Why Transparent Email Stopped Working For Us and What We Do Instead

When I joined Buffer and opened my new Buffer email account for the first time, the email count read 200.  I was momentarily stunned.
That was way more emails than I’d ever had in one place before.

Usually, when you set up an email account at a new workplace, your inbox is empty at first – people don’t yet have your email address and you aren’t on a bunch of email lists. I was planning on those few days or weeks of email bliss, where your inbox is nearly always zero.

I had known about Buffer’s value of transparency at work and about our practice of email transparency, but what I hadn’t realized was that sometimes the benefit of transparency can become a burden. That’s what was happening with transparent email.

Here’s why transparent email stopped working for us, and what we switched to instead.

Why transparent email wasn’t working for us anymore

Six years ago now, we shared a blog post detailing the exact workflows we used for transparent email. At the time, we wrote:

Our value of transparency extends all the way to the inbox. Every email is public within the team. Every bit of communication gets shared. Everyone knows everything. There are no secrets.

The idea is a sound one, and transparent email did solve a challenge for us. A lot of communication was happening via email, and we wanted everyone to be able to see emails transparently. Having specific email lists that we cc’ed or bcc’ed (click on that link above for more on that system) was a much more efficient way to work than to add each teammate individually.

So what stopped working?

We grew to a larger team size

The purpose of transparent email was to see conversations happening across any team and have all of the context you needed. It worked well for us when Buffer was a team of fewer than 30 people, but around and past that time, it started to get a little bit out of control. By the time we reached a team of over 80, transparent email was no longer easy to keep up with purely because of the volume.

If you look at it from a relationships standpoint, the formula for possible relationships means that at 80 people there were 3,160 possible relationships. Of course, every individual wasn’t always speaking with every other person at the company, but still, that’s a huge number of possible relationships to be communicating via email.

It put the burden of staying informed on the individual

Receiving several hundred emails in a week was a huge burden for teammates. They needed to leverage email to stay informed, maintain a system, and figuring out which conversations were relevant, and we placed that burden on individual teammates, rather than making a change at an organizational level. Teammates became responsible for keeping track of all internal conversations, while at the same time email was still a place for external conversations to come in as well and it was a lot to juggle.

On top of that, the feeling that I had opening my Buffer email for the first time happened to a lot of new teammates, and that wasn’t a great experience.

Filters didn’t always work

The best solution to that level of email was to create lots of filters to sort and organize all internal conversations based on the internal email address that was being cc’ed.

Having so many filters set up sometimes meant that people would miss out on emails that mentioned them, which isn’t a great result, but we spent a lot of time and energy trying to make these filters work with transparent email.

We created several detailed internal best practices documents filled with different systems for setting up filters and managing email. Our CEO, Joel Gascoigne, even outlined a project for an internal email tool, he wrote:

Email at Buffer is a little like the Wild West. With transparent email, the number of emails we individually receive as a 30 person team could be 5 or 10x the amount someone in a normal 30 person team would receive.

So we built an internal tool for email called Buffmail.

The result of all of this work was more work. Teammates needed to spend more time setting up filters and tweaking them when new teams were created or projects were kicked off. In the end, the issue wasn’t that we weren’t doing transparent email properly, it was that we had outgrown this system and needed to look for a new one.

Our new system for transparent internal communication

In the words of our Director of People, Courtney Seiter, we needed a tool to help us have “calm, deliberate and timezone-inclusive conversation and decision-making at Buffer.”

In addition to decision making, we wanted a space for work-related announcements and discussion in the form of longer, asynchronous conversations.

Our solution: Threads

We’ve mentioned Threads before as it’s a staple in our asynchronous communication. Threads makes it easy to have text-based conversations across the company and clearly mark decisions when they are made. It also works well with Slack; new Threads can be cross-posted to a linked Slack channel, which is a nice benefit.

Why Threads works for us

Threads is a much less overwhelming way for 90 people to communicate. It’s easy to skim a Space (that’s the Threads name for a specific area) to see if there’s any conversation you want to drop into, and there’s also a helpful button to mark something as follow up.

It’s also less likely that someone will miss a Thread that mentions them because of Threads’ notification system. Threads helps take the burden of staying informed off of the individual. If someone needs to be looped in, it’s easy to tag them, and if someone wants to skim a space, they can do so without getting alerted to every conversation.

How we set Threads up

In Threads, there are different “Spaces,” and anyone in that Space will see all of the Threads (discussions) created there.

We’ve set up Threads to have Spaces that everyone should be a part of, and other, optional Spaces depending on a teammate’s team and location.
Here’s how we’ve set up our Spaces:

Team Spaces

Any space that starts with “Buffer-” is intended for all teammates to permanently join with notifications on. For us, these spaces are:

• Announcements: For team-wide announcements
• Inclusion: To discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Joel’s Memos: For thoughts from our CEO
• Recognition & Praise: For celebrating and recognizing teammates
• Retreat: For retreat info
• Time-off: For vacation plans and time off
• Town-Hall: An asynchronous space for town-hall questions for our CEO and leadership team
• Updates: For area updates

Area Spaces

Each Area has its own Space with the naming convention Area-AreaName, e.g. Area-Marketing. These Spaces are intended only for those who work daily in that area to join. Teammates can view any Area Space anytime but we ask that they view only and not join any area they don’t work in directly. We do periodic cleanups to help stick to this guideline.

Project Spaces

We have a small number of Project Spaces with the naming convention: Proj-ProjectName, e.g. Proj-Pricing. These are for projects that touch many different teams and have a finite end date.

Geographic Spaces

We have several geography-related Spaces, e.g. Geo-UK and Geo-Canada, for discussion about the Buffer teammate experience specific to those countries.

Help Spaces

We have two help Spaces, Help-People and Help-Tools. Help-People is for questions or help around things like benefits, moving, and other life changes. Help-Tools is for when a teammate needs help with any of the tools we use at Buffer.

When we make new Spaces

To avoid having too many Spaces, we currently default to trying to write a Thread in the best-fitting Space before creating a new Space. If after that is given a try it still feels like this topic needs a new Space, then we’ll create it.

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We’ve been using Threads for over a year now and are still feeling like it was very much the right decision and choice to move away from transparent email. If you liked this blog post, check out this post where we talk about asynchronous communication and why it’s so important for remote work.

Thank Why Transparent Email Stopped Working For Us and What We Do Instead for first publishing this post.

Buffer Is Moving to a 4-Day Workweek for the Rest of 2020

In May, our entire team experimented with a 4-day workweek. The intention of this experiment was to help us all manage the stress and changes to routine caused by living through a global pandemic.

We initially rolled out the 4-day work week experiment for only one month, with the main goal of reducing teammates’ stress. Happily, both survey results and anecdotal stories tell us that this was a success.

After examining survey data and anecdotal feedback and chatting with the team, we’ve decided to conduct a long-term pilot of the 4-day workweek through the end of the year. Here’s more on how we came to that decision and our next steps.

The results from our 4-day workweek experiment

Our main goal with this experiment was to help the team manage stress and changes to their routine caused by COVID-19. To measure whether this effort was successful, we polled the team at the beginning and end of the month and asked about their autonomy, stress level, and overall work happiness.

Here are the results from our team surveys showing differences between early May and late May:

• We saw higher autonomy: 4.3 → 4.5
• We saw lower stress levels: 3.3 → 2.7
• We saw higher work happiness: 3.9 → 4.2

*These numbers are all out of 5.

These results are only part of the picture. We also asked teammates for written feedback and anecdotal stories about their experience. We received lots of both that supported these results. One teammate shared that they felt this experiment was helping them feel focused:

This last month has been incredible when it comes to finding more time to look after myself. I feel a lot more productive when it comes to the work I do and the creeping feeling of burnout towards the end of the week has gone completely. If anything I find myself more focused than I’ve ever been.

And another shared feelings of motivation and more collaboration:

General sense is that everyone has been feeling more motivated, energised and excited about the work we’re doing. We’ve also had more “ad-hoc improvements” with folx jumping in to add more monitoring, refactoring and improving our services. There was also more cross-team collaboration and more async activity on Threads and Slack.

It wasn’t completely smooth for all teammates, of course. We also heard a few challenges:

Since the biggest confusion to me was trying to remember/juggle who was off when, it would be great if we could decide on a particular day that we all take off.

Another challenge was around holidays (more on that below):

Due to a lot of public holidays during May, it meant that week to week it would often change as to who was taking what day off.  Folx appreciated having some flexibility in what day to take off, but it did result in a lot of deviations from the planned Wednesday off.

Because the 4-day workweek experiment was designed to give temporary relief to teammates during an especially hard time, we did not set goals around productivity or results during the one-month trial. In fact, we expected a tangible drop in productivity due to reduced hours.

So we were happily surprised when many teammates shared that they felt their weekly productivity was not all that different, and that their quality of work was higher due to increased rest and extra focus.

The one unique case here was our Customer Advocacy team. Because their style of work is heavily based on responding to customer queries, they may be an exception to the idea that fewer hours could result in similar productivity. Our VP of Customer Advocacy is leading separate discussions with this team around productivity and wellbeing in a 4-day model to see how they can make this shift work longer-term.

Why we decided on a 6-month pilot

Based on the results of the trial, we decided to start a more thorough pilot of a 4-day work week that focuses not just on teammate well-being but also on Buffer’s long-term success.

As a company we have a history of bold experiments, like being 100% distributed, having transparent salaries, and trying self-management. When testing out these new and bold ideas, we ask ourselves whether we are able to set and reach ambitious goals, deliver a high-quality experience for customers, grow our revenue, and make our mark on the world.

Some of those big experiments, like transparent salaries and remote work, have been a success because the answer to those questions was a resounding yes. For others, like self-management, the answer was no, and so we pivoted away from the experiment.

We’d like to seriously consider moving to a 4-day work week long term, so shifting to a 6-month pilot gives our team enough time to truly adapt to the concept so we can get more data on how this impacts team productivity and well-being in the long-term.

Next steps for this pilot

In order to truly evaluate whether a 4-day work week can be a success long-term, we need to measure productivity as well as individual well-being. Teammate well-being was our end goal for May. Whether that continues, and equally importantly, whether it translates into customer and company results, will be an exciting hypothesis to test.

We’re also keen to iterate on our current format and develop a more consistent approach. For the past six weeks, the 4-day concept has been implemented differently across teams and even individuals. Some teams took Wednesdays off and some took Fridays or Mondays off. This was fine for a short time, but in this longer experiment will likely feel a bit chaotic. We’ll be asking our teammates to help us define what a reduced-hours workweek looks like across a distributed team.

We also still have several elements to figure out.

• In our initial iteration of the experiment, we didn’t account well for holidays. We eventually decided that if a holiday already makes it a 4-day workweek, then the rest of that week can be considered a normal week. We’ve since heard that this could be disruptive for teammates. Some teams had Wednesdays off but if there was a holiday on a Monday they had a Monday off instead. We aren’t sure yet what our solution will be to this long term, and it’s something we’re keen to figure out.
• We also need to figure out how a 4-day workweek can be a success for our Customer Advocacy team. As much of their work revolves around interacting with customers and resolving tickets, taking additional days off has impacted both their productivity and the volume in our customer service inboxes.

We have an all-hands meeting at the end of this month where we’ll host breakout sessions asking teammates to help brainstorm how we can make the 4-day work week successful long-term, with a particular lens for what the Advocacy team is experiencing.

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This is just the beginning of a fun new journey for us. We’re excited to share what’s next and what we learn as we test the boundaries of how work happens.

In May, our entire team experimented with a 4-day workweek. After examining survey data & anecdotal stories, we’ve decided to conduct a long-term pilot of the 4-day workweek for the rest of 2020.

Here’s more on how we came to that decision & next steps: https://t.co/L73FpsgZv1

— Buffer (@buffer) June 16, 2020

Thank Buffer Is Moving to a 4-Day Workweek for the Rest of 2020 for first publishing this post.

Social Media Management in Times of Crisis

These are times of fast-changing news around COVID-19. It’s clear that what we are facing — not just as marketers, as friends, and parents and colleagues — is unprecedented. And we’re all in it together.

In times like these, people look to each other, and to their communities to figure out how to respond. Over the last, 9 years, we’re very grateful to have built up such a strong community of people who use our products, read our blogs and listen to our podcast, and we believe that it’s important that we all try to navigate these challenges together. That’s why we want to share these thoughts with you. Sometimes, it’s best to just start a conversation.

Last Thursday (March 12, 2020), as a team, we took a moment to stop and reflect. We paused our Buffer queue, as what seemed like a great and timely posts a few days ago, now felt a little irrelevant. We gathered together and we discussed what the COVID-19 situation means for Buffer, for our teammates and those closest to us, and our customers — and we’re still figuring this out.

Social media is such an important communication tool in 2020, and we know as we all try to navigate unexpected and unprecedented challenges, many of your customers and teammates will turn to social media for some form of support. And as many around the globe isolate, social media might become an even more important channel for communication and a sense of community.

So what does social media management look like over the coming weeks and months? We’re still figuring it out.

We hope that the below thoughts can act as a starting point to work from as we navigate the current and up-coming challenge.

This isn’t an opportunity

The first thing to say is that this isn’t a marketing opportunity. Brands shouldn’t be looking at the COVID-19 pandemic as something to capitalize on.

However, even though it’s not quite business as usual — every post, campaign and ad you run will need an added layer of care and empathy over the coming days and weeks — it is okay to continue to market and sell your product or services, we know for some businesses not selling products can impact the livelihoods of some of their teammates. Just don’t use COVID-19 as a platform to self-promote. 

Pause and reconsider your social media plans (and goals)

If you haven’t already, now is a time to reflect on any existing plans for the end of Q1 and heading into Q2.

Many campaigns and pieces of content you had planned might be better saved for another time. We recommend rethinking your content and social media plans to tailor them to the changing needs of consumers right now.

On Monday (March 16th), we were due to launch a new, updated version of our podcast, The Science of Social Media. We had a new episode lined up, new artwork, creative and more. But we felt it wasn’t the time “celebrate” something new so we hit pause on that temporarily to focus on the more immediate needs of our customers and our audience. (We still plan to launch the new style podcast in the next week-or-so, but the launch might look a little different.)

It’s also a good time to reflect on any goals you had for the coming months as priorities may need to change. For example, new customer acquisition goals might shift towards a focus on customer retention and support.

Now is a good time to take a look at the bigger picture and what social media means to your business in a time of global crisis.

If you decide to keep some campaigns or content paused and find yourself with a few spare hours that would have been spent on content creation, promotion or analytics, now could be a good time to focus on some of the social media tasks that aren’t directly customer facing like a social media audit. 

Is your company able to help

You never want to shoehorn your brand into a conversation in which it doesn’t belong. And most brands don’t belong directly in the COVID-19 conversation.

But that said, almost every business globally will be impacted in some way by COVID-19, and there might be some small things your business can do help in these moments.

At Buffer, we’ve been a remote-first company since the start, and with many businesses and workers being forced to go remote for the foreseeable future, this felt like the best place for us to help.

So after a brief pause last week, we decided to focus this week on how we might be able to help people adjusting to remote work:

Hailley also jumped into our remote work guide to freshen it up and ensure it includes all of our most useful remote work resources. 

Outside of Buffer, Common Thread Collective doubled down on sharing data and insights into how it the pandemic is affecting its brands and how it’s responding:

At a time when eCommerce business might be cutting back ad budgets, Privy hosted a webinar focused on making the most from your existing traffic: 

Loom made changes to its platform to help students and teachers: 

And Basecamp’s co-founders hosted a Q&A about remote work: 

Over the coming days and week, ask yourself: What role does your brand play in this situation?

(And it’s completely fine if feels like there’s nothing. Don’t force it.)

Think clearly about the unique role your brand plays in people’s lives. If you’re an entertainment brand, maybe your audience could do with a fun distraction, like Disney releasing Frozen 2 early. 

If you’re a travel company, dealing with support might be more of a priority, so you could try to proactive about questions from your audience and give clear directions on what’s happening. 

And as a local business, it could be helpful to simply share your opening hours or how you’re being affected by what’s going on. Saucy Brew Works, a brewery and restaurant in Cleveland has been keeping its followers regularly updated with open hours and updates:

Communicate clearly with customers

It’s almost always better to over-communicate than under-communicate. Especially in times of crisis.

If you’re closing your office and the team is working from home and it isn’t impacting your customers, that might not be something you’d want to communicate. If your team shifting to remote work will impact customer service response times, or delivery times, that is something worth sharing.

With so many companies impacted consumers are getting much more communication than usual from the brands and companies that they engage with, make sure that the information you are giving them is empathetic to that and focused on conveying only key messages.

When it comes to figuring out what to say when you put out a message over the coming days and week, the details matter. Strive to make all communication clear and relevant, and avoid making assumptions and share decisions early to give you customers as much time as possible to react.

Delta airlines has been great at communicating with its customers on social media over the past week-or-so. Its CEO, Ed Bastian, turned to LinkedIn to keep customers informed: 

And Delta has also been sharing some additional information and context across its social channels, such as how air filtration systems work on its planes. This is a great example of over-communication that is relevant to customers who may be traveling during the crisis.

Patagonia made the decision to close its retail stores on Friday, March 13, 2020:

In its announcement, Patagonia made sure to over-communicate and provide customers with plenty of information about how it is dealing with COVID-19. In the Twitter thread sharing the announcement about its retail stores closing Patagonia told its customers:

• We will temporarily close our stores, offices and other operations at the end of business on Friday, March 13, 2020.
• Employees who can work from home will do so. All Patagonia employees will receive their regular pay during the closure.
• We apologize that over the next two weeks, there will be delays on orders and customer-service requests.
• We encourage our friends everywhere to take the extra precautions necessary to safeguard their health and that of others.

The message could have simple been “We’ll be closing our retail stores at the end of business on Friday, March 13, 2020 — but taking the time to over-communicate, and share more than it needed to, helped Patagonia to assure it’s customers that is was doing all it could for them, and to support the company’s employees.

(This Twitter thread started by Matthew Kobach has more examples of brands communicating clearly during this on-going crisis.)

Support and keep your team informed 

Work will look a little different for all of us for a little while, and it’s great to embrace the concept of over-communication with your team as well as your customers.

In times of crisis, it’s important to keep in close contact with each member of your team and set some expectations around what work might look like over the next few weeks or months.

As people adapt to new working practices productivity might not be at its usual levels, and it’s important to let your team know how your company plans to deal with the effects of COVID-19 and the new work environment.

Here at Buffer, our Director of People, Courtney Seiter, and CEO, Joel Gascoigne, shared updates with us last week on COVID-19, Buffer and how the next little while might look for the team. We also have a temporary, and very optional, Slack channel where teammates can chat, share news, resources and support each other at this time. As a remote team, we’ve also been making extra effort to connect with each other for impromptu chats and get togethers, too. 

There’s still a lot going on to figure out but it feels incredibly important for company leaders, and teammates alike, to be pro-active supporting their teams and each other. 

Further resources on crisis communication and social media management

Here are a few resources we’ve found helpful for thinking about social media and communication strategy at this time:

• Facebook: Small Business Resource Hub
• Twitter: Brand Communications in Time of Crisis
• Harvard Business Review: Communicating Through the Coronavirus Crisis
• Ogilvy: How to Communicate in Turbulent Times
• Klaviyo: How to Communicate With Empathy During the Coronavirus Crisis

Thank Social Media Management in Times of Crisis for first publishing this post.

Introducing Best Time to Post: Personalized Recommendations to Increase Your Reach on Instagram

Search “best time to post on Instagram” and you’ll find countless articles telling you when to post according to studies of a few million Instagram posts.

We have written such articles ourselves. For a long time, we thought that’s the way to grow our reach and engagement on social media.

But that is no longer the best approach.

There are many reasons for the change. Most importantly, you now have much more data about your own posts and followers. The best time to post is when your followers are online and engaging with your posts.

How do you know when to post?

Well, you can now get recommendations for when to post on Instagram to maximize your reach, with Analyze. Curious to find out more? Read on.

Analytics as your assistant

Analytics is often simply numbers and graphs. It’s easy to understand why some people are intimidated by analytics. But that doesn’t have to be the way. Analytics can be joyful and fun. It should help you take away the tedious work of dissecting graphs and calculating numbers. Analytics should feel like your assistant.

With Analyze, you don’t just get charts. You’ll also see three recommended times to post on Instagram. They are times when your predicted reach is among the highest during the week.

Most people would find the three recommendations sufficient but if you want more, you can then dive into the charts.

How does it work?

Your brand’s best time to post is unique to your own brand. That’s because your Instagram followers behave differently from the followers of other brands. So your best time to post should be dependent on your followers’ behavior.

Here’s how Analyze predicts your reach:

First, it looks at how your previous Instagram posts have performed and when they were posted. Do posts at certain times of the day or the week get more reach? Second, to make the predictions more accurate, it also looks at when your Instagram followers are online.

Using these two pieces of information, Analyze predicts your reach on Instagram for each hour of the week. For each hour, Analyze also informs you how the predicted reach compares with the average hourly reach for the whole week.

The predicted reach for this hour is 31% higher than the average post reach of the week.

Then, it recommends three times to try.

You’ll notice that the three times aren’t necessarily the three times with the highest predicted reach. That is intentional. The top times are often next to each other (e.g. Wednesday at 1pm and Wednesday at 2pm). Unless you are posting about a live event, it doesn’t help your reach by publishing multiple posts around the same time. By spreading out your posts throughout the week, you can maximize your reach for the week.

Grow your reach more efficiently

Once you know your best times to post, you can go to Publish to update your posting schedule.

First, go to your Instagram account in Publish and click “Settings” then “Posting Schedule”.

Here, you can add new posting times or adjust your existing posting times to your best times to post.

The times are saved automatically, and you are ready to publish at your best times! Simply add new posts to your queue to schedule them at those times.

It’s worth noting your best times to post can change over time. While your followers’ behavior shouldn’t change drastically, every new post gives Analyze additional data to work with. With that, it might find new best times to post. I would recommend checking your best times to post every few months, especially if you have recently tried new posting times.

Insights delivered to you

We should all be spending less time figuring out our data and more time optimizing our campaigns. With the recommendations in Analyze, you can save some time analyzing your data or reading “best time to post” articles so that you can focus on what’s more important — creating great content.

This new feature is available on all Analyze plans. Give it a go, and take some time back from analyzing your data.

Try Analyze today.

P.S. In the future, you can expect Analyze to surface more insights to you, rather than you searching for them yourself.

Thank Introducing Best Time to Post: Personalized Recommendations to Increase Your Reach on Instagram for first publishing this post.

Introducing Buffer + Shopify: Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard

One thing we’ve heard over and over is that logging into social media analytics tools can leave marketers feeling a little lost. Sure you can see the reach and engagement of your posts but how is this really impacting your business?

Social media tools have been great at giving us social media metrics. But they terribly lack at providing us with a comprehensive view of the business. Unless you are running social ads, chances are you find it hard to know how your marketing efforts have influenced sales.

For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that invest in social media, the need to understand how social media and sales relate to each other is crucial. Marketers at these brands need to know how their social media strategy is helping the business. To them, social media is not just about getting likes and comments…

but how their social media posts are driving the business forward.

That’s why we are thrilled to introduce the first version of our Shopify integration today. You can now have your social and Shopify data in one single tool and create modern, visual reports with more data about your business. 

(Can’t wait to get started? Start an Analyze Premium trial to try the integration right away!)

Realize the full potential of your brand

Our customers use our platform of products to build their brand and connect with their customers online. Analyze, our new analytics product, aims to help you realize the full potential of your brand.

To achieve the best version of your brand, we want to give you:

• More data to provide a more complete picture of your brand
• Data that are easy to understand and share
• Strategies and tactics to achieve your goals

Currently, social media marketing can feel isolated from the business. You spend time creating content, find the best time to post, and respond to questions on your posts. At the end of the day, you can only report on follower growth, reach, and engagement.

Only if you had more data about your marketing efforts and the business!

When we look at 1,300 top DTC brands, we learned that 87.4 percent of them use Shopify to sell their products.

Shopify provides data that marketers and small business owners often lack in social media tools — sales data. We realized it’s a source of data that could give you a more complete picture of your brand:

Social + sales

Simplified Shopify reporting in your Buffer dashboard

“We usually cross reference metrics from Shopify and our social media analytics.”

When we asked our customers how they figure out whether what they are doing on social is worth it, we heard several versions of the quote above. That’s when we realized our customers have a problem we could solve.

With the new Shopify integration, you’ll have your social media and Shopify data in a single place — Analyze. For this first version, we focus on a few key metrics you need and put them in the same dashboard as your social media data.

At the top of your Shopify tab, you can get a quick health check-in on your business. This is built for you to get a sense of your business health at a glance.

One of the metrics you’ll get is your average customer lifetime value. This is an important metric to know because to have a profitable business, you generally want to spend less money on acquiring new customers and retaining them than they spend on your products.

You’ll also get data to help you understand where your sales are coming from and what products are selling well.

Which channel drives the most number of customers or the highest sales?

Which channel brings in the most valuable customers?

Which are my top products, and where are the sales coming from?

This additional data from Shopify in Analyze will give you a better picture of your business than having only social media data.

To make it easier for your reporting, you can add the tables to your reports in Analyze, download them as PDF, and share them with your team. Just like any other tables and charts in Analyze.

Connecting social media and sales

For a long time, marketers have struggled to show the impact of social media on the bottom line. Much of this data is not available in social media tools that marketers use to plan, optimize, and report their campaigns. It just felt off that marketers can plan and measure their social media campaigns in one tool but have to find another, often much more complicated, tool to know that the campaigns are selling products.

Now you can report how much sales your social media marketing strategy has generated for the business — using a single tool.

(These numbers do not include orders from customers who saw your social media posts and went to Google to search for your website and buy products. That is much harder to track right now. But you now know, at the minimum, how much sales came directly from your social media profiles and the actual impact is much higher.)

You no longer need to jump between tools to draw the connection between your social media efforts and your sales.

Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM, discovered that customers from organic social have a higher average order value than the site average. You can now see this for your business, too.

Gain a better understanding of your brand

Having more data and analytics is essential for realizing the full potential of your brand. It gives you insights to act on and improve your marketing campaigns so that you can grow your brand and your business.

This is just the first version of our Shopify integration, and we are keen to explore more ways to make it more valuable to you. For example, here are some of the areas we have been thinking about:

• Per-post sales: Find out how much sales each social media post has generated
• Campaign sales: Know how much sales your campaign has generated
• Customer insights: Learn more about the social media users who are buying your products
• Customer lifetime value: Calculate customer lifetime value for different segments
• Product buzz: Get insights into who’s talking about your products on social

For now, with your social media and Shopify data together in Analyze, you can already have a better understanding of your marketing and brand.

Give yourself an advantage today.

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How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales

Did you know:

Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.

Talk about buying power!

Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest. 

Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.

And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.

We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!

Here’s what we learned…

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How people are using Pinterest

According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.” 

Seventy-seven percent of weekly Pinners have also discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest, and according to Pinterest, “people actually want to see content from brands while they’re on the platform–78 percent say it’s useful.”

Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.

Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products. 

Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.

How to leverage Pinterest for sales: 5 tips from the Pinterest team

There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in! 

1. Brand your pins 

A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform. 

Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image. 

2. Create mobile-first content 

As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well. 

A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels. 

3. Create a similar look and feel 

Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.

According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”

This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest. 

And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.

4. Time your campaigns 

A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about? 

Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year. 

For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February. 
They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY! 

These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns. 

5. Set up your shop 

One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles. 

Every Business profile on Pinterest has the ability for users to create a “shop” tab. 

The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product. 

Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well. 

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We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments! 

If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there. 

Thank How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales for first publishing this post.

The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

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Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.

Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day.

I’m definitely among that group.

And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.

Not to mention, we had a ton of Stories podcast episodes in 2019, which you can find in our archives. 

So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose. 

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The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.

Let’s get right to it then. 

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1. Tastemade

Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade. 

Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories. 

In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch. 

That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next. 

Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome.

And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.

2. Brooklinen

Along with food content, music is another big theme for the year. You’ve probably seen your friends and colleagues sharing what they’re listening to on Spotify. You can share your songs straight to Instagram Stories from your Spotify mobile app. 

Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories. 

Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.

3. Burrow

Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow. 

They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.

Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!

4. Potluck 

For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters. 

Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo. 

Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights. 

Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.

I thought it was also really neat how Potluck did a Story educating people on where to find the filter. Worked great for getting the word out about it!

5. Pattern Brands

Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company. 

Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.

(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)

Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful. 

And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.

6. Allbirds

Allbirds does a great job of bridging the gap between product promotion and customer service. Allbirds uses some of its Stories to share answers to frequently asked questions about its products. 

This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person. 

7. Monica + Andy

Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories. 

Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.

What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.

8. Its Nice That

The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.

It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format. 

9. Instagram Story templates

And then one final Stories trend that we really loved seeing this year was the rise of Instagram Story templates. We referenced this a bit earlier with Burrow’s cool example of the Dream Sofa.  2019 introduced a whole cottage industry of Story templates for brands. 

A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib. 

The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes: 

• Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
• Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
• and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today

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How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Heather-Mae on Twitter
• Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank The Best Instagram Stories of 2019 for first publishing this post.