Buffer Live Q&A #1 with Kevan Lee

Key Takeaways

hi everyone I'm Kevan from buffer I'm really excited to be sharing with you today in our very first live Q&A so it's going to be a wonderful chance for me to do a lot of talking and answer a lot of questions thank you so much for everyone who's admitted questions already we had a number of great ones come in over email and we've had some come in through google plus and we're keeping our eyes on Twitter and and Google+ and other social networks to throughout this live Q&A so really excited to get going wanted to mention a couple quick things off the top this is our very first live Q&A so I really appreciate your giving us the chance to experiment with this and hopefully provide you something that's super valuable and useful we love any feedback and tips that you might have for us throughout we're very keen to improve on this and to deliver something really great for you another thought we had two is that would be great to hear any questions if you have any that come to mind during the live Q&A there's a couple different places you can ask them you can ask them on twitter with the hashtag buffer live or you can ask them here in the google hangout by using the Q&A tool I'd love to tell you quickly how to maybe open that if you don't quite see it if you're watching from google plus you might see a list of icons down the left hand side and there's a there's one that says Q&A on it and that would be the one that might open something on the right hand side Bend of your screen where you can ask a question you can kind of see the questions that I'm answering as I'm answering them if for any reason that doesn't come up for you there might be a menu bar in the top of your screen with four little squares looks like a little window if you click on that you can add the Q&A app to your hangout and then you should be good to go with loading it from there any questions on that feel free to leave a comment on the Hangout or on Twitter and will be very very happy to jump right on that and the cyst so really great to have you here today I'm really excited to share with you all and yeah I'd love to to kick it off with kind of the first questions so the first one that I have here is one from Mike petrucci and he asked on google+ what do you wish you knew before starting at buffer and I really love that question i think it's it's such a wonderful chance to reflect back on kind of my early days at buffer to what i remember maybe most vividly is not having any previous startup experience and then jumping into the startup pace at buffer was just a wonderful kind of view of what things can be like and how fast people can move on different things and it's just been such a wonderful experience to kind of have that as as part of my life in my journey now I feel like before i joined the startup pace for me with something that was maybe a bit more intuitive where I just enjoyed creating things and making things on my own spare time and trying lots of things and I'm grateful to that may be part of my personality is something that ended up being quite start-up II and now that's something that I get to practice every day at buffer so coming into the environment here that was something I didn't really expect or or know before starting I definitely could have if I'd done my research I think I think startups are all really exciting in this way so that's something that uh but yeah has just been a really great thing for me to kind of reflect on into to think back on how that's been thanks for that great question the next that i love to answer comes from Alex and Alex sent this one in over email Alex asks if you could enlist the buffer team for a week how can we help you plan a social media marketing campaign strategy and Wow Alex that would be that would be incredible I have like a personal vision of travelling places and helping people get set up with different things like that so thank you for letting me have the chance to kind of brainstorm on this one with you I think with the opportunity to kind of plan a social media marketing campaign from scratch in a lot of ways it's it's a quite exciting thought because there's so many different things you could focus on and do and one thing that I often come back to is like how I can best spent a certain amount of my time so if I have 30 minutes up and I best spent 30 minutes of my time and there's the few different things that come to mind in terms of like a social media strategy maybe I think first and foremost is is understanding the goal of the social media campaign so if you're looking for clicks if you're looking for follows if you're looking for engagement or sentiment it kind of I guess changes the tone and the nature of the campaign itself depending on what you're looking for so a lot of times the campaign's that we run we're quite interested in looking it at the clicks the cliq results so we will create headlines and and kind of come up with the content and plan around the goal of driving clicks and that that kind of changes the tone if you're instead of going for a campaign of awareness or follows then you're not really I guess put in the content in such a way that you're driving clicks you're more just driving engagement and positive sentiment and things like that so to start off with a goal setting what you have in mind I think the second part of a cool campaign is kind of knowing how you're going to track it afterward so we are really grateful for the chance to have some cool tools within buffer that we used to track and if you happen to be a buffer user or have the chance to hop into the analytics site on buffer there's a couple of cool places to look definitely in our buffer for business plans we have lots of neat things and then also in kind of the general analytics tab there's sortable analytics so we can see a sort of view of the posts that have done well in terms of clicks or reach or retweets or shares comments pretty much any type of engagement you can have on a social media bit of content we have it there inside buffer so definitely knowing what you want to look for and then kind of knowing what you want track and having a way to track that I think those are maybe two of the higher level two kinds of use with a campaign then if I were to get down maybe into the more actionable day-to-day things I think having a hashtag or something to organize around is great for campaigns I think being purposeful about where you target those campaigns so if it's just twitter if it's just facebook if it's just a Facebook ad even if it's just really segmented and focused on a certain segment that you have in mind for the campaign and then having a good way to track it back to a landing page where the ask of the campaign is is clear enough so there's only one thing that person would need to do so if it's click here to receive this then the next page they go to they receive this if it's click here to follow then it's an easy an easy interaction where they can follow right away so that's kind of the stuff that comes to mind in terms of helping helping you out to be fun to hang out together and work on a project like that together I think we'd have a lot of fun with that so hopefully that that helps with kind of some answers along those lines cool the next quest I have here is from Charlotte who sent this one in over email her question is one of the challenges for marketers i think is predicting trends what do you think the social media digital trends are likely to be over the next five years and wow I don't I don't know if I'm in a good place to to predict with very much accuracy what that might be I'm happy to toss about some some random thoughts and ideas that come to mind on that one I think personally I'm quite excited about this idea of messaging apps and what I mean by messaging apps is maybe something like facebook Messenger or whatsapp or even to a certain degree slack and HipChat just kind of chat rooms that have grown in popularity and I'm not sure exactly how it fits in terms of social media marketing but I get the sense that a lot of conversations are moving in that direction and I personally don't have any ideas yet on how to get marketing into there but I I think that that's something i'd love to kind of think on more and in the coming years that might be more and more important as different networks pop up than different tools gain in popularity one thing that comes to mind that I don't know if it'll ever come to come to pass or not but is this is this concept of I guess in whatsapp I've noticed that people have moved their newsletters to what's up so instead of sending an email newsletter they're sending a whatsapp message with a link that links then to the newsletter itself so it's more of an SMS or text message kind of notification I've seen different people use some cool tactics on slack where they're building out ways to share links and share content from within slack and I'm not quite sure how you as a content creator are able to contribute to that which is the fact that those conversations are happening is is quite exciting for me something else that comes to mind in terms of trends is definitely video content and in particular I think the idea of live casting is something that's going to gain even more and more in popularity I might be behind the trend a bit in mentioning that since since stuff like periscope meerkat have been so great and and I think networks will continue to kind of move in that direction where people are able to share this kind of very intimate way of connecting with someone this live Q&A that we're doing is an experiment for a lot of reasons because of that connection and I think being able to show a face to some advice in some words is a really powerful way of connecting on a deeper level so those are a couple that come to mind messaging apps and video live casting so it'll be fun to kind of follow along and and see if any of that comes to fruition great the next question that I have here is from Ellen who sent this one in over email Ellen says I'd be interested in your thoughts on measuring social media roi what are some important metrics to track and that's a great big huge question I think I think social media roi is is one that I personally would definitely I definitely could improve on my tracking of it I'm not too disciplined and tracking that myself and I think what it comes down to for me is this idea that ROI is a lot about dollars and cents and I'm not sure I have a very good grasp on the dollars and cents I'd from from my side the time I find on social media doesn't feel like it cost me anything and yet I guess it does constantly salary and it might cost in terms of certain tools that I use and I guess being a bit more discipline on that side of things would be a great first step in order to track roi so understanding the dollars and cents amounts that you're able to kind of add to to your social media marketing so once you can figure out how much you put in then you kind of figure out how much you get back and that's the other another good one to think on with that one it's a lot about understanding your conversions and your conversion rate and your funnel and how all that works so if you were to send a tweet that links back to your your app of your tool and someone signs up through that then how much of that value of that person's eventual subscription can be tied back to twitter and a few extra factors that come into play there are if the person signs up to a free app then there's no dollar and send value to a sign at that stage but if they upgrade later on then yes you can add that back in and then you can kind of think about lifetime someone who joins you if if someone who signs up for your app or service ends up spending two hundred dollars on average over a number of years that's kind of your average lifetime value then you can bring that number back and stick it into your formula so I guess in terms of ROI measuring it from social media it's a bit tricky for me personally to figure all that out because there's lots of different dollars and cents values what we often do at buffer is kind of aim for not so much as a direct social media roi but more of a I guess more of an engagement type of metric where we're noticing kind of the time and effort that we put in and then kind of looking for referral traffic back to our site from social looking for direct clicks on different updates and just noticing these different elements of things is is kind of been quite key for us in terms of the specific metrics like I kind of said before clicks are great conversion paths and lifetime value and then the dollar amount with the resources that you put in all of those make for a great kind of combination on sorting through the ROI formula this is great I see some questions coming in as as we're talking to so thank you all for dropping some questions in this is really cool okay this one is from yo D Collins hi yo D it says I don't use buffer but spend a good deal of my daytime hours minding the internet for useful information to share that's awesome I I'm right there with you how could buffer help me in this endeavor wow that's a great one and really grateful for the chance to share some of my thoughts on this with you yo D um so I also spend a lot of daytime hours mining the internet so to speak for for stuff to share and where buffer comes in really great for me is is it lets me focus so much of my my mental energy in the searching and the finding for of content and then buffer makes it super easy to kind of at the backend come in and make it a a smooth way to share that content with others so for me personally what that workflow would look like is I subscribe to lots of newsletters I have lots of feeds in my feedly and all of that content that looks interesting to me i will add directly into my pocket is a kind of read it read it later app and from within pocket then I'm able to go in when I have 30 minutes or an hour in the day and do all of my reading at once and as I read through things the stuff that I find I might kind of notice that oh this would be cool to share or I'd love to be able to pass this along and then all I do is click the star button on that article and then I have an ifft recipe which is a way to automate a couple different services to to kind of connect with each other so every time I mark something as a favorite inside a pocket that article then goes into my buffer automatically and if she knows to grab a picture even from the article and stick that along with the social update so it really makes life quite easy for me all I get all I then need to do is go into buffer later on and then I'll kind of make sure the updates look the way I want them to add any commentary or text the the ifft recipe pulls in the headline in addition to the the photo so a lot of my work is already done which is which is very much appreciated so that's like the one the one big benefit that I found in including buffering kind of my curation the second benefit is it I don't need to be online when I share anything I can find 30 articles today and share those 30 articles spaced out at optimal times over the next 10 days and just kind of batch myself and almost replicate myself to a certain degree where I can be sharing when I'm not online so kind of those two put together are really the greatest benefits i have received in terms of curation with buffer so i'm not sure how far along you are in exploring with those by love to hear if either of those things resonate at all with with your experience great this one is from this next one is from Sarah eggers hi Sarah Sarah asks i saw that buffer is looking for new people to join the happiness team what are some of the fun amazing things about working at buffer wow where to begin I I guess I'll start by selling buffer has just been a an amazing fantastic experience for me to join and it's not only in the perks and the kind of cool cool things that we get to have and do it's also in the ability to be working alongside people whom I greatly admire and respect and trust and appreciate and to have all of those values kind of reflected back to me where I feel very valued and and trusted and respected and just a very much of a kindred spirit atmosphere here so I don't know if that qualifies as a fun an amazing thing about working at buffer vibes I've definitely felt that quite acutely in my time here in terms of the actual things that we do get with perks and different things like that everyone on the team who joins receives a kindle and a jawbone up and the kindle we can ask for any books that we like to read and and those are gifted to us it really fits in with well with our value of constantly learning and self-improvement so we're very much encouraged to practice that through the kindle and then with the jawbone up it's a fitness tracking tool so we're able to receive that and then track our steps in our sleep in our activity and we're encouraged to connect with the team so that all of us on the team can see those different stats and and engage with each other and hold each other accountable in that way we also get a chance to be together a couple times each year within a retreat to somewhere fun and exciting around the world we just recently visited Iceland together and in the past I've had the chance to to attend retreats in sydney and new york and there's also been some in South Africa and San Francisco and Thailand I think I might I think that might be all the ones that i can remember those are great opportunities to connect with with people to in terms of benefits also i think remote work at buffer is a huge benefit for me where we can choose the place that we are happiest and most productive to work so in my case this is it's at home here here in the house in an office for others on the team it's is taken the form of being quite nomadic and traveling all over and not really having a home base others enjoy going to a co-working space in town and spending some time working with with other folks in the same building so that flexibility is is definitely a fun amazing thing about buffer so that just kind of probably scratches the surface of what I've particularly enjoyed here but definitely some of the highlights for me and yeah if anyone's interested in in kind of exploring buffer further we have a lot of listings up at buffer calm / journey and we definitely love to hear from you there if anything if any position grabs you this is great I see lots more coming in so I'm going to grab some of the newest ones okay this one is from Beatrice and Beatrice says but for for work but am uncertain on how to really use it for my personal social media that's that's a great point how to buffer employees use buffer as a tool for their personal social media and what are some suggestions and thoughts I might have on that Thank You Beatrice that's that's a really great question I think I think there's I definitely take lots of inspiration from the folks on the team who share i'm happy to share my personal workflow in what evers are observed from others i have the chance to kind of share through buffer so i definitely understand that element of using buffer for work so to speak and then the flip side for me a set is sharing through my personal twitter handle up kevin lee and i have i have made it a point to kind of focus my sharing from that side and and share as much as I can about a specific topic so I'm interested in a lot of different things that might not be why not appear in my twitter timeline and that's a very purposeful choice on mice on my hand um I love football I love soccer I love dogs i love certain TV shows i love certain movies certain books i love writing and that writing one is the one that i had kind of chosen to be my go-to for for sharing on twitter so that helped a lot and kind of making that decision where it's not just share everything but it share something in particular and once I made that decision that it was quite easy quite a bit easier for me to focus the content that I filled it up my buffer wits so I'm still able to engage real time with the things that do interest me in terms of if there's a movie or a game that's happening then that's um that's kind of a cool a cool thing to just engage with automatically on Twitter in real time but in terms of filling my buffer I have a three times the base schedule and this is for Twitter three times a day to Twitter and I'll fill that up I think currently it has maybe a hundred different updates in there just because I've come across some really cool things lately but I'm excited to share and then I focused that kind of around the articles that i enjoy reading and in particular any writing or content marketing things that have been particularly meaningful to me and i thought worth sharing so I fill up my buffer using a tool called bull coiffeur and using bulk buffer you can use a you can grab a spreadsheet of tweets so let me think of the best way to explain this maybe if I took a step back instead it's possible that you can have an ifft recipe that takes all of your tweets adds them to a spreadsheet as you tweet them and then what you can do is take that spreadsheet change the tweets or edit the tweets and add them back into your buffer so you kind of have this ongoing evergreen cycle of content that data is great to share we one of our recommendations a buffer is to share content multiple times the recommendation behind that is because you can reach people who didn't see it the first time we personally reach maybe five to ten percent of people on our social media updates so that leaves 95 90 percent that that would have never seen certain content from us so that's one benefit another benefit is hitting people in different time zones and then the third benefit is reaching people who have joined and followed you since you last shared the content so I'm probably getting a bit far away from your specific question but this is kind of how how I personally view that all of that with the aisle in mind I then add stuff back into my queue and edit it and change it around slightly and add pictures and make it feel a bit different and unique and yeah and that's that makes it really easy so I'm able to add you know 150 tweets in five minutes and I'm good to go for a month just have it knowing I have content there and as I find new things buffer gives the option to either add to your cue to share it now immediately or to add it next so if you add to queue it goes to the bottom of the queue if you share now it goes out right now and if you add it next and we'll go to the top of the queue so if I find something that's timely or something that I think would be would be useful to kind of share more urgently I'll add to the top of the queue so when I publish new blog posts or when I read something that's that's great it goes to the top and I still haven't offer full of stuff for the rest of the time so that's kind of how i personally use it I've seen others who who do a great job of kind of mixing the different types of content that they share so our founder joel has this system he calls it the or maybe we call it I don't know if he has a name for it but I I've personally called it the four to one system where you identify kind of I think it's five different types of content you can share on social media a photo a quote a link a status update and a reshare or retweet and out of those five you would then choose one that's kind of your staple update so in my case the staple update for me is a link share and then the other the other four kind of represent the one sides of the four to one showing ratio every five updates that you post four of them will be your staple update and then the one will be kind of something that's a bit different so it's great to kind of do that within buffer because you can see the types of updates that you're sending based on kind of an icon that is to the left of the update so I can glance at it and see okay i have three links coming up and then I a quote so I'm good to go or I can see oh I have ten links right up against each other so I can kind of drag quotes and and retweets and things within that queue and yeah it just makes it kind of easy to to kind of organize yourself around all that so hoping that might give you some ideas about some possible things to try definitely came to help out more freaky onto this is great um I'm gonna grab this question came from from Joe and he asked if I could share the ifft recipes that I mentioned and be very happy to I might like I mentioned the live Q&A is very much an experiment for us i'm going to experiment with showing my screen here and see if you all can see this this is my buffer i'll do my best to kind of navigate over to ifft to show you what these recipes might look like if you happen to go to gif calm you can do ace you can do a couple different things you can go over to channels which is in the top right corner and within channels there's a search box you can search for buffer bring up buffer below when you click on buffer it gives you the chance to connect the channel if you haven't yet and what's really cool if you look below that there's a section for popular buffer recipes and these are ones that have been really useful for us we had a chance to kind of partner with the ifft team to recommend some that that we've noticed have been quite quite helpful so just briefly kind of looking at the list here some of the ones that I mentioned are going from pocket into buffer and that one is here on kind of it the buffer recipe page and that's a great one for just kind of curation and quickly sharing the stuff that you find that's great you can also go from feedly straight to buff first if you read a lot from within your feedly or your RSS reader you can go right from that article with in feedly to address straight to your buffer there's the ifft recipe that that makes a an editorial calendar based on your on your buffered updates which is just amazing functionality I am blown away by whoever slide up that one it recognizes kind of the times that you send things at times you have things scheduled and it adds those into a Google Calendar that you can then use as kind of an editorial view editorial calendar view of your social media and yet then the other one I just mentioned a second ago is share from buffer or share to twitter and then add to a spreadsheet you can wire that one up in a lot of different ways buffers a great one to do it with you can use this specific networks or Twitter or Facebook etc and yes it's kind of a cool way a lot of people use it to build an archive and I've noticed that's quite helpful for a lot of folks so yeah any any that are on this page again that pages if calm / buffer and it if tis ifttt it stands for if this then that and yeah lots of cool stuff not only with buffer but with most any other social media tool or online thing even some offline things like colored light bulbs and different stuff like that lots of lots of cool uses for ifft and wiring services together so thank you for for asking for a bit more on that one Joe great I'm gonna do this one next from miro and Miro asks with all the recent changes in Facebook's algorithm and how organic reach has changed do you foresee other social networks adopting similar paid to play strategies and yeah that's that's definitely a wonderful question and one to think about I mean I have noticed a lot of I guess there's a couple things that come to mind with that one thing that I've noticed with Facebook is is there news feed is just an amazingly powerful and useful tool that has helped for certain for certain has helped me kind of appreciate being on facebook and having all this stuff that is very relevant and useful to me automatically appear without my having to go look for it so i think this algorithm based approach to a feat or a timeline is is kind of central to the notion of pay to play versus something that's like twitter where it's just a steady stream of everything from everyone you follow and it's not necessarily it's not algorithm based by any means it's kind of whatever someone's posted most recently goes to the top and you can kind of look at all of it with those two different mindsets there it feels like a lot of networks are moving more toward the Facebook algorithm approach I know Pinterest has has an algorithm on their homepage and things and and some others do and I think less you move into that algorithm approach I think my sense is that's kind of when the pay-to-play comes in where all of your content isn't automatically served to people it's served based on an algorithm and based on previous engagement based on a number of factors that you don't necessarily control and my sense is that businesses would appreciate having an extra layer of control over things which is kind of where the the paid advertising comes in so if I were to make a good guess i would say that yes pay-to-play is probably something that will will be happening a lot more so in and maybe be a bit more pronounced on other networks coming up I think anything that Facebook does is probably magnified 100 fold just because of their user base and size and that is kind of a trickle-down effect than to the smaller networks which themselves are huge and enormous but in relation to Facebook maybe not quite as large so the effect while it might be happening currently I know for instance Pinterest has some ads that they're kind of experimenting with and growing the the larger effective kind of oh this feels a lot like Facebook's pay to play at this point I might be a bit more subtle and take a bit more time to get there but I have the sense that it might be kind of moving in that direction and if I can maybe piggyback on your question with another thought is is this this whole idea of should you be paying for getting your post out there or is it okay to just kind of go for the organic reach side of things and that's something that we're quite interested in knowing ourselves I think there's been a blog post that's been sitting in the idea list for a while about a 30 day organic reach experiment and just seeing if we can throw everything we can at getting improving our organic reach for free without paying anything than we'd love to explore that and see what we can do and my hunch is that it is definitely possible because we've seen pages that do it and we've noticed that there who who can get organic reach in huge huge numbers and what it comes down to then is kind of maybe reverse engineering those pages that do that well and finding out what is it about those strategies and updates that is resonating with people and yeah and then kind of taking that and applying it to yourself my hunch is that a lot of it is about fitting into the Facebook newsfeed in such a way that an update from your business or brand steams quite natural alongside an update from your brother or your dad or your mom or your friends and I if I were to guess I would say that there's there's a bit of a disconnect there for certain folks and certain brands at this point which is kind of where lower engagement has come in and then paid advertising his has come up so that's something I'm excited to kind of explore more and see what we can figure out and as always will love to kind of report back what we find so thank you for kicking off that cool discussion mirror that was a great one great I'd love to ask this one from Twitter this is from at chris d 0 0 8 from twitter any question is about how much time do you spend on preparing / writing your blog posts I love your content thank you Chris for saying that that's it's a amazingly kind I very grateful for the chance to write for the blog and to do things there yeah and in terms of how much time we spend preparing and writing it has completely been an evolution for me and continues to be one that I change a lot on i think when i first joined buffer I came from a background of it I was excited to produce content at the level of the buffer did and I I think I had a bit of an onboarding experience to kind of get up to speed and be able to do that as quickly as I would have liked to and early on it probably took oh eight to ten hours to make a buffer blog post the way that I was was happy with and currently it takes maybe three or four hours to put a post together we had a post that went live on the blog just today about social media checklist that I put together and it was about three thousand words and had lots of lots of good visuals and things that we kind of aim before with our content and if I'm kind of thinking back to the time that one took it probably took about about three or four hours to put together and I could definitely have seen that one before taking about twice as long or longer and I think what's changed over time and if I could share anything encouraging as far as kind of my development toward a faster writing process and style is I've definitely become more comfortable and faster at researching and knowing where to look for things so a lot of the content in today's post which kind of talks about different social media checklist items that okay I was able to quickly reference things that were just in my mind from before from being on the blog and knowing lots of stuff of previous content that we published doing a lot of research for other things in the past it's not necessarily I went out and started researching for checklist today it's more that I have been immersed in social media for the last year and all of these things are now coming to mind as I kind of experienced them and think about them so that difference though it's probably quite subtle makes a big impact on my time spent kind of ramping up and gearing up for writing something like that so that was hugely useful for me and has been useful these past few months and then I think too i've i've gotten more disciplined about my writing process and that's something that i continually am still trying to improve it and grow on last night when i was writing I I was riding it into the evening and i stopped at nine thirty which was great because i recognized wow I don't know that I would be making any sense if i were to keep going and i think that was something i wouldn't have noticed in myself before I would have just pushed through until it was done or until I fell asleep I don't really know what how long I would have lasted but it I guess it's the idea of being mindful and and conscious of kind of my energy and when able to produce my best work has been a great hack for me in terms of how much time I spend on things so yeah if I could pass along any advice I think it's it's been great for me to kind of be aware of that and to schedule my day in a way that I have the time to work on things when I have the energy to work on things and once I'm in a task to be fully in that task and not pulling out to do other things or to check social media to get kind of involved in something else but to be really mindful and focused and disciplined from that side so I might have been more than you asked for with that question so thank you for letting me share a bit extra there but yeah thank you for for kind of bringing that one up that's a great one all right I'm just going to look through the list here to see what else has come in great this one is from Ben and Ben asks buffer does an amazing job with super informative blog posts that thoroughly cover the topics that we discuss and we don't do much short form content is there a reason for this set buffer and that's a good one above 2 i'd love to have a maybe a bigger conversation about that to some time but i think for me personally what we found on the blog is an excuse me is that the long-form content has done really well for us when we tend to pull our numbers and our metrics it seems to be that even the 2500 word posts and up are the ones that are highest performing we typically aim for maybe excuse me between them i guess around 2000 words to 2500 would be kind of a big a great big one for us um what those are the ones that tend to perform best and have historically so I think that's kind of guided our process along those lines what we're kind of excited to experiment with and don't have any idea how it will work but our kind of keen to figure out is maybe using something like medium as a way to do more short form content and what I'd have in mind for short form would be if anyone's familiar with a site like daring fireball or kottke org those two sites are kind of like a well maybe like a news aggregator of sorts where they'll pull out the most interesting news items on their on their industry a niche and from that point kind of common at commentary to them or just surface them for folks and kind of be the source of go to information and my sense is that maybe that could be quite powerful in terms of social media and in worth trying for us so I guess to answer the question I have some ideas about short form content we have only validated long-form content which is why we are I guess still fully focused on that at this stage but excited to see what might come from the short form aside as well so thanks for encouraging that that thought and the nudge in that direction great let me grab another one here this is a great one this one comes from Miguel Miguel asks if I had to choose only three feeds to have on feedly which ones would they be oh boy um I love feeling maybe I can share my feedly with you while we're chatting here and yeah I think here's Mike featly I'm gonna totally cheat and just probably read some of these off to you I can login to the right one is funny i have three or four feed Lee's also so I totally cheat in terms of having um in terms of having way more RSS link RSS stuff than I need but um yeah if I were to choose maybe three or four is seeing what I have in the list here for marketing blogs what I really enjoyed is a site called copy hackers and let me see if it's in the list here not quite seeing us I'll pull up the link copy hackers is a site run by joining and we've and it's just amazing stuff about copy and how to write and very very detailed and action-oriented which is something I personally feel like and I can improve a lot on and I'm excited to kind of learn from everything new that comes from their site so yeah this is their sites and just a really cool place to learn about writing and I'm probably one of many who would lips Copyblogger as a go-to place for different articles and things this is their main site here them just kind of scrolling through their blog has a lot of a lot of great information and it kind of gone in a direction for a lot of podcast slightly too much has been fun to to learn and grow along with and yeah I think a lot of my favorite articles over time or from coffee blogger and a lot of the writers they're so definitely keen to keep keep learning and stuff from them and and Maz is another one that I I quite enjoy and is their blog a pair just some amazing thought leadership Moz itself is a lot about SEO but their blog covers not only SEO but also content with social media and covers it in a way that it it really inspires me to think bigger and think deeper on a lot of levels so they're one that I constantly look to for advice and guidance from that side and yeah and then in terms of maybe non non non marketing blogs um I do quite enjoy a certain site that has just met magazine covers I'm probably giving you way more than you asked for with this when Miguel but um I love looking at magazine covers so I think it's trying to think of the name i think it's covered junkie that i find the magazine covers on and then I love sports so I go to SB Nation a lot for sports news they kind of have a light-hearted tone to a lot of the stuff they cover there and then I love looking at pictures of a funny dog so I I'm on tumblr and I kind of look at funny dog pictures when I need a a big smile or something cool to look at so yeah those would be my three that I would choose that are not marketing related so thank you for the chance to share all that that's a great question cool this is great that all these have come in time gonna do my best to get to as many as I can and any that I don't get too i will for sure leave answers to later on today so I i can make sure we got good everyone covered here and thank you for voting them up too if there's a question that you see on the side that you love for me to answer before we get done here clicking the plus one or uploading it would be really really helpful so I can make sure to get to the ones you're keen to to hear this one comes from paul and paul asks in a clickbait world how do you remate how do you remain intriguing yet honest in your headlines that's a great one I i definitely understand kind of where you're coming from with that and I've noticed a couple different things like in terms of headlines where and it's almost like a a complete reversal of clickbait where it tells you everything in the headline and you're still intrigued enough to click on it and I don't know if that I can't quite think of like any examples or how if we've done that with buffer before but I think this idea of creating content that in and of itself is so unique and engaging and intriguing that you can kind of give it all away in the headline and still have people who want to read that I think that's probably a really powerful way to to stay honest and a headline and still get lots of good traction and clicks and if I were to try that approach I imagine a lot of emphasis will be placed on kind of the idea stage where you're thinking wow this is a great idea that we know will work great and working to kind of throw it out there I'm just thinking now that I'm kind of saying this one thing that we tried recently on the blog is we stopped publishing new content for 30 days and that as an idea seemed like something that might excite a lot of people or could be great to learn from and in terms of framing that headline then we could have gone with something like we didn't publish new content for 30 days and only lost four percent of our traffic here's how or here's why I'm not sure which way to say that but something on those lines might be kind of kind of the opposite of clickbait and yet still intriguing I think a few other things that come to mind in terms of intriguing and remaining honest are the specific words that you use within a headline there's lots that can be quite engaging quite interesting and you can use them in contexts of kind of telling the honest story of what's to come in the blog post I have a lot of how to fondness for headlines with numbers in them and it's not so much like just a listicle I think it's anything with a number kind of adds this specificity to a headline so you can have something with a number and then also say say for instance i guess the headline i just used so we stopped publishing blog posts for 30 days this is what happened that even the number 30 in there it it hints at something very specific in the headline where you're like oh wow so they they had this very very particular idea and notion of mind and they acted on it I bet I will learn a lot of specific actual things from within the article itself if you see people use headlines like our traffic grew three hundred percent with this one tip or something like that where it's an actual number I think that's quite powerful than to get people to click through because they will expect to see some really cool stuff once they get into it um in terms of specific numbers I think one thing we found to be somewhat true for us is that odd numbers tend to work pretty well and even further is prime numbers tend to work quite great also and I I want to say that the odd numbers has been slightly validated by research and the prime numbers is probably just like a wild intuition guess on my part but um I'm not sure maybe there's I tried to research it even a while back and I think prime numbers have my hunch is that prime numbers have some sort of psychological impact on folks where the numbers are so unique because they're probably they kind of trigger something in the brain and that is a wildly irresponsible thing for me to say without having any research behind it but just a theory that I'm working with currently and we've seen some good results from that if you look at headlines like 17 sources of amazing content or 39 ways to do 39 a prime number I don't think 39 is a prime number 37 ways to do Twitter and chats like those numbers kind of grab you and they've worked so um kind of got a bit deep on to the number side but that would be something I might try in terms of headlines to get out of the clickbait into the more honest and actual side of things um I guess my last thought on headlines is kind of this idea of delivering on the promise that you have in your headline this is maybe a higher level view of headlines where if you are if you're writing a headline and you have kind of a vision for what the content will be behind that that each of those matchups so that when someone clicks on the headline they're getting what they expect in the article and then over time the idea is that that will kind of foster this expectation with the audience and the community that oh I can click on most anything from the buffer blog or from the maz blog and know that they're going to make good on the promise of the headline so to speak so not that we would ever experiment with the clickbait headband but if there was ever a headline that you were like it doesn't know if I really I don't know what I'm going to get there like you'll know what you're going to get there based on past history so yeah just kind of a few extra headline tidbits that have been useful for us in the past but that's that's a great one I think I'm do okay I I love this question from Jessica Jessica asks what buffer feature that you think most users overlooked or underutilized wow I have a couple of them maybe I could share my screen again and see if I can um show any of these to you let's see let me open a new one so that it's fresh okay great this is my my buffer dashboard and a couple of things that I i really enjoy from here are the ability to drag-and-drop updates from within the queue so i'll kind of hit on a couple different levels of things so dragging and dropping so this is kind of the next this is today and tomorrow on my cue so this post here if I wanted to go first thing tomorrow I would just mouse over the icon to the left of the update and it changes from a pointer to a hand and I can click and hold and then drag it around to different places you can also click and drag from one profile to another profile so if i wanted to share this same thing on facebook i could click and drag up to facebook and it copies to my facebook there it is on facebook so clicking and dragging is a super big favorite of mine a very small in which I I think some folks know and some folks might not is you can set the different default profiles here on the left so you'll see this as a checkmark next to your default profiles if you were to click that or unclick that it then changes it toggles it offer on so I could set multiple ones as defaults and then where that comes into play let's say I'm on a particular website and kind of looking through things here and I want to share this so if I were to open the buffer extension buffer will recognize the profiles that I have selected as default and have them automatically selected for me from the start so that's a very handy ND way of doing things here and then one more thing with the extension a couple of things maybe somebody somebody buffer features that I quite enjoyed would love to make sure everyone knows about um if you right click on any photo you can go to buffer this image and the image is added to the update and then likewise if you or to just looking for something the highlight here if you were to highlight anything really if there's a quote or a heading that really grabs you you can right click and buffer you can buffer selected text and then the text automatically fills in there and something new we're working on is you can buffer the text and create an image with Pablo so this is kind of a enough upcoming version of Pablo but it's our image creation tool so we have that that seemed to be built into the extension as well so yeah those are a couple of my favorite ones would love to hear any of your all as to if there's one that catches your eye that I didn't quite touch on cool i see we got about 10 minutes left so i might breeze through a couple of these pretty quickly this one comes from Twitter again I'll kept on this one fast this is when we get a lot this is from chris d 0 0 8 and he asks any plans to incorporate instagram integration or if it's even possible and that's a great one i think having seen HootSuite come out with instagram recently has kind of brought this up up again a lot for us when we did customer development a while back to kind of learn from you all what you would like from us in terms of Instagram the reaction and feedback that we got was that you love for it to be as smooth and seamless as possible so that your scheduling within buffer and you don't have to worry about doing anything else that you know it's going to go straight to Instagram and currently what the instagram api allows is for is not that what they allow for is is the chance to kind of send notifications and to kind of work within the loose structure of kind of the publishing side but not fully engaged there which is kind of what we're excited about it and hopeful for and just kind of doing our best to stay in communication with instagram