolls out for Promote Mode and whether some might be better suited for those who already have a reasonably large following.

A good rule-of-thumb to decide if this is suitable for you might be to compare your organic Twitter performance with the average Twitter Promote Mode performance of 30 new followers and 30,000 additional reach. Here are a few more things to consider

• Are these gains worth $99 (or more) to you?
• Can you achieve better results with the traditional Twitter ads, assuming you have the time to manually create them?
• Can you invest the money in other social media advertising options and get better results?

If you would like to read more about the program before you try it, you can check out Twitter’s help page.

Now that you have read our analysis, do you think you’ll give it a try?

—

Image credit: Unsplash

Thank How Effective is Twitter Promote Mode? We Tested It for 30 Days. for first publishing this post.

Do 3rd-Party Social Media Tools Negatively Affect Reach and Engagement? Our 200+ Post Experiment and Results

Putting your trust as a marketer or brand in 3rd-party social media tools to manage all of your posts can be a bit scary.

You might be wondering:

• Are my posts getting optimal reach and engagement?
• Do social media platforms penalize 3rd-party tools?
• Are 3rd-party tools really worth the cost?

These are some of the most common questions our Customer Advocates receive on a daily basis. And up until this research, we haven’t had any concrete data to say “yes” or “no” to whether or not 3rd-party tools affect the reach and engagement of posts.

We’re hoping to change that.

For an entire month, with the help of several awesome marketers and brands, we tested more than 200 posts across 35 profiles to see exactly how 3rd-party social media tools stack up vs. native posting.

Today we’re excited to share the experiment setup and results in their entirety!

Brief summary of results: 3rd-party tools don’t seem to negatively affect the reach of posts

We’d love to share a quick summary of what we found (you can find the full results and more on how we ran the experiment below!).

Facebook:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 81,639 total reach / 9,071 per post
• Native Posting: 9 posts / 79,380 total reach / 8,820 per post

Twitter:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 45 posts / 949,890 total impressions / 21,108 per post
• Native Posting: 45 posts / 975,223 total impressions / 21,671 per post

LinkedIn:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 63,221 total reach / 7,024 per post
• Native Posting: 9 posts / 54,646 total reach / 6,071 per post

Read on to check out all of the details!

3rd-party social media tools vs. native posting (setup)

In order to make the research as statistically sound as possible, we focused on three important factors:

• Account Variation: Ensuring that we tested multiple 3rd-party social media tools and social accounts
• Content Quality: Ensuring that we tested similar content across platforms
• Posting Consistency: Ensuring that we posted at similar times and frequencies

Our tests ran from November 27, 2017, to December 19, 2017.

Account Variation

Our biggest concern with an experiment like this is that our results would be biased if we only tested Buffer content with the Buffer tool.

We knew it would take multiple marketers and tools to make the data meaningful.

First, we signed up for test accounts with Hootsuite and CoSchedule. This would allow us to test three different 3rd-party social media tools to reduce the chance of a particular tool playing a factor in reach and engagement.

Then, we turned to the Social Media Masterminds Facebook Group and asked if any marketers would be up for helping us run a few tests. The response was incredible…

Judging by the number of comments and overall enthusiasm for this experiment, we knew we were onto something.

In the end, we received data from 11 different brands, totaling more than 98 posts across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Factoring in these results to the overall findings greatly helped to reduce any biased data. A huge thanks to everyone that participated!

Now we just had to figure out how we would approach content.

Content Quality

Content presented a unique challenge in that we had to be strategic about what we posted and when we posted it.

As many marketers know, posting the same content multiple times in a short period of time might result in a decrease of reach and engagement with each post.

We ultimately decided that we would not post the same content multiple times. Rather, we would post three different types of content (links, images, videos) and do our very best to ensure that each piece of content was super high-quality.

But what we realized is that, at the end of the day, it’s nearly impossible to create truly equal content – some posts will inevitably perform better than others based on a hundreds of different algorithm factors.

In short, content is the number one factor that determines success on social media.

More on the implications of social media content later in this post!

Posting Consistency

The final factor that we focused on for this experiment was to ensure that we were posting consistently. Both timing and frequency impact social media results and so we did our best to post at roughly the same time and frequency each day.

• Facebook: Posted once per day between 6:00am & 12:00pm PST.
• Twitter: Posted 3-5 times per day between 5:00am & 10:00pm PST.
• LinkedIn: Posted once per day between 6:00am & 12:00pm PST.

Posting natively proved to be the most difficult part of this experiment! We found that without 3rd-party social media tools we were having to set reminders in our calendar in order to post at the correct times.

Multiplying that by eight posts per day and three social media accounts, we did end up missing a few posts here and there which prolonged the study.

Last, but not least. It might be helpful to provide the Buffer audience sizes on each network.

Current Buffer Audience Sizes:

• Facebook: 106,000
• Twitter: 927,000
• LinkedIn: 16,500

3rd-party social media tools vs. native posting (results)

Now for the fun part!

Do 3rd-part tools negatively affect reach and engagement on social media?

Data-Backed Answer: No.

We did not find a significant difference in social media reach and engagement whether we posted through 3rd-party tools or natively to each network. As you might expect, some pieces of content performed better than others no matter how they were posted.

If you’re interested in seeing all of the raw data from our experiment, feel free to check out the original spreadsheet where we kept track of every single post.

And if you’d like to run your own 3rd-party tools vs. native posting experiment, we’re happy to share the blank spreadsheet template:

Download: 3rd-Party Tools vs. Native Posting Results (Blank .XLS)

Total Reach

First, let’s take a look at the main component of our experiment – how 3rd-party tools performed vs. native posting in regards to reach/impressions on each social media network.

Facebook:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 81,639 total reach / 8,515 per post
• Native Posting: 9 posts / 79,380 total reach / 8,820 per post

Slight Advantage: 3rd-Party Tools

Twitter:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 45 posts / 949,890 total impressions / 21,108 per post
• Native Posting: 45 posts / 975,223 total impressions / 21,671 per post

Slight Advantage: Native Posting

LinkedIn:

• 3rd-Party Tools: 9 posts / 63,221 total reach / 7,024 per post
• Native Posting: 9 posts / 54,646 total reach / 6,071 per post

Slight Advantage: 3rd-Party Tools

Average Reach Per Post Type

Next, we thought it would be useful to break down how each post type (links, images/GIFS, videos) performed with both 3rd-party social media tools and native posting.

Link Posts:

• Average Link Post Reach (Facebook, 3rd-party): 7,333
• Average Link Post Reach (Facebook, Native): 7,332
• Average Link Post Impressions (Twitter, 3rd-party): 20,326
• Average Link Post Impressions (Twitter, Native): 18,931
• Average Link Post Reach (LinkedIn, 3rd-party): 6,125
• Average Link Post Reach (LinkedIn, Native): 5,852

Images/GIFs Posts:

• Average Image/GIF Post Reach (Facebook, 3rd-party): 5,733
• Average Image/GIF Post Reach (Facebook, Native): 8,237
• Average Image/GIF Post Impressions (Twitter, 3rd-party): 19,522
• Average Image/GIF Post Impressions (Twitter, Native): 22,914
• Average Image/GIF Post Reach (LinkedIn, 3rd-party): 8,148
• Average Image/GIF Post Reach (LinkedIn, Native): 6,247

Video Posts:

• Average Video Post Reach (Facebook, 3rd-party): 14,146
• Average Video Post Reach (Facebook, Native): 17,100
• Average Video Post Impressions (Twitter, 3rd-party): 26,495
• Average Video Post Impressions (Twitter, Native): 24,214
• Average Video Post Reach (LinkedIn, 3rd-party): N/A
• Average Video Post Reach (LinkedIn, Native): N/A

It’s interesting to note that in all cases there was no clear winner between 3rd-party social media tools and native posting. Each performed better seemingly at random – making their performance more or less even across the board.

Which leads us to the 3 major takeaways that we got from this experiment.

3rd-party social media tools vs. native posting (takeaways)

This experiment was an eye-opening one, to say the least! It gave us a great perspective on the current state of social media reach and engagement while also reminding us how much time and effort goes into creating great content.

We’re excited to share the three biggest takeaways we learned in the process.

1. Importance of Content

The number one takeaway that we got out of this experiment is that content is the most important factor that determines social media posting success.

It matters more than timing and frequency. And it matters more than whether or not we posted natively to each network or through a 3rd-party social media tool.

In examining the data, there were times when a piece of content “went viral” when posted natively and there were times when content “went viral” when posted through a 3rd-party tool.

We’ve had the pleasure of running multiple experiments over the past year and it always comes down to the same thing: content.

For example, simply reducing our posting frequency and focusing on only creating content that we knew our audience would love, we were able to increase our Facebook organic reach by more than 330 percent in 2017.

Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective on the types of content we create:

If you’re looking for a fun way to switch it up and create a ton of high-quality posts in 2018, feel free to check out 20 social media content ideas that have worked for us and just might work for you, too!

2. Power of Video

We’ve talked about the importance of video marketing lots here on the blog in the past – we even mentioned the video trend in a recent episode of the Buffer Podcast.

Now we’re excited to say that we have our very own data to back it up!

Here’s how videos stacked up in terms of reach and engagement on Facebook and Twitter in comparison to links and images/GIFs:

LinkedIn doesn’t currently offer native video posting for brands and so we weren’t able to test the data from that network. But rumor has it that they’ll be opening up native video posting for brands sometime in 2018 (yes!).

Whether networks are prioritizing videos in their algorithms or people truly do enjoy interacting with video over other types of posts, we can expect to see a lot more of them in the coming year.

3. Time and Productivity

Folks that work and are successful in the social media industry know that it can take lots of time and effort to create amazing content and grow accounts.

That’s why we’re huge fans of anything that can make our jobs that much easier – extensions, hacks, tools, you name it!

Planning, uploading, and posting to social media natively turned out to be a major challenge for us. We often found ourselves forgetting to upload a Tweet or Facebook post at a certain time.

And quite ironically, when posting natively, we ended up using Buffer to “store” all of our content so that we could quickly copy and paste the image and caption to each social network. We’re not sure what we would have done without that over the course of the three weeks.

For us, utilizing a social media tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, CoSchedule (or any of the other great tools out there) is how we’re able to ship great content consistently and on time.

Thoughts and next steps

At this point you might be eager to run some 3rd-party vs. native posting experiments of your own. I know I would be!

While it’s great to read studies like this one, every brand’s results on social media might look a little different. You might rest a little easier at night knowing for sure that your social media posts aren’t being penalized for using a 3rd-party tool.

If you’re interested, you can grab a copy of the blank spreadsheet template here:

Download: 3rd-Party Tools vs. Native Posting Results (Blank .XLS)

Or, check out the raw data from our experiment, including the results from 11 other brands:

Results: 3rd-Party Tools vs. Native Posting (Buffer + Community)

I’d love to hear the results of your experiments!

Please feel free to leave a comment below with any questions about the experiment or results above, or your own experience with 3rd-party social media tools vs. native posting.

Thank Do 3rd-Party Social Media Tools Negatively Affect Reach and Engagement? Our 200+ Post Experiment and Results for first publishing this post.

We Studied Our Top Social Media Posts of 2017. Here’s What We Learned.

Marketing for Plumbers

Running a successful plumbing business means bringing in positive cash flow from your investments. This holds true whether we are talking about employees or a marketing budget. Marketing for plumbers, having said that, is fairly simple and cost effective. But it doesn’t happen overnight.

Plumber Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business

The plumbing industry, like most local business niches, can use the web to target customers in their market. A quality lead generation website, professional seo, an active social media network, and Google My Business (GMB) are a few of the big ways to do this. If you are the DIY type, just know that the plumbing niche is not the easiest to target and a professional may be needed to compete.

High Quality Lead Generation Website

It even sounds great right?

Your website can’t still be the same old 2013 cool site that you had made. Today’s web is so different and so are all the mobile devices.

Even if your website was made with great care, it still is too dated to be effective today when it comes to getting plumbing leads for plumbers.

So what makes a great lead gen site?

Today, the best pages have a contact form present above the fold, or before the user scrolls. You also want a couple key reasons why you are the best bet for the user. The final key is to put some social proof right there, in the form of a testimonial.

Gone are the days when a “fancy” slider introduces your company. When is the last time you actually waited to see all 5 slides on a homepage? Even worse, if you do wait, do you ever find what you came looking for?

Beyond that top section of each page, you need awesome content that tells your customers how you can help them. Also ensure that your navigation is simple and the site isn’t cluttered. Finally, use images that are of your business where possible, otherwise purchase quality stock images. Don’t just grab free ones from Google, it looks tacky.

Finally, make sure that your website loads fast for visitors. Nobody wants to wait 6 seconds for the fancy moving images on your page. Keep it simple and clean, a fast site is often the result. And lots of leads for your business.

Search Engine Optimization Gets Your Plumbing Website on Google

Perhaps you have heard the term by now. SEO. But what is it?

SEO, or search engine optimization is the act of attempting to make your web properties more visible in search engines for a given set of terms.

Take for instance, a great looking website in the plumbing niche. If it doesn’t even get seen on search, how many customers could it possibly attract?

Not many, so how do you fix it?

The answer is simple, you perform seo to get the website ranking higher for searches that your potential customers use when they search online.

White Hat vs Black Hat (or Gray)

SEO comes in many forms, but it is often classified between either white or black hat, and now gray hat has emerged as a term.

White hat seo is a term used by the “purists” that cling to every word that comes from the Google propoganda machine. They claim to strictyly adhere to every rule.

The truth is, nobody is abiding by every rule, or they aren’t performing seo.

Black hat seo means the gloves come off. Black hats do whatever is necessary to get the ranking. Often they are seen as lazy, since automation is one of their main weapons of choice.

Somewhere in between those 2 “factions” lies the gray hat seo scene. As you may have guessed, it’s a mix of the two. On the surface and when talking to clients, they claim to be clean (likely). In practice however, they only try to be. If a limit can’t be reached and a site won’t climb, they will stray to the dark side, thus the gray hat.

Whatever side of the color spectrum suits your plumbing business, some certain things need to be done. These are foundational seo tactics that every website should strive to perfect. Of course you know that everything you create needs to be centered around quality keyword research and planning.

• on page seo ~ optimize the title, description, headings, images, and text to make sure search engines understand the meaning of your content
• interlinking ~ to make your site more searchable, you want to link pages together where it makes sense
• citations/directories ~ there are still a few major data aggregators out there that send your data to websites across the world, get on those

One of the often overlooked pieces to seo, is the social media network. Having the popular social media channels locked down for your brand is important and powerful.

Branded Social Media Marketing Network for a Complete Plumber Marketing Package

Don’t make these just to get them online either. Make them being a solid representation of your brand. Your social channels can be a great way to instill trust in potential customers, don’t take that lightly.

I’m referring to the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and so on. Grab at least those 5 for the plumbing industry.

By now you have probably heard that having an active social media channel is important for business. I can surely tell you that blindly posting will not grow your brand.

However, properly building out these profiles, interlinking them all together and with your website, and syndicating your content is great for seo.

It provides backlinks from high quality websites, and they aren’t spammy links from fake fiverr gigs.

Aside from that, these profiles have the ability to rank. A well built, active and powerful Twitter or Facebook page can easily outrank a competitor’s poor website. You get 2 chances instead of one.

Then there is the obvious fact.

Social sites can generate traffic! Considering traffic is one of the main goals of seo, it just makes sense as a potential candidate in terms of marketing for plumbers.

Perhaps the easiest avenue for traffic in the plumbing industry would be from YouTube. Considering the number of DIY plumbing projects there are that you may not necessarily want a call from, your content options are big.

Fix a leaky faucet and make a step by step video. That could well drive thousands of visitors to your website over time. Will they all be in your local market? No, but the traffic builds the authority of your channel, and consequently the website it links to (yours). Since you do the work anyway, this is a smart marketing strategy.

That brings us to the final point of the plumbing marketing must haves. And it’s another Google product.

Get Your Plumbing Business on The Google Map

GMB is perhaps one of the best marketing channels for a business to generate inexpensive calls that are somewhat predictable and inexpensive.

One of the cool parts about the GMB platform is the Insights. This area tells you the number of calls, how many folks asked for driving directions to your shop, and the number of direct website visits generated by the map listing in the last 30-90 days.

Even Google is realizing the power of the map listing in local search. Consequently, they are testing paid service ads in that area of the search results around the country at times, and in certain niches.

The best part about Google My Business is that the listing itself is a free digital marketing opportunity!

The bad part is that getting your plumbing business listed is tough unless the searcher is in your driveway or you live in a small city.

I’m not trying to say the “average Joe Plumber” couldn’t rank in the map pack, but it’s unlikely. Unless you are a plumbing company in Tinytown, USA, it’s time for an seo specialist.

If you must go it alone, here is a guide that will help you add your business to Google Maps.

The Google Map Listing is one of the most powerful business profiles you can build online. For that reason, make sure you provide quality images and text, as well as completely building the profile.

Get Your Plumber Marketing Plan Together and Running

This is just a handful of plumber marketing tips you will likely need to run a successful campaign, but it is the foundation. Once you have these items together and in place, you are ready for your business to climb the ranks. And of course, if you need help, we perform awesome marketing for plumbers!

The post Marketing for Plumbers appeared first on Cloud Inspector Web Design.

Marketing for Plumbers published first on http://www.cloudinspectorwd.com/

7 Tips for Building a Career in Marketing (Advice and Insights From Top Founders and Investors)

“How did you get into marketing?”

At Buffer, members of our marketing team are often asked this question. And the truth is, the path looks different for each of us:

• Alfred was in the army
• Arielle was a health coach
• Kevan, our Marketing Director, was a sports reporter

But for those of you out there who want to start a career in marketing or maybe build from where you are in 2018, we’d love to help you figure out:

• How can you transition from your current role into marketing?
• What should you focus on learning?
• What skills do you need?

To help answer these questions (and more!), we’ve teamed up with Product Hunt, who recently published their first book on careers. The book highlights the best insights from top founders and investors on mentorship, overcoming challenges, and the best and worst career advice they’ve received.

In this post, we’ll share some of the insights from Product Hunt’s book — including lessons from Tim Ferriss and Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian— as well as some advice on building a career in marketing from the Buffer marketing team.

Ready to jump in?

7 Tips for building a career in marketing

1. Form habits around your strengths

You are the average of the five people you associate with most. Also, you don’t need to get much right to be and feel successful. Just form habits around one or two strengths.

Tim Ferriss

In Product Hunt’s book, Tim Ferriss’ #1 piece of advice for anyone looking to kickstart their career is to “Form habits around a few strengths.”

And at Buffer, we’ve built our marketing team around our individual, core strengths. For example, as an Editor, I focus mainly on my strengths in content marketing and SEO:

As Kevan explains in our t-shaped marketer post:

Generally-speaking, everyone on the Buffer marketing team will have all the base knowledge and marketing foundation skills; plus, each teammate will have chosen at least one main channel in which they are an expert.

Try to form habits around whatever discipline of marketing you’re most excited about:

• If you’re into video, download some stock footage and start editing it
• If you want to become an SEO master, try reading as much content as possible from places like Moz, Ahrefs and Backlinko
• If writing is your thing, set aside time in your calendar each day to sit and write

It can be daunting to look at marketing and think you need to fully master: analytics, data, CRO, SEM, advertising, copywriting, SEO, community and more.

But in reality, to be a successful marketer, you don’t need to be an expert in every channel: one or two areas of expertise will be enough.

However, before diving right in and choosing an area or two to focus on, experiment with a bunch of different skills to see what’s the best fit for you.

2. “No” is just a starting point

The best piece of advice I ever received was that “No” is often just the starting point, and most careers worth having involve a fair amount of determination, grit, and just general “try, try again”-ing.

Kathryn Minshewf, Founder of The Muse

When it comes to kickstarting a career in marketing—or even climbing the ladder, you’ll likely hear “No” and a lot more than “Yes”.

From pitching editors content ideas to applying for various roles and freelance gigs, throughout my career, I’ve been told “No” plenty of times.

But what I learned along the way was that each “No” was bringing me a step closer to a “Yes”. For example, each article pitch I had rejected helped me to eventually land my first paid writing gig with Crew.

And When I landed my role at Buffer, it was actually the second time I applied — Kevan, who’s now our Marketing Director, was also unsuccessful in his first Buffer application: 

Kevan used the above note as motivation and failing to land his dream job helped him to realize where he could focus his energy to improve.

Treat each “No” as an opportunity to learn and refine your skills.

3. Focus on timeless skills

Write every day. Even if you’re not a writer, I find this practice to be clarifying for many things.

MG Siegler, Partner at Google Ventures

There are certain skills that will never become outdated in marketing. To name a few:

• Communication
• Writing
• Storytelling

These skills will always be valuable.

For example, whether it’s a blog post, copy for a landing page or captions for a video, writing will always be a key skill for marketers to have.

And before joining Buffer, Kevan used to write 2,000 words minimum every day to help improve his craft. Alfred also challenged himself to write every day before he worked at Buffer and again when he first transitioned into a content-focused role.

Try to find opportunities in everyday life where you can practice these timeless skills.

For instance:

• Treat every tweet or email you send as a chance to improve your writing skills
• Next time you’re speaking with a customer service agent, think about how you can make your communication really clear and easy to understand
• The next time you compose a Facebook status, think about how you can effectively tell the story you’re looking to share (these storytelling formulas may help)

4. Pursue side hustles

If you’ve got things you want to build, just build them for the sake of learning a new thing.

Alexis Ohanian, Co-founder of Reddit

At Buffer, we love side projects.

And when it comes to marketing, side projects can be a great way to learn new skills and embrace areas you’re passionate about.

For example, when our content crafter, Alfred, was keen to learn more about design and coding websites, he set out on a mission to redesign his personal site and code the changes himself.

Playing around with my personal blog design in Sketch again. Sharing a *very* early homepage design here. Thoughts are welcome! pic.twitter.com/oBJfDd05gn

— Alfred Lua (@alfred_lua) July 25, 2017

This side project enabled Alfred to level up his skills and now he can even commit changes to Buffer code:

Without taking on this side project, Alfred may not have had the opportunity to learn about design and development. But through a side project he’s picked up some skills that are invaluable to our team.

No matter what stage of your career you’re at, side projects are a great way to learn and level up your skills.

When it comes to thinking about a side project, I love the three rules for side projects that Hiut Denim Co shared on Medium:

1. They don’t have to provide you with a living. You can still eat if they fail.
2. They don’t have a deadline. And as there is no time pressure, you don’t revert to your usual formula. You try new things. You experiment. You take risks.
3. This is a Labour of Love. You provide the ‘Labour’. And you provide the ‘Love’. So when you spend time on it, it is because you really want to. That keeps you coming back and pushing it on. That’s important. This thing will require you to keep plugging away at it, maybe, for years.

And across the Buffer marketing team we still embrace side projects that help us to level up our skills in marketing and other areas:

• Kevan has a weekly newsletter on marketing and leadership
• Hailley has a future of work podcast
• Alfred has a fortnightly newsletter on marketing

5. Embrace the industry

I truly believe that to excel in a specific industry if you are a creative, you need to live and breathe the industry.

Helena Price, Photographer

Marketing is an ever-changing industry.

The platforms we use to reach our target audiences, like Facebook, Instagram and Google are constantly evolving and the tactics that deliver results one day, don’t the next.

Often, the most successful marketers succeed because they love what they do and always keep on top of the latest trends, news, and developments.

Marketers at all stages of their careers can benefit from following industry blogs, publishers and leaders.

Here’s a quick list of sources I’d recommend following:

Marketing industry blogs

• AdWeek: a leading source for news and insight for marketers
• AdAge: daily news and updates from the marketing and media landscape
• CMO: insights, expertise and inspiration for and by digital leaders

Individuals to follow

• Matt Navarra: for all things social media
• Rand Fishkin: for SEO, marketing and leadership
• Ali Mese: for a ton of great startup marketing and content advice

6. Help others

Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it—give it away. Pay it forward.

Naval Ravikant, Co-founder of AngelList

One of the best ways to progress in your career is to help others.

When you take the time to help others solve problems and offer feedback, you get the chance to showcase your skills and build your network at the same time.

When it comes to finding people to help out, you could start with answering relevant questions on communities like Inbound, GrowthHackers and Quora.

For example, early in his career, Hubspot’s Director of Acquisition, Matthew Barby, searched the internet for marketing questions he could answer in order to help others:

I scoured through online forums and communities to find questions that I could answer, and when I did answer them, I’d go into great detail.

Keep your eyes peeled across social media for opportunities to help people in your niche, too. Often individuals will turn to Twitter and other online communities when they’re looking for some feedback or help.

Creating content is also a good way to help other marketers. For example, Kevan shares frequent insights about marketing at Buffer in his Medium publication, Crumbs:

And SEO consultant, Dan Shure, takes people behind the scenes of life in the SEO world with his vlog:

Always be on the lookout for opportunities to help others. 

7. Think like a journalist

The most important thing about being a good journalist is the ability to think critically. A good journalist asks the right questions, finds the truth in a story, and tells the reader what matters.

David Ewalt, Author of Of Dice and Men

With the above quote in mind, marketers and journalists are much alike.

In marketing, it’s important to always have a critical eye and question everything. For example, if traffic on your blog has increased, you might ask yourself:

• What’s caused the increase?
• Where is the traffic coming from?
• Why has this happened? And can we repeat this success?

It’s also important for marketers to find the truth in what we’re sharing. Often, marketing content will reference data or studies and it’s up to us as marketers to fact-check what we’re sharing and ensure we attribute the correct sources.

As Smooch. Editorial Director, Dan Levy, explains on Moz:

I once had a blog post queued up and ready to go live first thing the next morning until our eagle-eyed social strategist recognized one of the case studies cited in the post and noticed that the author had completely misinterpreted the results. In a small industry, examples and stats often get recycled from one blog to the next. The result is a case of broken telephone where the facts get muddled in transit. Proper attribution makes it easier to track where the breakdown occurred and to set the record straight.

In marketing, it’s a good practice to approach everything with a curious eye and look for the “why” and “how” behind every piece of data.

As Brian Balfour shares on his blog:

Real insights do not happen by scratching the surface. Real insights come from digging to the deeper layers.

Over to you

Thanks so much for checking out this post. If you’re interested in some more career advice from uber-successful founders and investors, you can check out Product Hunt’s book here.

I’d love to continue the conversation with you below, too.

What would your advice be for someone looking to build a career in marketing? Or if you’re trying to break into the marketing industry, feel free to ask any questions below in the comments.

Thank 7 Tips for Building a Career in Marketing (Advice and Insights From Top Founders and Investors) for first publishing this post.