7 Invaluable Marketing Skills That Help Teams Produce Consistently Great Content

In speaking with thousands of marketers and businesses over the past several years, we’ve learned that marketing has an incredible potential to impact people’s lives.

In fact, the American Marketing Association defines marketing as:

“The activity, set of institutions, skills, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

I love that. We as marketers are benefiting society at large!

But marketing skills and career growth don’t come easy in a field that moves at the speed of light. It seems like every week companies are demanding an evolved skill set out of their employees – giving rise to a new era of marketing roles such as the Full-Stack and T-Shaped Marketer.

Brands that can successfully bring a variety of people, marketing skills, and unique perspectives together have a huge advantage when it comes to providing value.

That’s why we’ve partnered with the incredible marketing team at Asana, a leading work management software, to break down the top 7 invaluable marketing skills that help some of the greatest brand teams on the planet produce consistently great content.

Let’s dive in!

7 invaluable marketing skills for teams

As Sujan Patel writes on his blog, “the modern marketer has to be familiar with a lot, good at many, and master of a few.”

Having a variety of skills and tools not only provides ultimate flexibility as a team to create a variety of successful marketing campaigns, but it also allows each marketer to shine as an individual.

These 7 high-level marketing skills will help to ensure your team has ultimate flexibility and individuality.

1. Storytelling

There seems to be a general belief that marketing has always been about storytelling – and that marketers have always identified as natural storytellers.

But that may not be the case.

LinkedIn found that just seven years ago the number of marketers listing “storytelling” on their profile as a skill was obsolete. It didn’t exist at all as a respected marketing discipline.

Today, however, between 7 percent and 8 percent of all marketers on LinkedIn worldwide identify themselves as storytellers based on their profile descriptions and list of skills.

As a marketer, storytelling doesn’t just mean telling your audience what your product or service does or what it has done. Effective storytelling involves a deep understanding of human emotions, motivations, and psychology in order to effectively communicate with them in an authentic and engaging way.

During the writing of this article, Asana CMO Dave King told me: “The best marketers are problem solvers and storytellers. Content creators should ask ‘what problem is this piece solving for my audience.’”

As marketers, there are endless ways to tell a story.

One of my favorite ways to develop a compelling story is to use “The Story Spine” formula created by professional playwright and improvisor Kenn Adams. Over the years, Pixar has won countless awards by using this formula, including 13 Academy Awards, 9 Golden Globes, and 11 Grammys.

Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

I encourage you to practice this formula for your own own brand, products, or services.

Let’s give it a shot with a brand we might all know of: Nike.

• Once upon a time there was a passionate shoemaker that wanted to get his shoes into the hands of runners around the world.
• Every day, he worked on perfecting his shoes so that these runners could perform at an optimum level.
• But one day, this shoemaker realized that supplying shoes to thousands of runners around the world was no easy task.
• Because of that, he worked harder and harder to ensure that he had the supply of products needed to be successful despite what critics said.
• Because of that, his shoes continued to improve and more and more athletes started to wear them in prestigious competitions.
• Until finally, it wasn’t just about running anymore. It became about something bigger – finding your inner champion doing what you love in gear that makes you feel great.

As Ken describes, “The Story Spine is not the story, it’s the spine. It’s nothing but the bare-boned structure upon which the story is built. And, that’s what makes it such a powerful tool.”

It’s up to us as marketers to fill in all the little nuances of the story.

2. Prioritizing

As many marketers know all too well – there is always something to be done.

Being an effective prioritizer is one of those marketing skills that doesn’t get talked about enough, but plays a huge role in the success of your team and content.

Producing consistently great content means saying yes to a handful of awesome content ideas/opportunities and saying no to many others.

The Asana marketing team uses a project labeled “Content Opportunities” to which anyone in the company is highly encouraged to contribute ideas. Then, when their marketing team is ready to take action on a piece of content or campaign, they add it to their Editorial Calendar project.

This management of ideas, projects, and initiatives is what allows them to be super focused and productive on a consistent basis.

So how can you develop prioritization as a marketing skill? And how can you prioritize content and campaigns that will perform at a high level?

That’s where the importance of goal-setting comes into play!

At Buffer, we’ve experimented with a variety of goal-setting frameworks such as OKRs, Locke and Latham’s 5 Principles of Goal-Setting, BHAGs, and lots more.

Today, our marketing team is using two types of goal-setting methods depending on the scope. For long-term planning and strategizing, we use a modified Warren Buffett Framework, and for short-term (experimental content), we use a framework called ICE.

The Modified Warren Buffett Framework

My colleague Hailley has long admired the original framework for setting goals from Warren Buffett – a method where you write down 25 things you want to accomplish in your career, and from that, pick the top five as the focus and put the other 20 on an “avoid at all costs” list.

We’ve since adopted a modified version of this goal-setting framework. Here’s a quick overview of how it works (with a real-life example goals from one of our 6-week cycles):

Step 1: Choose 10 goals

Brainstorm a list of 10 goals related to your work on the team that can be accomplished in a certain, predesignated timeframe.

Remember to focus on goals and not tasks. A good way to remember this is that tasks describe how you spend your time, whereas goals are your results.

Ex:

Step 2: Assign a “tag” to each goal

Next, go through and add a tag to each goal with the category that it falls into. The tagging system should be unique for each person.

Come up with your tags, and assign them to each of your 10 goals.

Ex:

Step 3: Pick three goals to focus on (P1s)

This is the most difficult portion of the exercise! Refining the list from 10 to the three that you will focus on during the specified time period.

Pick one goal for each tag that you have on your list.

Ex:

Then, add a P2 and a P3 to prioritize the rest of your goals within the list.

That doesn’t mean you have 10 goals all competing with each other at the same time.

It means that as soon as you complete a P1 in any one of the categories, you then (and only then) move onto your P2 and P3.

ICE Score Framework

“ICE” stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease.

Below is a description of each element directly from the creators of the ICE Score Framework at GrowthHackers:

• Impact: The possible impact the idea could have on the business if considered a “win
• Confidence: This relates to how confident you are in whether it’ll result in a wi
• Ease: This relates to how many resources, and what kind, are needed to implement the idea

For each idea, give each factor a score from one to ten. The overall score is determined by taking the average of the three scores. You should start with the idea that has the highest score.

For example, let’s say you wanted to run a content partnership experiment with a peer or influencer within your industry (similar to this one!) Your ICE score might look like this:

• Impact: 8
• Confidence: 7
• Ease: 7
• Total: 22

Comparing that to other ICE scores, you can quickly determine which ideas to tackle next and which ones to table for the time being. Over time, you’ll be able to score ideas quickly and efficiently.

3. Collaborating

Why is team collaboration necessary?

Part of the answer, according to research from strategy professor Benjamin Jones at the Kellogg School, is that our individual knowledge base is becoming more and more specialized.

Jones gives a great example of the Wright Brothers and building an airplane:

“In 1903, two people designed and flew an airplane. Today, a Boeing 787 has dozens of specialists working on the engines alone. Then there are the controls, the hydraulics, the airframe itself. There is an incredible range of specialized skills needed.”

There is an ever-growing need for collaboration among specialists (teams) within companies to get a product or service off of the ground.

In our experiences at Buffer and Asana, the most successful marketing teams coordinate on two important levels:

1. Messaging: Ensuring there’s consistency in what is being said across channels (blog, website, social, etc.
2. Distribution: Planning and sequencing content rollout for maximum impact across channels

By combining the right set of marketing skills in both messaging and distribution you are setting your campaigns up for a much higher rate of success.

Messaging

Whether you’re launching a full-on marketing campaign or simply posting a video to Facebook, creating a consistent message across channels is an important part of building your brand.

We’ve found that having effective collaboration tools in place makes all of the difference.

Here’s a quick example of some of the tools and workflows we use in order to help our teams create consistent messaging:

1. Kick off a conversation in messaging app, Slack, about the proposed idea or campaign:

1. Start a doc in Dropbox Paper with additional details, comments, copy, etc:

1. Create a project within Asana and assign tasks to team members across the organization:

These three tools are invaluable for transparent and cross-functional collaboration and communication among teams within your organization. They’re especially important for us at Buffer as a fully remote company!

Distribution

Without a solid distribution plan in place, your messages may never reach their intended audiences. Having the skills to not only create the assets, but efficiently deliver those assets across multiple channels, is an important quality for any marketer.

Here’s a quick look at some of the tools and workflows we use to distribute consistent content:

1. WordPress for hosting and creating blog content:

1. Discourse for internal distribution, information, and announcements:

1. Buffer for social media planning, scheduling, and analytics:

At the core of any great team collaboration is trust. Trust is the willingness and openness to intentionally communicate with teammates on your direct team and across the company.

It’s up to you to make space (physically or virtually) for people to meet and share ideas. Pixar is a perfect example of this in action – they designed their offices so that artists, designers, programmers, and marketers would purposely bump into each other.

4. Visualizing

Humans are, by nature, very visual beings.

In the brain itself, there are hundreds of millions of neurons devoted to visual processing, nearly 30 percent of the entire cortex, as compared with 8 percent for touch and just 3 percent for hearing.

In other words, the most successful marketing teams are not only able to communicate messages in written form, they’re also able to create stunning designs that aid in telling a compelling visual story.

We wrote an article in 2017 titled, “Why Every Marketer Needs to Be a (Part-Time) Designer” and the general theory still remains true, even more so, today in 2018.

The best part is there are tons of free resources our there to get started! Here are some of our favorites:

• Graphic Design Basics: Core Principles for Graphic Design (Skillshare)
• How to Create Better Graphic Design (Udemy)
• The Landing Page Conversion Course (Unbounce)
• Graphic Design 101 (Udemy)
• 11 Simple Design Tips to Enhance Your Social Media Images (Buffer)
• Designing Asana: A Day in the Life of a Product Designer (Asana)

Visual storytelling is one of those marketing skills that often goes overlooked, but plays a massive role in the success of every single piece of content.

5. Experimenting

Have you ever wondered how some marketing teams come up with so many great ideas?

Their secret…

Behind every one successful marketing idea or campaign, there were dozens (if not hundreds) of little failures along the way.

It reminds me a lot of what is known as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in product development. A MVP is a product that has the minimum amount of features required to validate if people want it or not.

The same theory holds true for marketing experimentation and testing.

A marketing team that is unafraid of failure and willing to run hundreds of different tests in order to quickly validate ideas will often succeed over a marketing team that puts their eggs (ideas) into one basket (channel/campaign).

The Information, for example, might have hundreds of potential story ideas in Asana at any one time — prioritizing experiments and ideas based on competition, importance, opportunity costs, and lots more.

Although there isn’t a true scientific way of running marketing experiments, this is the formula we’ve come up with at Buffer to systematically test ideas:

We start with setting clear goals and then work backwards from there.

Let’s say we wanted to increase Buffer blog traffic by 10% in one year (goal).

Our marketing team would start by getting together and brainstorming all of the different ways we could accomplish that – SEO, social media, affiliates, etc.

We’d then prioritize ideas based on impact (Warren Buffett Framework / ICE Scores) and begin testing.

Then, we’d constantly measure and analyze results along the way while making incremental improvements.

Approaching experimentation and testing with a growth mindset, similar to developing a product, is a marketing skill that will help take your team to the next level.

6. Analyzing

As marketers, we’re all somewhere on the analytics expertise scale (whether we know it or not!) From the analytics wizards to those of us just starting to dip our toes in data analysis, we all have a base layer to work from.

Our Director of Marketing at Buffer, Kevan Lee, puts it perfectly:

“The great thing about deepening your skills in analytics is that we all have a base layer to work from. We all know how to build intuition. And intuition is just an absorbed history of data. Add to that the ability to ask good questions, and you’re well on your way. (The tools themselves matter far less than you’d think.)”

Asking good questions, when it comes to data and marketing analytics, is an invaluable marketing skill to have on any team.

This graphic from Moz shows just how many BIG questions there are to ask:

At first, asking all of these questions can be a bit intimidating.

What if I don’t know the answers?

That’s okay!

One way we like to think about approaching analytics is this idea of “Crawl, Walk, Run” – It might look something like this if you’re just starting out:

• Crawling: Which channels get the most engagement?
• Walking: Which tactics and/or strategies are contributing to this engagement?
• Running: Which channels, tactics, and strategies should we implement to increase engagement?

Another great way of thinking of analytics is the “Hierarchy of Analytics” model made popular by data wizard Christopher S. Penn:

In the beginning, you might experiment with various analytics platforms and tools in order to get a feel for the basics of marketing analytics. Understanding what data is available, its limitations, and what you can report is a great start.

Then, as you become more skilled and confident with data, you might dive into things like understanding why something happened or what might happen in the future based on your findings.

There are some incredible data analysis tools out there from companies like Google, IBM, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft that can help you do just that!

7. Learning

I like to think that the path to becoming a great marketer is a lifelong journey and never truly complete.

Knowledge, passion, and expertise are intangible qualities that we usually don’t acquire overnight. These are often developed as result of years (even decades) of hard work, mistakes, self-reflection, and personal growth.

Even a virtuoso like Michelangelo was quoted as saying, “I am still learning” late into his career.

At Buffer and Asana, we aim to build our marketing teams around folks who are naturally curious, hungry to learn, passionate, and open to new ideas.

“A love of learning is one of primary skills we look for in marketers because it tells us a couple things: do they love what they do, and are they curious about the world?” explains Kevan Lee. “Those two factors alone can take you quite far!”

Just like food nourishes our bodies, information and continuous learning nourishes our minds.

But where do you start on your learning journey as a marketer?

We’ve found that having a framework in place allows us to identify opportunities for growth. We call it the T-Shaped Marketer Framework:

T-Shaped Marketing at Buffer. Feel free to grab a download of the Sketch file or Canva template we used to build this, if you’d like to customize it for your company.

I encourage you to create one of these templates for yourself. It’s an incredible, eye-opening activity that will provide you with a clear path forward.

Then, we suggest forming habits around the marketing disciplines you’re most excited about:

• If you want to get better at data analysis, try taking a course on Udemy or Skillshare to expand your skills
• If you want to dive into video marketing, experiment with creating a video in Animoto or take a free Adobe Premiere tutorial on YouTube.
• If social media is your passion, we’ve got a ton of great learning resources on our Social Blog, Skillshare, and the Buffer Podcast.
• If you want to improve your organization, workflow, or project management skills, Asana has created a ton of great resources and best practices for work management on their blog.

If you’re curious, inquisitive, genuine, and if your intent is sincere, there will always be people who will support you in your journey.

Experiment and try out new things – some of them might even scare you! Once you gain some momentum, keep it going. That will set you up for a lifetime of success in marketing.

Over to you

Thank you so much for checking out this post!

If you’re interested in learning more about career and marketing skills from some uber-talented professionals in the industry, feel free to check out the Asana blog. It’s packed with some incredible insights.

We’d also love to continue the conversation with you below!

What skills are we missing from this list? What has helped your team create consistently great content? What would you suggest to those looking to hire marketers?

Thank 7 Invaluable Marketing Skills That Help Teams Produce Consistently Great Content for first publishing this post.

How to Create Engaging Short Videos for Social Media (Including 7 Excellent Examples)

A Simple 6-Step Framework for Running Social Media Experiments (with 87 Ideas Included)

Experiment with ideas. Test and see which works better. Analyze your data.

These are phrases we often use on this blog. To us, social media marketing is a bit of a science. We recommend testing things, running experiments, and analyzing data — because it worked for us. This experimental mindset has helped us grow our social media results.

But one thing we haven’t done well is to explain the how: how to run social media experiments.

In this post, you’ll learn the six simple steps of running social media experiments. We’ve even included 87 ideas, which you can start testing immediately.

How to run social media experiments successfully

Running social media experiments can be hard when you’re not sure where to start and where to head to. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you hit the ground running.

Before we dive into the guide, here’s a quick caveat: social media experiments are not perfect or entirely scientific. Some factors are out of our control, such as organic reach since it’s determined by the social media algorithms.

This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t get meaningful results (it has worked for us and many others); it’s just good to be mindful of this while running your experiments.

1. Set goals

As with most planning, it’s crucial to start by setting your goals. Why?

Imagine the following situation. Both social media posts are sharing the same blog post with a different headline.

Post A received 100 Likes, 100 shares, 10 clicks, and 5,000 impressions.

Post B received 10 Likes, 10 shares, 100 clicks, and 1,000 impressions.

Which post do you think is better?

I think it depends on your goals! If you think social media is for engagement, you’ll likely prefer Post A. But if you think social media is for driving traffic, you’ll probably prefer Post B instead.

Here’s a list of social media goals you could choose from:

• Reach (or impressions)
• Engagement (Likes, comments, and shares)
• Following
• Traffic from social media
• Leads from social media
• Revenue from social media

For us, our overarching goal for social media is engagement and brand-building. (Here’s why.) So we focus more on our social media reach, engagement, and following than traffic, leads, or revenue from social media.

Having said that, each social media post can sometimes have its own micro-goal. For example, while our overall social media goal is engagement and majority of our posts are meant for generating engagement, we have some posts that are meant for driving traffic, such as this and this.

2. Brainstorm ideas

Once you have set your goals, you are ready to come up with ideas. While you are thinking of new ideas, it’ll be good if you could form a hypothesis around the idea, too. This is the format we like to use1Inspired by Brian Balfour:

If we (experiment idea),
then (expected results),
because (assumptions).

If we curate top content from other Facebook Pages,
then we can grow our Facebook reach by 10%,
because they are content proven to be popular.

You could also keep it as simple as “Curating top third-party content will increase our reach on Facebook.”

Here are a few suggestions for coming up with social media experiment ideas:

Read blog posts for ideas

This is my favorite method because there’s so much written about social media marketing every day. Listicles and case studies of successful social media tactics can be a great source of inspiration for experiment ideas.

If you want somewhere to get started, we have quite a few blog posts with experiment ideas in them:

• Get Over Your Creativity Block With These 20 Social Media Content Ideas
• 20 Creative Ways to Use Social Media for Storytelling
• 7 Powerful Social Media Experiments That Grew Our Traffic by 241% in 8 Months
• 10 Unique Ideas to Test on Every Social Media Channel (And How to Tell What Works)
• We Made These 10 Social Media Mistakes so You Don’t Have To

There’s also a huge list of 100 social media experiment ideas below. Click here to skip right to it, and feel free to take any of the ideas.

Follow social media trends

The second method is to follow social media trends.

For example, videos are becoming the most popular content format on social media. Facebook has been pushing for videos on its platform for the last few years, and LinkedIn has recently introduced native videos. Our internal data also showed that videos received an average of 873 interactions per post, compared with 279 for photos and 190 for text posts.

So it’ll be a good idea to test videos on your social media profiles.

We recently wrote about the 10 major social media trends for 2018, which you might find useful for generating ideas.

What ideas can you think of in light of these trends?

Study industry leaders and competitors

The final method is to watch and learn from the best companies in your industry and your competitors. What have they been doing that is worth trying yourself?

It’s also good to be aware that the ideas that worked for them might not always work for you. You all likely have many differences such as branding, positioning, and audience. But if you think an idea is suitable for your brand, I would say go for it and modify it for your own brand.

There are some free tools you can use to track industry leaders and competitors.

On Facebook, you have Pages to Watch. It allows you to quickly check out the recent top posts of similar Facebook Pages. You can find it at the bottom of the Overview tab in your Page Insights.

On Twitter, you could add your favorite companies to a Twitter list. To create a Twitter list, click on your profile photo in the upper-right corner and click on “Lists”. Then, click on “Create new list” and fill out the information.

On LinkedIn, you have the Companies to track feature in your Company Page analytics. Clicking on any of the company names will bring you to their Company Page. You can access this section by clicking on Analytics > Followers.

3. Prioritize

The next step is to prioritize your ideas. A prioritization framework we like to use at Buffer is the ICE score by GrowthHackers.

ICE stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease.

• Impact: The possible impact of the idea on your selected metric (e.g. 10 percent increase in reach)
• Confidence: Your confidence level about the success of the experiment (e.g. three companies have found success with this idea)
• Ease: The number of resources required (e.g. no design or engineering help needed)

For each experiment, give each factor a score from one to 10. The overall score is determined by taking the average of the three scores. You should start with the experiment that has the highest score. 

Here are two simple examples of ICE scoring in action:

Experiment A
Curating top third-party content will increase our reach on Facebook.
Impact = 6
Confidence = 8
Ease = 8
Overall = 7.3

Experiment B
Partnering with micro-influencers will grow our Instagram reach.
Impact = 8
Confidence = 4
Ease = 3
Overall = 5

Based on the ICE score, I would run experiment A before experiment B.

While this process can be a little time-consuming at the start, it’s important. It’ll help you think through the experiment details (such as what metric to track) and maximize your impact with the resources you have.

After a while, you should be able to build up a good intuition about the potential of ideas without having to score every single idea.

4. Test

Now you’re ready to test your top ideas!

There are a few things you want to be mindful when testing.

(Ideally) test one thing at a time to understand what’s making the difference. For example, if you want to test your copy as an experiment, it’ll be best to keep the multimedia the same. Otherwise, you won’t know if the copy or the multimedia caused one post to outperform the other.

Look at the right metrics to measure the results of your experiment. This is where the goals you’ve set will be helpful. For instance, if you want to maximize your social media reach, you would pick reach or impressions over clicks.

Run one experiment at a time for a start. Similar to the first point above, doing so lets you know which experiment moved the needle. (When you are feeling advanced, you could run multiple experiments concurrently as long as you understand how they will affect the metrics.)

Run each experiment for at least a week for smaller experiments. This isn’t entirely scientific but I believe a week is sufficient for the results to be seen. For bigger experiments such as shifting your social strategy to posting more videos, you might want to test it for a month to a quarter. The bigger the experiment, the longer it should be tested.

Good luck!

5. Analyze and learn

Finally, you’ll want to analyze your results to see if your experiment has been a success. Here are some questions you could ask yourself:

• Did it achieve the results I had expected? Why?
• Did any other factors contribute to the success or failure?
• Can I learn anything else from this experiment?

To help you with your experiment tracking, I’ve created a simple tracking template: Social Media Experiment Tracking. Feel free to make a copy and modify it to your liking.

When running scientific experiments, it’s important to look at the statistical significance of the results — to ensure that the result isn’t a fluke and can be repeated successfully. But for social media experiments, it might not always be feasible. That’s because your sample size (impressions of a post) isn’t within your control.

My non-scientific recommendation here is to repeat the experiment a few times and see if the result remains the same. If the result can be repeated, you can consider turning the experiment into a regular part of your social media marketing.

6. Repeat

Congratulations! You have just planned, run, and analyze a social media experiment!

Whether you had a successful experiment or not, it’ll be great to repeat step four (test) and five (analyze and learn) continuously. Then once a quarter, you could take a step back and look at the bigger picture again. Your social media goals might have changed, or there might be new social media tactics to try.

Re-evaluate your goals, brainstorm new ideas, and test them. All the best!

87 social media experiment ideas

To help you get started with running social media experiments, here’s a mega list of ideas for you to try. Some are low-hanging fruits while others might require much effort:

Posting time

1. Post when your followers are online
2. Post when your followers are offline
3. Post during commute times
4. Post during lunch time
5. Post on the weekends

Posting frequency

6. Post less
7. Post more

Headlines and copy

8. Write short headlines
9. Write long headlines
10. Write really long headlines (or stories)
11. Use social proof in your copy
12. Add emojis
13. Customize your post for each social media platform

Content

14. Post questions
15. Ask for opinions on a trending topic
16. Share top industry news
17. Share thought-leadership articles
18. Share interesting, relevant statistics
19. Share inspiration quotes
20. Post interviews
21. Host a live Q&A
22. Post behind-the-scenes videos
23. Share your company culture
24. Re-use top posts
25. Poll your audience
26. Retweet a mention every day
27. Create a branded hashtag
28. Host a giveaway and invite people to comment
29. Host a giveaway and invite people to tag a friend
30. Host a giveaway and invite people to share your post
31. Host a giveaway with other brands
32. Celebrate national or international events
33. Create a huge image on your Instagram profile with multiple posts
34. Create a Twitter moment
35. Create a Slideshare presentation (and share it)

Multimedia

36. Curate third-party content
37. Post self-explanatory images
38. Post photos of your product
39. Post infographics
40. Post GIFs
41. Post audio recordings
42. Post slideshow videos
43. Post tutorial or tips videos
44. Post a 360 photo or video
45. Go live
46. Livestream an event
47. Live-tweet an event

Videos

48. Upload videos directly to social media platforms (vs YouTube)
49. Create landscape videos
50. Create square (or letterbox) videos
51. Create portrait videos
52. Create short 10-15s videos
53. Create long 20-30min videos
54. Add captions to videos
55. Add music to videos
56. Use a cover video for Facebook

Ads

57. Boost your top posts
58. Use social proof in your copy
59. Use a photo of a person
60. Test the carousel ad format
61. Test the video ad format
62. Test stories ads
63. Test Messenger ads
64. Test Snapchat Geofilters
65. Test Snap Ads
66. Sequence your Facebook ads

Collaboration

67. Share user-generated content
68. Share customer stories
69. Sponsor a micro-influencer (sponsored posts)
70. Create a piece of content with a micro-influencer and share it together
71. Host a social media takeover
72. Do a social swap
73. Host social media events with another brand
74. Host a roundtable with experts in your industry
75. Hire an agency for a social media campaign

Community

76. Start a Twitter chat
77. Create (and link) a Facebook Group
78. Create a LinkedIn Group

Others

79. Pin a post
80. Reply to all mentions
81. Use Facebook Messenger
82. Create a Facebook Messenger bot
83. Use a social media management tool
84. Use a social media analytics tool
85. Use Facebook’s preferred audience feature
86. Offer time-limited discounts
87. Ask your CEO (or a colleague that is well-known in your industry) to share your posts

How do you run social media experiments?

Having a framework for running social media experiments can be very helpful. Here’s one I like (though you can tweak it however much you like):

1. Set goals
2. Brainstorm
3. Prioritize
4. Test
5. Analyze and learn
6. Repeat

I’m curious about how you run your social media experiments. Do you use a framework or system? Do you use any tools to help you with it? Let’s chat in the comments section below.

—

The amazing featured image is by chuttersnap, taken from Unsplash.

Thank A Simple 6-Step Framework for Running Social Media Experiments (with 87 Ideas Included) for first publishing this post.

How to Gain a Massive Following on Instagram: 10 Proven Tactics To Grow Followers and Engagement

Instagram now has more than 800 million monthly users and sky-high user engagement levels.

And with 80 percent of accounts following a business on Instagram, it seems like marketers might be more keen than ever to get acquainted with Instagram for their business1Instagram, 2017.

I know we are at Buffer!

Lately, we’ve been sharing, liking, and trying new ways to grow Buffer’s Instagram account, and it’s been so much fun. Since Instagram is a platform we’re keen to focus on, we thought it would be fun to research some ways to grow a following there.

Whether you’re growing your own personal account or working on behalf of a company, read on to find out the 10 best tactics (with tools and examples!) we uncovered that could help you grow a bigger, more relevant audience on Instagram.

Instagram scheduling is coming to Buffer! We want to create a great Instagram scheduling experience for you. Watch us build, and share your thoughts.

Top 10 Instagram Growth Tactics

10 actionable ways to supercharge your follower growth on Instagram:

1. Post consistently (at least once a day)
2. Try videos, live videos, and Stories
3. Study and use quality hashtags
4. Share user-generated content
5. Collaborate with others
6. Post at your best times
7. Use your analytics
8. Engage your fans
9. Host contests
10. Cross-post

1. Post consistently (at least once a day)

Visual marketing tool Tailwind studied more than 100,000 Instagram profiles in 2017 to understand how posting frequency affects follower growth and engagement rate2Tailwind, 2017.

They found that the more often you post, the more likes and followers you get.

According to the study, profiles that posted seven or more times a week (or at least once a day) get more likes and gain more followers faster than those that post less frequently.

Here’s the impact of posting more:

You can almost double your follower growth rate by moving from less than one post per week to 1-6 posts a week. You can more than double your follower growth rate again by moving from posting 1-6 times per week to once or more per day.

The key takeaway: Post consistently on Instagram. Brands that get into a regular flow with Instagram posts tend to see the best results.

With Instagram’s algorithmic timeline, consistency feels like a key element to getting your posts seen and appearing at the top of the timeline. If your posts are shared on a regular basis and picking up good engagement, then our hunch is Instagram’s algorithm may place your posts near the top of your follower’s feeds.

2. Try videos, live videos, and Stories

While Instagram started as a photo-sharing network, it has grown beyond just photos. With features like videos, live videos and Stories, brands can now create many different types of content to engage their fans and grow their following.

Here are a few compelling reasons to try posting these new content types:

• The average engagement for videos is growing faster than the average engagement for images3NewsWhip, 2017
• When you go live on Instagram, you will appear right at the front of the Stories feed4Here’s an example.
• More than 250 million people use Instagram Stories every day5Instagram, 2018
• Sixty-eight percent of marketers surveyed plan to create more Stories in 20186Buffer, 2018

Free resources:
How to Create Beautiful Instagram Stories (and 10 Amazing Templates to Use)
Here’s All You Need to Know About Live Video on Instagram Stories:
A Video Marketing Guide On Creating Epic Content for Social Media

3. Study and use quality hashtags

We’ve explored hashtags a lot on the blog, but it seems that nowhere on social media are they quite as important as on Instagram. The right hashtags (and location tag) can expose your image to a large and targeted audience, and Instagram users don’t seem to get hashtag fatigue in the same way they might on other networks.

Due to its popularity, it’s even possible to follow a hashtag now!

Simply Measured did two studies and found that Instagram posts with both hashtags and a location tag get the highest average engagement7Simply Measured, 2014 and 2015. In other words, hashtags could be your best bet for growing a fast following on Instagram.

For example, check out one of our recent top Instagram posts, where we used ten hashtags and a location tag:

While Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags per post, TrackMaven found that nine hashtags seem to be the optimal number for getting the maximum engagement8TrackMaven, 2016.

With free Instagram tools like Display Purpose, Focalmark, and AutoHash, you can easily get quality, relevant hashtags for your Instagram posts. For instance, with Display Purpose, simply type in a few words about your image and it’ll recommend the top hashtags to use.

4. Share user-generated content

In a year, we grew our Instagram following by almost 400 percent  – from 4,250 to 21,000 followers. And a large percentage of this growth was a result of us embracing and sharing user-generated content.

The easiest way to think about user-generated content is this: brands taking the best-of-the-best user content from around the web and featuring it on their own social media or other platforms while giving credit to the original creator (user).

At Buffer, we started the hashtags #BufferStories and #BufferCommunity to showcase the unique stories of our users. These hashtags have opened up a huge variety of content options from curated stories of digital nomads to social media tips from marketers. Here’s an example:

Besides growing your following, digital intelligence firm L2 Inc found that user-generated content also increases the likelihood of an Instagram follower becoming a customer9L2 Inc, 2015.

Further reading: Check out our full guide to curating user-generated content on Instagram here.

5. Collaborate with others

Another great way to extend your Instagram reach and grow your following is to collaborate with others, either through partnerships or sponsorships.

For example, we once collaborated with Brian Fanzo, founder and CEO of iSocialFanz, by taking over each other’s Instagram Stories. Through the partnership, we were both able to provide value to our own audience and reach a new audience.

If you have the budget for social media sponsorships, then influencer marketing might be suitable for you. Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington is a classic example. They grew their Instagram following from 850,000 to 2.1 million followers in one year by sponsoring Instagram influencers10Mediakix, 2016.

Here’s an example of a recent sponsorship post:

The Instagram influencers tag Daniel Wellington’s Instagram account in their sponsored post, which drives people to check out Daniel Wellington’s profile. Through this strategy, Daniel Wellington has amassed more than four million followers so far.

If you wish to explore influencer marketing, here’s a quick five-step influencer marketing guide to get you started.

6. Post at your best times

After looking at more than five studies on the best times to post, I learned that there isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram.

Instead, every brand has its own best times to post. You have yours, too!

Timeliness of a post is one of the major factors in the Instagram algorithm. So a possible best time for you to post on Instagram is when your followers are most active. Here’s how you can find that information:

• In the Instagram app, tap on your profile photo
• Tap on the Instagram Insights (bar chart) icon
• Scroll down to the “Followers” section and tap on “See more”

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see on which day of the week and at which hours of the day your followers are most active. For example, our followers seem to be most active on Thursdays from 9 am to 3pm ET. You could also look at where your followers are based and experiment with times that you think they’ll be active.

Alternatively, you can use Instagram analytics tools like Iconosquare or Buffer for Business to find your best time to post using your Instagram data. This is especially helpful if you don’t have a business profile on Instagram and, thereby, no access to Instagram Insights. Here’s how the Iconosquare feature looks like:

7. Use your analytics

One of the key ways to grow your Instagram following is to post high-quality content that your followers like and would engage with.

How do you know what your followers like? Again, Instagram Insights provides the data for you to understand which posts your followers like the most.

• In the Instagram app, tap on your profile photo
• Tap on the Instagram Insights (bar chart) icon
• Scroll down to the “Posts” section and tap on “See more”

Here, you’ll see your top posts sorted by impressions. You can tap on the sentence at the top of the page and change the filters according. For example, you could instead see your top videos in the past three months sorted by comments.

Do you notice any trends?

Does a certain type of image get more impressions or engagement? Post more of those images and see if your followers continue to like and engage with them.

You can even dive deeper into the data by selecting a post and tapping on “View Insights”. For example, I found that, with one of our recent posts, we reached more than 1,700 people who weren’t following us. If they like that post, there’s a high chance that they might end up following us for more similar posts.

8. Engage your fans

In the Instagram algorithm, engagement is one of the major considerations (perhaps the top consideration) when determining how many people to show a post to.

The more engagement a post has, the more people will see it in their feed. 

With many engagements, your posts may even be featured in the top posts of hashtags or in the Explore tab, reaching even more people. And possibly gaining more followers.

A great practice is then to engage your followers by liking or replying to their comments to your posts. Since they took the effort to check out your posts and commenting on them, it feels great to reciprocate by continuing the conversation. Here at Buffer, we use Buffer Reply to easily and quickly reply our fans on Instagram (Facebook, and Twitter).

9. Host contests

Our most commented-on Instagram posts are all contest posts, where we gave out Buffer swags as the prize. Here’s one of them:

These posts are great for increasing your reach on Instagram and gaining new followers. For example, you could invite your followers to comment with their favorite emojis or tag a friend to enter the contest.

With the help of either the algorithm or your followers, you could reach many people who might not have heard of your brand before. And if they like the posts on your profile, they might choose to follow you.

To help you get started, Social Media Examiner has an awesome primer on all kinds of Instagram contests.

10. Cross-post

Finally, make sure your existing fans know you’re on Instagram through cross-posting. Instagram makes it simple to share your posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, which could be a great tactic to get some extra exposure.

And there’s a great advantage to cross-post! A Buzzsumo study of more than one billion Facebook posts from three million brand pages found that images posted to Facebook via Instagram receive more engagement than natively published images11Buzzsumo, 2016:

You can also try embedding Instagram photos in your blog posts (see this post for an example) or adding an Instagram feed to your Facebook page for some additional discovery. Here’s a look at Buffer’s Facebook Page with an added Instagram feed:

One last tactic: How to drive traffic from Instagram?

One of the challenges of marketing on Instagram (and possibly a part of its joy for users) is that you can’t quite add links for your viewers to click.

If you want to send your followers to a specific link, it’s becoming a common practice to change the link in your Instagram profile and add the comment “link in bio” to a corresponding photo or video.

You could also use a tool like Campsite to create a mobile-friendly page where you can list multiple links and associate the links to the respective Instagram post (which you can then link to from your bio).

Wrapping it up: Anatomy of a perfect post

We’ve gone over quite a lot of tactics to remember and try! The kind folks at Made Freshly combined lots of these tips for growing a following into this fun, evergreen infographic:

Bonus: Instagram scheduling is coming to Buffer

We’re so excited to share that Instagram scheduling is well on its way to Buffer!

As an official Instagram Marketing Partner, we’re eager to deliver a meaningful Instagram scheduling experience — automatic posting, in addition to reminders, and done in a thoughtful, clear way.

While eager to build it fast, we also want to build it the right way. We’d love your advice on what would feel ideal to you. Come watch us build, and share your thoughts.

What are your Instagram experiences?

In our quest to grow our followers, it’s always helpful to remember what really matters in all of this: The friends we’ll talk to, the relationships we’ll create, and the fun we’ll have.

An easy way to keep this principle central is to spend a bit of time each day just hanging out and enjoying Instagram. You might respond to comments, like photos, follow some new friends, and comment on awesome posts. It’s the time spent showing and sharing the love that can pay off in new followers. It also creates a better social media experience for everyone.

We’d love to keep the conversation going—both in the comments here and on Instagram, of course! Lots of awesome friends shared their top tips for marketing on the social network, and we’d love to hear yours, too! Add your thoughts below!

You might also enjoy these Instagram marketing resources:

The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Analytics: Metrics, Insights, Tools, and Tips

 

A Complete Guide to Instagram Marketing: The Playbook That Drives Results

How Instagram Stories Work: A Powerful New Way to Engage

 

Thank How to Gain a Massive Following on Instagram: 10 Proven Tactics To Grow Followers and Engagement for first publishing this post.