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mariemary1 · 5 years ago

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The Evolution of Product at Buffer and the Next Step: We’re Hiring a VP of Product

We've been building Buffer for coming up to ten years now. We’re currently a 90-person fully remote team with over 70,000 paying customers and $20M in annual revenue. We’re proud to be a leader in the space of social media management, and to operate long-term as an independent and profitable business. As a company, we’ve rallied around serving small businesses. We’re also passionate about challenging suboptimal approaches to how work happens and how employees are treated. Our current 4-day workweek experiment is an example of that. An important philosophy of our journey has been having the freedom to build our product and workplace the way we'd like to. In 2018, we took an important action to maintain this freedom by spending $3.3 million buying out our main VC investors. After a great decade with many accomplishments and interesting challenges, we’re looking for an experienced and driven product executive to partner with me as CEO to shape the future of Buffer. Before I get into why we’re hiring a VP of Product, I want to share a history of product at Buffer, how our team is set up, and our most recent revenue metrics as these are all aspects of Buffer that I know a product leader will have questions around.

A history of product at Buffer

I launched the first (truly an MVP) version of Buffer in late 2010. In the beginning, Buffer started as a solution to my own problemaround consistently sharing content on social media. Ithen put the idea through a customer discovery and validation process to ensure it was a problem others had, too.We launched with a freemium model and were fortunate to welcome the first paying customer on day three. We then added some focused marketing, and over the course of the first year gained thousands of active users of the product. Initially a lot of our product direction came from those customers, listening to their problems and devising unique solutions. In 2012, it was time to focus slightly more. We narrowed in on bloggers, individuals, and small business owners. We set down our first true product vision, which was to be the sharing standard for the web. We made big progress on this vision, becoming the first social media management solution to create a sharing button and completing integrations with countless news reading apps. During this time, our acquisition and growth strategy was our freemium model. Ultimately we started to realize that this strategy would only truly work if we became a mainstream product used by millions. As we integrated more widely, the signups we gained from those partnerships led to much lower freemium conversion rates. As a result, by 2014, our growth started to plateau and we felt we reached the upper limits of how successful Buffer could become with this approach. Since our product was most valued by and most active among small business customers, we leaned into that and launched Buffer for Business with new pricing plans tiered up to $500/mo. We succeeded in finding a new wave of growth, and the journey cemented our intuition that Buffer wouldn’t find success as a consumer product. This brought a level of focus that was refreshing, and pushed us to add more power to the product. We aimed to do this while still maintaining the simplicity our customers had grown to love Buffer for. In 2015, we explored a team structure with no managers, and this played directly into our approach to product. With more autonomy on our team, we let our product strategy take a truly organic direction. During our period of no managers, we launched several new products. This included a “Buffer labs” exploration where we produced Pablo, our image creation product, as well as Daily, a swipe left or right approach to adding suggested content to your social media queue. Finally, the Pablo team shifted to launch Rocket, our first foray into the ads space. Daily and Rocket were ultimately sunset, and we learned a lot from each of them. In early 2016, we acquired Respondly, a social customer service and engagement product which we relaunched as Buffer Reply. This was our most significant bet and investment to date and took us into the customer service industry for the first time. Customer service had always been a large focus for us as a company, and we were excited to be able to offer a product to help others in this space, too. At the time, the networks were making a big bet on social media becoming a significant channel for customer service. Customer service ultimately did not grow along the path we predicted, and the need for a fully fledged product here was mostly limited to Enterprise scale, which was too mismatched with our existing customer-base and knowledge in the team. We grew Reply from $4k to $70k in MRR, and chose to sunset the product earlier this year. In the process of becoming a two product organization, we saw an opportunity to separate out social analytics from our main product focused on social media publishing and content planning. We leaned into this multi-product strategy and built our third product, Analyze. This separation gave us a better focus on the separate customer jobs and we have been able to grow this into a very successful product. Analyze currently generates over $1.5m in ARR. By the second half of 2018, we had grown to $18m in ARR and over 75,000 paying customers. Still being a small team, we started to feel stretched thin, and we increasingly found product prioritization and pace to be challenges. I partnered with our head of research to run a process to determine a singular type of customer for us to focus our efforts around. We arrived at Direct to Consumer (DTC) brands as a type of customer who has built their business on top of social media and has innovated the most with social media marketing and customer engagement. This newly defined Target Customer for Buffer brought us a lot of focus, but at times felt like an over correction and came at a cost to product improvements for our existing customers, who are small businesses of all types. Something that became clear over a few years, and during our customer research process to arrive at DTC brands as a customer persona to focus on, was that the the world of social media had become increasing visual. To address this shift, we spent most of 2018 and 2019 building out new functionality focused on Instagram. In addition to this work to expand our product offerings, we underwent a significant rebuild project for our main product, Publish. Rebuilds are never fun, but with this now complete we are able to move significantly faster and deliver a much improved user experience. That brings us to 2020. Our current focus is to become a brand-building platform for small businesses, with DTC brands as one of our primary customer personas. This year, it became clear that the multi-product approach was creating friction for customers, so we are working to adjust our pricing and overall experience towards a single solution. We’re in the midst of launching Engage, a social engagement product for small businesses that came out of our experiences growing Reply. Engage will be bundled as part of existing pricing tiers, at various levels of functionality. I’m looking forward to this next chapter of Buffer, and to a future where we can become a comprehensive toolkit for small businesses to build their brand, grow, and create great relationships with their customers. We see a path to 100,000 paying customers and beyond, with many opportunities to solve more problems for that audience.

How our product team is set up

We’re primarily structured around the customer jobs we are focused on: Publish, Analyze and Engage. We also have two “shared services” teams focused on authentication, billing and onboarding (Core) and our iOS and Android apps (Mobile). Most teams have a Product Manager, Product Designer and somewhere between two and seven engineers depending on the needs of that product area. The VP of Product we bring on board will manage Product and Design, and initially have six direct reports (four PMs, Head of Design and Partnerships Manager).

Our current financial metrics

We’ve been profitable since 2016 and in 2018 we chose to leverage that profitability to buy out a portion of our investors in order to retain control over Buffer’s path. We reached $10 million in ARR in May 2016, and $20 million ARR in March 2019. Here are our most recent revenue and product metrics from June 2020: MRR: $1,704,768 ARR: $20,457,216Customers: 69,596 ARPU: $24.50 Customer Churn: 4.76%Net MRR Churn: 3.95% LTV: $515 Revenue: $1,679,591 Operating Income: $235,375 EBITDA margin: 14.01% We have a dedicated revenue dashboard (a work in progress!) where you can see revenue over time. Here’s what that looks like:

The COVID-19 impact Many businesses have been impacted by COVID-19, including us. Buffer is in a strong financial position, we’ve thankfully had no impact on jobs and have remained solidly profitable. The shareholder update we sent in April shares a complete picture of our approach in the midst of the pandemic. One thing I talked about in that update is that sometimes the best thing we can do for our small business customers isn’t immediately profitable for Buffer – including our COVID-19 support programs for customers with financial challenges. I have no doubt that we’re doing the right thing by focusing on people first. One of my business philosophies is that if we take care of our teammates and our customers as best we possibly can now, we will succeed in the long term. This graph of our MRR in 2020 shows the impact we’ve seen on revenue:

Though we have experienced some anticipated decline, we are happy to see that it has started to climb again and as I mentioned, Buffer has pulled through in a strong financial position. We’ve spent the last few years building up to our current financial security, which means we can weather extreme levels of uncertainty. We’re fortunate and grateful to be in this position, and are proud of our financial diligence.

We’re hiring a VP of Product

At this point in the journey of Buffer, I’m excited to bring on board a VP of Product. Before I share more of the reasons we came to this decision, I want to share a key area of weakness up front. While we've made great strides over the past few years, and we have a majority female leadership team, our current leadership team lacks diversity. There's no doubt that as a result we lack key perspectives and have unconscious biases as a company. It’s a priority for us to change this dynamic and include within our leadership team backgrounds that have been typically underrepresented in tech. This will serve our customers and our team more fully than we have been able to so far. Since we don’t grow our leadership team often, this is a rare opportunity for us. In addition to looking for a talented product leader, we also want this teammate to bring a new perspective to our leadership team and culture. Making sure we speak to a slate of diverse candidates is critical as we look for our VP of Product. Below are a few reasons I came to the decision to look for a product leader: Being a product-minded CEO can become a weakness As a product-minded CEO, my journey has followed from my innate energy and passion for product development. An engineer by background, I shifted to product development early in our journey, and found a lot of enjoyment in crafting the experience for customers, which I believe has played a large role in where we are today. Unfortunately, what can happen with a product-CEO, is that product can go from being the strongest area of the company to one of the weakest. At a certain point, product must scale up and become operationalized, and those strengths must become part of how the overall team functions. I believe in recent years we’ve seen some deterioration of product where other areas such as engineering have grown stronger, due to my desire to hold on and shape product more than is appropriate for the size have grown to. I’ve recognized that I need to take a different approach to fulfill the vision and goals I have, in order to keep the product as a core strength of ours. It needs to happen through someone else, rather than through me alone. I’m looking to bring more balance to all areas of Buffer I believe for a company to thrive, all areas in a company need to work in harmony and that my role as CEO is set down vision and support all areas. Over the past few years, I’ve been very focused on product, which has caused an imbalance in how much I’ve been involved in other areas of the company. This is to the detriment of our customers, team, and all stakeholders. By inviting this functional leader to our leadership team, it will mean I can be more equally balanced across all areas of Buffer. We will be able to push forward, and I can work more closely with leaders to set vision and strategy, across all areas in tandem. Therefore, bringing on an experienced VP of Product will help us level up as a product organization. We will be able to introduce more streamlined processes, and by having a person dedicated to this area solely, we will improve the way product interacts with other related and interdependent areas, such as engineering, marketing, and advocacy. We’re looking for outside perspective For this role, I am making the choice to bring in someone from the outside instead of considering someone growing from within the company. This is new for us, and I’m excited for the opportunity for growth we have with a fresh perspective on the executive team. In our journey so far, we have overwhelmingly had leaders grow from individual contributor roles into senior leaders. I believe that it’s beneficial to have a majority of leaders grow from within the company as there is a clear alignment of our values, empathy towards team members, and a sense of loyalty towards our mission. With that said, having 100% of leaders grow from within creates a lack of diversity in our mindset and approach. Without outside experience, we will have knowledge gaps as a leadership team, and can become set in our ways. The VP of Product role is an excellent opportunity for us to find someone with some extensive outside experience. A key thing we will be focused on in our hiring process is that a person’s external experience is compatible and additive to Buffer’s approach and values.

More about this role

For this role, I’m seeking a partner in product strategy and execution. Since product is at the heart of Buffer, this is one of the most important roles and one which will make decisions impacting all other areas. We’re looking for a product leader with deep product management and design fundamentals and expertise, as well as strong people management experience and stakeholder collaboration. I’m aiming to find someone that can both tap into the insights that I have to offer and stand strong and push back when they believe I shouldn’t be involved. It will be helpful for a potential VP of Product to have experience in a smaller company environment, and ideally has led a product team through significant growth, for example growing a SaaS product from $10m to $50m or more. The other key difference with Buffer is that we’re focused on SMB, with a large number of paying customers and free users, and we have no sales team. This changes the type of work involved at the product leadership level, and this will be something the right person is energized by. The new VP of Product will have the opportunity to craft a unique strategy to help us serve customers, differentiate Buffer, and see great growth over the next 5 to 10 years. Joining Buffer at the leadership level is a rare opportunity. We’re a highly customer-focused team and are squarely on a path of long-term sustainability. This is an opportunity for a great product leader to play a key role in creating much more value for customers and building something special that endures. I’m looking forward to meeting people who are up for this challenge. Please reach out through this job posting to apply and someone from our hiring team will be in touch with next steps. If you want to recommend someone who you think would be great for this role, please fill out this form.

More about Buffer’s journey

If you’d like to learn more about Buffer’s journey over the years, here are a few podcast episodes where I’ve talked about starting Buffer, fundraising, transparency, and profitability.

SaaStock: Building a remote, profitable, transparent and sustainable company with Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer

20VC: Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne on The Moment The Founder Is No Longer The Boss, The Questions Founders Must Ask Their VCs and Why We Need A Spectrum of Different Financing Mechanisms Other Than VC

Product Hunt: Distributed teams, extreme transparency and buying out your investors

Thank The Evolution of Product at Buffer and the Next Step: We’re Hiring a VP of Product for first publishing this post.

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margaretbeagle · 5 years ago

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The Evolution of Product at Buffer and the Next Step: We’re Hiring a VP of Product

A history of product at Buffer

How our product team is set up

Our current financial metrics

We’re hiring a VP of Product

More about this role

More about Buffer’s journey

If you’d like to learn more about Buffer’s journey over the years, here are a few podcast episodes where I’ve talked about starting Buffer, fundraising, transparency, and profitability.

SaaStock: Building a remote, profitable, transparent and sustainable company with Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer

20VC: Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne on The Moment The Founder Is No Longer The Boss, The Questions Founders Must Ask Their VCs and Why We Need A Spectrum of Different Financing Mechanisms Other Than VC

Product Hunt: Distributed teams, extreme transparency and buying out your investors

The Evolution of Product at Buffer and the Next Step: We’re Hiring a VP of Product published first on https://improfitninja.weebly.com/

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workfromhomeyoutuber · 5 years ago

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Buffer: Senior Product Manager (Remote)

Headquarters: Buffer URL: https://buffer.com

About Buffer

Buffer is a platform of social media products made for modern, online brands. We’re building the products they need for visual marketing, audience engagement, and analytics. We want to help these brands stand out online and to drive meaningful engagement and measurable results for their brand and their bottom line.

As a Senior Product Manager at Buffer, you’ll own the vision and roadmap for your product within the Buffer platform. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams at Buffer to align Publish with our strategic bets and north star, define success criteria, and develop clear plans and milestones. Day to day, you’ll work hands on and collaborate with your product team to execute on the roadmap and ship features that deliver value to our customers.

About Publish

You’ll be working on our flagship product, Publish. This highly visible product is at the core of our customer’s overall experience with Buffer. The product allows our customers to plan, collaborate, and publish high quality content that helps drive awareness, engagement, and sales for their brand.

Though our Publish product is well established and generating just over $20M ARR, we’re looking for a Senior Product Manager that can drive more than incremental change. Working closely with the Design, Engineering, Data, and Marketing teams, you’ll find, execute, and grow the next big opportunities for this product.

Who You’ll Work With

In this role you’ll report to the Head of Product. Day to day you’ll work closely with and be supported by a Senior Product Designer, Engineers, and an Engineering Manager. You’ll also work closely with our Data, Marketing, and Advocacy teams.

Responsibilities

Set a compelling long term vision for the next chapter of Publish.

Define the strategy, set clear goals, and build a roadmap that helps your team realize the product vision.

Collaborate closely with design, engineering, data, and marketing to drive the ideation, research, design, and development of customer-focused features and improvements.

Keep a strong pulse on the world of direct to consumer brands (DTCs) and the social media management landscape.

Keep your team focused and excited to solve customer problems by connecting the work they do to our customer’s success and our larger mission.

Build alignment across product teams, our leadership team, and other stakeholders.

Qualifications

5+ years of product management experience.

Successful track record of managing software products throughout the product lifecycle.

Strong technical understanding of how modern software products are built and integrate with other services and APIs.

Passionate about creating a high quality products with a keen eye for detail and intuitive user experiences.

Adept at pairing data with product intuition to always keep product decisions moving forward.

Strong understanding of key SaaS metrics including MRR, Churn, LTV, CAC, ARPU, and how these metrics impact one another.

Clear and concise written skills with an ability to distill and communicate complex topics.

Bias towards action with an ability to drive results near term as well as the ability to zoom out and connect the day to day work to our large mission.

Ideally located in within the CST or EST timezone.

What We Value

Clear communication, transparency, open-mindedness, empathy and patience are just a few of Buffer's cultural values. We are looking for a person who understands this culture and will thrive within a team of people passionate about self-improvement, honesty and openness. Here's a guide on how we strive to communicate with customers.

Perks and Benefits

We hope that you're excited by the possibilities that come with working at Buffer! In addition to our unique culture, we also offer these fun perks and benefits.

💰 Competitive salary: Our salary formula adjusts to your cost of living and experience. For this role, the range is: $122K - $153K USD.

🏝 Work remotely: Live and work wherever you like!

💪 Health insurance: We offer health insurance for all of our team members, international or US.

💻 Home office setup: Get a laptop + $500 to set up your home office!

👓 Growth mindset fund: Extra money for learning and development.

⛺️ Minimum vacation: At least 3 weeks/year!

🤑 401(k): With 3% company match.

📈 Profit sharing: When the company does well, all team members share the profits!

🍼 Family leave: 3 months of family leave for all parents, and more is possible.

✈️ Retreats: Join us for company get-togethers twice per year! Our next retreat is in Greece.

☕️ Working smarter stipend: Get some extra cash for a co-working space or a coffee shop work.

📚 Free books and Kindle: Get a free Kindle and all the free books - digital, physical, and audio - you like, anytime.

⛱ Sabbaticals: Take a 6-week break, fully paid, after every 5 years with Buffer.

Where You'll Work

Buffer is a fully distributed team, which means that we’re spread across the planet. We have Bufferoos in 18 countries, 11 timezones and 45 cities around the world to build a great culture and product. You'll work where you're happiest and most productive, in the place that helps you to become the person you wish to be.

To apply: https://journey.buffer.com/senior-product-manager

from We Work Remotely: Remote jobs in design, programming, marketing and more https://ift.tt/2QPPHjK from Work From Home YouTuber Job Board Blog https://ift.tt/2tR9uWZ

#WorkFromHome #OnlineJobs #RemoteJobs #Entrepreneur #WorkFromHomeJobs #WorkAtHomeJobs #Self Em

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 5 years ago

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Content curation in 2020: When, why and how

Low on budget, short on time but still needing to churn out insightful content to your readers?

Incorporate content curation into your marketing strategy.

Here’s why.

Curated blogs, newsletters and industry updates are valuable additions to a content marketing machine that’s hamstrung by limited resources. Or, if your company is looking to add a different, external perspective to your marketing, curation can be a relevant, cost-effective tool to utilise.

It doesn’t have to be content curation versus content creation: It can be both.

What is content curation?

Content curation is the process of gathering highly relevant information from outside sources and sharing it with readers.

For companies in the SaaS space, news on updated customer privacy standards, for instance, would be pertinent to your customers. For us, insights from the Content Marketing Institute or Search Engine Journal are of great value, and so we share that content with our readers.

It’s not created from scratch and it’s not necessarily revolutionary, but it’s relevant and it serves audience intent. The key is that whatever you share needs to be of high quality.

High-quality content that resonates

It’s not enough to gather trustworthy sources and share the opinions of influencers; you also need to ensure that what you’re curating and promoting meaningfully adds to the conversation and presents information in a way that isn’t offered elsewhere.

And you don’t have to rely on articles alone.

Content curation is often seen in three forms:

Email newsletters

Email marketing is a primary vehicle for content marketers to generate leads and deliver quality content directly to the inboxes of high-value prospects.

Leveraging the power of email automation platforms and curated newsletters creates a dynamic and efficient tool that every marketer should use.

One reason they work so well is that you save your subscribers time. Instead of them scouring the internet for hot takes and trend-worthy news, all they have to do is open an email: Your newsletter is right there waiting.

Short snippet of a Moz email newsletter.

Blogs

So what do you put into those newsletters? Many times they’re filled with quality blogs (in addition to downloadable assets like eBooks or visual content like infographics or video).

Curated blogs are great mechanisms to keep blog pages updated and relevant. These articles should feature industry roundups, game-changing business developments and predictions for the future, among others. Essentially, if it can make readers’ lives easier, include it.

Here’s an example of our work:

Social media posts

Posting on various social platforms several times a day likewise benefits from automation and a bit of planning. You’re not always going to have newly created content to share, so curated posts, images, quizzes, data, etc. can fill those gaps in your social calendar.

The focus should be on shareability, and if you find yourself wanting to retweet or like another business’s post, chances are your readers have the same sentiment. Fun facts, off-the-wall first-person stories and visually compelling content create higher engagement and inject your brand into industry conversations online.

Here’s how influencer Shane Barker uses his Twitter feed to frequently post industry insights from around the web:

How To Make Money On Social Media (Even With Fewer Than 1,000 Followers) via @forbes https://t.co/suE9uoxswl #InfluencerMarketing #MicroInfluencers #Money

— Shane Barker (@shane_barker) December 5, 2017

How to create and use buyer personas to drive #sales https://t.co/0RtAHVJuHM @wordtracker #ecommerce pic.twitter.com/WJnMzCG35Z

— Shane Barker (@shane_barker) December 5, 2017

7 Ways to Ensure Your Next Webinar is a Success https://t.co/uq4NZIXeFi @CrazyEgg #Webinar

— Shane Barker (@shane_barker) December 5, 2017

Twitter, YouTube and Instagram shares are easy options for content curation because many content management systems have built-in integrations that allow for these platforms’ posts to be directly embedded in new articles.

By embedding social media posts in the middle of longer posts, you can offer additional takeaways and commentary, thus contributing further to the conversation at hand.

What ISN’T content curation?

You might be asking, “Well, aren’t you just aggregating other people’s work and re-posting it?��

The short answer is, content curation is not “content farming” or “content aggregation”. Emphasis is placed on “curation”, as a direct copy + paste of external content is clearly a knockoff or generic attempt at scraping the work of actual creators.

The key to curation is weaving a narrative of sources into a comprehensive piece while adding in one’s own thoughts, reviews or experiences.

When to curate and when to create

Fifty-five percent of B2B marketers have small or single-person marketing teams, meaning there simply aren’t enough people to handle steady content creation (at least not in-house). A quick peek into some of the most common challenges B2B marketers face shows just how pervasive content creation struggles really are:

Via contentmarketinginstitute.com

So the question isn’t so much, “Should I create or curate,” but, rather, “What do I have time to accomplish, and what is the best way to do so efficiently?”

Content creation is resource-intensive but also more valuable in the long term. Customers and prospects want to know your brand is authentic, engaging and industry-leading. Projecting this image is possible through releasing proprietary research, crafting a strong resource centre and providing information or opinions that can’t be found elsewhere (custom visuals are an added bonus!).

Additionally, organically created content allows you to fine-tune your messaging and target the keyword opportunities that can propel your brand from Page 5 to Page 1. You can also measure and re-optimise posts based on web analytics data – you effectively have an entire roadmap of what works and what doesn’t, and you know how, when and what to create in the future.

It should be noted, however, that in-house or agency-led content creation is obviously ideal but not always realistic. This fact means companies often have to rely on professional freelance writers, ghostwriters or other content marketing specialists to do the heavy lifting for them. Each of these avenues may be more of a headache than it’s worth if your writers for hire aren’t able to quickly match your brand voice or get up to speed on your niche services.

On the other end of the spectrum, curation is more limiting in its scope simply because you can’t curate what doesn’t already exist (you have to rely on others to publish great content first before you can compile it). Under a strictly curated arrangement, you also aren’t in full control of targeting and prospecting. Again, it’s difficult to rank for keywords (thus getting in front of qualified leads) if you can’t structure content from top to bottom in the way you like, and in a way that no one else has.

It’s akin to a library. You can be either a librarian (a curator of books), or a writer, (a creator of those books). We bet you can’t remember the name of any librarian (sorry, librarians), but you can probably name your top three writers in five seconds flat. So, do you want your marketing to be memorable?

“The key to curation is weaving a narrative of sources into a comprehensive piece while adding in one’s own thoughts, reviews or experiences.”

Then you’ll need your own voice. One that includes unique commentary and custom marketing assets.

But, that doesn’t mean you can scrap curation altogether, because it has tangible benefits. The best option is to find a strategy that allows curation and creation to complement one another, forming cohesive, refreshing, measurable campaigns.

Conventional wisdom shifts, but a general breakdown to shoot for is 65 percent creation and 35 percent curation.

Content curation tools

Automating the content curation process can maximise your time spent. Here are a few tools to consider:

Curata brands itself as the “fastest way to find and share content gold,” and its curation software is becoming an industry standard.

BuzzSumo allows you to research by keywords and keyphrases to see what’s trending, who’s sharing it and how much engagement social posts are receiving. You can also set up automated alerts to be notified whenever new content in your topic area and share content directly from your BuzzSumo account through a Buffer integration.

Feedly is mostly used for surfacing blog content and following industry insiders, while also providing integration features with Slack, Trello, Evernote and others.

Twitter Lists is perfect for monitoring influencers and keeping trends organised by topic. Twitter categorises the people and information you seek into lists so all content is at your fingertips.

Storify comes with a WordPress plugin that quickly allows you to move curated content directly to your CMS. You can scan visual storyboards to see the breaking news, blogs, hashtag campaigns and events are trending.

How your content strategy can benefit from curation

Content curation has a number of SEO and brand-building benefits, including:

Exposure: You’re attaching your name to other big brands.

Thought leadership: You become a one-stop shop for all things authoritative in your industry.

Organic indexing: With more content, relevant sources and incoming traffic, search engines index your web pages, providing users more avenues to arrive to your site.

Comprehensiveness: Instead of product-specific, me-first marketing, you’re focusing on topical authority and expert opinions.

Social boost: You have many more resources to share on social, encouraging subscriptions, follows and engagement.

Also, consider this illustration from Curata which shows the inherent value in curation:

Via curata.com

Be diverse, be comprehensive and be engaging. And if you have a tool that allows you to do that, all the better.

from http://bit.ly/32ALvbL

#content marketing

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mediacalling · 7 years ago

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Social Media Engagement is the New Social Media Marketing: How To Do It Well

At Buffer, we think a lot about the future of social media.

It started as a way for friends to connect online, evolved into a broadcasting channel, and is now a place for brands to provide personalized, human experiences with their audience and customers.

Social media is as much about engagement with other people as it is about sharing content.

It’s why we call it “social” media.

Here are just a few reasons why social media engagement is a vital part of any social media marketing strategy.

1. Simply broadcasting content results in low reach and referral traffic

Over the last few years, organic reach (on Facebook in particular) has dropped so dramatically that some people have questioned the viability of organic posting at all.

In 2017, Buzzsumo analyzed 880 million Facebook posts and uncovered a sharp decline in engagements. This is linked to a perceived push by social media platforms to encourage brands to use advertising to boost their reach.

In 2018, Facebook also announced that they would change their post ranking algorithm to prioritize personal posts over brand page posts in the News Feed. A key part of the change is that they are using “meaningful engagement” as an important signal that a post should be prioritized.

In other words, posts with more active and thoughtful interactions will get more reach.

There’s a fascinating insight into why Facebook are taking this approach in this explainer video from their Newsfeed team.

“Interacting with people is associated with a greater sense of well-being… On the other hand, just scrolling through your Facebook feed, passively reading or watching without interacting with others, tends to make people feel worse.” – Facebook

2. People expect businesses to respond on social media, and fast

Twitter and Facebook have become the first places people go to for customer support, product enquiries or just to say thank you to businesses.

Back in 2013 it was estimated that 67% of consumers use Facebook and Twitter for customer service, and that was five years ago! With the rise of Facebook Messenger usage, that number is likely to have trended upwards as over 8 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses on Messenger alone each month.

This report by Sprout Social also suggests that using social media is now the top choice for people seeking customer service.

The speed at which business respond is also important. According to research commissioned by Twitter in 2016, 71% of their users expect a response within an hour.

3. Social media engagement increases loyalty and generates word of mouth.

People love positive interactions with brands on social media. Here’s just one example of nice tweet someone shared about Buffer.

There’s also a ton of data that suggests that answering complaints on social media increases customer advocacy and reduces churn. For example, Jay Baer’s research found that answering a complaint on social media can increase customer advocacy by as much 25%.

On the flipside, in Sprout Social’s research they discovered that 30% of customers who are shunned by brands on social media are more likely to switch to a competitor.

What’s more – social media experiences are, by design, both public and easy to share. This creates a compounding impact on positive experiences, compared to say, an email exchange or phone call.

The Twitter exchange below is a neat example of how thoughtful and fun social engagement between a customer and brand can go viral. Aside from garnering hundreds of retweets, it got picked up by news outlets including Buzzfeed and the Mirror.

@TeaAndCopy Were there no other packs in the plaice, or was that the sole one on the shelf? Floundering for an explanation! David.

— Sainsbury's (@sainsburys) January 10, 2014

@TeaAndCopy If I'm herring you right, you're looking to eel our relationship. I'll tell the store to find the shelf & fillet. David.

— Sainsbury's (@sainsburys) January 10, 2014

.@sainsburys All these exchanges in a roe have been brill-iant, David. I'll try to kipper a lid on it, but Gods hake, it's been fin-tastic.

— Marty Lawrence (@TeaAndCopy) January 10, 2014

4. You can learn directly from customers and prospects

We use social media to learn from our customers and community about how we can improve their experience.

If you're a Buffer customer, what would you most like to see us add or improve in the product?

— Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) December 16, 2017

Better collaboration tools for agencies that manage client accounts. Similar to what Mailchimp does. Would be nice for clients to get approval notifications as well.

— Brandon Kidd (@SmashBrando) December 16, 2017

The basic workflow as an agency is I have my own account to manage social but clients can grant me access to their account so I can manage social for them. If they decide to move on, they keep their account. They could grant me publish privileges (full access).

— Brandon Kidd (@SmashBrando) December 16, 2017

Amazing, thanks for the insights here. We have a full Drafts + Approvals workflow being built right now. I think this will help you a lot.

Do you sometimes have clients that hire you and want you to set up their whole account? Or are clients always good setting up themselves?

— Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) December 16, 2017

Having this direct line to customers enables us to build relationships, develop empathy and ultimately build a better product for our users.

Social Media Engagement Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Looking again at the Sprout Social study, apparently brands are only responding to 11 percent of messages on social media and are sharing a whopping 23 promotional messages for every response to their social audience.

If we extrapolate this into the makeup of total social media activity, the contrast is stark and pretty worrisome!

The benefits of social media engagement seem clear, so why haven’t more brands fully embraced it as a marketing strategy?

I believe there are three key challenges that, on the surface, seem quite daunting for marketers and their organizations.

Finding the resources to engage with all relevant conversations

Quality control: maintaining a consistent, authentic voice and tone

Measuring the impact of social media engagement

The best brands on social media turn these challenges into opportunities, and this is how you can nail your social media engagement too.

1. Engaging with all relevant conversations

Staying on top of “mentions” on social media, tapping into relevant conversations, and filtering out irrelevant social chatter is the basis of most social media engagement strategies.

Our marketing team at Buffer uses our own product, Buffer Reply, to focus in on relevant conversations across our key social networks and respond to them quickly.

Reply is a little different to other social media engagement tools because it is more like an inbox rather than a collection of feeds or streams.

It’s a bit like a traditional email inbox, where all relevant messages, whether they’re from Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, appear in the order that the conversation was started. Having threaded conversations neatly organized in one inbox saves our team a huge amount of time. We don’t have to jump between multiple streams and we don’t have to dig through every conversation to see what it’s about or whether it needs a response.

Our team also uses Reply to prioritize certain conversations – for example customer support issues. We have automation rules (which you can learn more about here – they’re quite magical) set up to move certain types of conversations to specific folders, so that we can better manage how we respond to them.

We also use filters to weed out conversations that on the surface appear like they might be relevant but are actually totally unrelated to our business.

Reply isn’t the only tool available to help make social media engagement easier and minimize the time it takes to find and respond to social media posts and messages. There are a number of different options available, depending on your needs. Here’s a list we put together with some of our favorites.

2. Maintaining a consistent, authentic voice

Putting yourself out there on social media can be scary. Will people like what you have to say? Are you putting your brand in its best light?

Having an authentic voice on social media is important but not as easy as it sounds. It’s important because it humanizes your brand – whether that’s a company big or small, or a personal brand – and encourages people to respond and talk about you positively.

It’s difficult because things like “voice” and “tone” are quite subjective. Here’s how Kevan, Buffer’s director of marketing described the challenge in a previous blog post:

“We don’t want brands talking at us as if we are dollar signs. We want authentic communication. Finding a voice for your social media marketing can be difficult because the concept is somewhat unlike other optimization strategies online. Voice is not a statistic you can track or a design element you can tweak. Voice goes deeper than that.”

As an example of how to develop your social media voice, here’s a four-part formula suggested by Stephanie Schwab, writing for Social Media Explorer. She breaks voice down into tone, character, language, and purpose.

Establishing a voice and tone is also one of the subjects in our Social Media 101 email course. You can check out the notes for it here (and feel free to take the entire course if you’re interested!)

Having a clear voice and tone guide is especially helpful when there are multiple people engaging on social media on behalf of a brand.

But what does that look like in practice?

At Buffer, we have a tone guide (which you read about here along with some other guides that we think are quite inspirational). We use this guide to help empower our team. We also provide our whole team with access to Reply to engage with our community.

Here are some tactics we use to engage with people on social media authentically and efficiently.

Personal signatures

Everyone on our team has a personal signature set up in Reply to help humanize our social media responses.

Here’s what it looks like on Twitter:

GIFs and emojis

Emojis and GIFs have become a massive part of the language of social media. We use emojis and GIFs to add personality to our social media conversations and convey our feelings more efficiently.

Assigning conversations to teammates

Reply has a neat feature that enables us to automatically assign social media conversations to specific people on the team. If it’s a technical support query, it might go to one of our customer support advocates. If it’s a shoutout or someone seeking general social media advice, we can route the message directly to our social media manager Bonnie. This helps us provide a better, faster experience for the people we engage with.

As a backup, we also have a some pre-written replies to some of the more common (or tricky) conversations we have on social media, which are available to our team – only if they need it.

In general, we encourage each other to write our own, personal social media messages.

3. Measuring the impact of social media engagement

In my opinion, being able to quantify the return-on-investment is the biggest thing that holds brands back from investing in social media engagement.

It’s often not quite as straightforward as measuring clicks on an ad campaign, or sales from an email promotion.

At Buffer, we measure success through multiple lenses.

Customer support impact

How many messages are we responding to on social media? Are we responding (and resolving issues) faster? Is it reducing the number of support requests we receive through other channels, like email?

Reply tracks our key customer support metrics for us and lets us export the data to CSV so that we can aggregate it with statistics across our other main support channel – email.

Below is an example of one of our reports in Reply. It lets us compare message volume with response time. We can also see how much engagement is happening on each platform.

Brand impact

The impact social media engagement has on your brand is more difficult to measure because someone’s journey with your brand is nonlinear and attribution is murky. Brand perceptions are built up over time and through multiple channels.

At Buffer, the brand metric that we focus on is reach – the number of people who are coming into contact with Buffer each week. We have an annual goal for reach, and we track weekly progress against it. For example, this year we are aiming to reach 105 million people!

We treat social media as a component of total reach, and it is a big contributor for us to our total reach number.

In the table below, Social Reach is the total number of people who see our content within a social media feed and Social Engagement is the cumulative total of likes, comments, shares and clicks, etc.

We include Social Engagement because it helps us measure the quality of our reach. By engaging with our audience on social media ourselves, we try to drive both of these numbers up!

Ultimately, how you measure the effectiveness of engaging with people on social media depends on your goals.

We believe that social media is for branding – so we engage with people on social media to provide quick and friendly customer support, build affinity with our brand, and grow our reach.

You might have different goals for your social media program, so how you measure your social media engagement should line up with those goals.

For example, your goal might be to develop an email list, or build a network of influencers, or drive downloads of your app.

Over to you

Do you have a social media engagement strategy? How do you measure it? We’d love to learn from other marketers! Feel free to leave a comment below or engage with us on social media.

Social Media Engagement is the New Social Media Marketing: How To Do It Well posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

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