The Science Of Social Media

We live in a world of infinite supply… The secret to standing out is to have a brand that your customers connect with and care about deeply. In today’s world, brand is often the only differentiator between your business and your competitors. So in today’s episode, we'll show you how to build a brand! Hear the best tips and strategies from the people behind some of the biggest brands out there -- Sweetgreen, Pattern Brands, and more. These insights all come from our new podcast series: Breaking Brand.  If you want to listen, search Breaking Brand wherever you get your podcasts. - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/podcast About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simp

The biggest retail dates of the year are just around the corner. Do you have your social media marketing ready? In this episode, we'll share some of the trendiest marketing ideas for Black Friday + Cyber Monday, including flash sales, messenger marketing, and UGC. We’ll cover a host of new ideas, tips, and tactics that can help you boost your already-planned campaigns or give you some inspiration for an upcoming piece of content.  Find out some of the numbers behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and see what the most cutting-edge brands are trying out this holiday season. - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/custom-audiences About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer,

When you want to get your message in front of the right people on social media, where do you turn?  More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads -- whether you're talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers In this episode, we’ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use. Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/custom-audiences About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in

On this special episode of The Science of Social Media, we’re introducing you to a new podcast series from Buffer. It’s called 'Breaking Brand' and it charts the journey of Pattern Brands, a family of brands designed to help you enjoy daily life, from idea to launch. Over the past decade the Pattern Brands founding team has helped to launch over 50 businesses — creating over $15 billion in market value. The series dives into the tactics and techniques they’ve learned to create brands to stand out from the crowd. Plus, spoiler alert, throughout the series you can hear exactly how they are built Pattern’s brand, and follow along as they take their first product to market. Breaking Brand is launching on November 5th. 

The thing we love most at Buffer is to help you succeed at social media. And a key part of social media success is knowing which goals and targets to set for your team. Without goals, it’s hard to know exactly how well your social media strategy is performing and where you need to iterate to continue moving forwards. Today we’d love to share with you a bunch of super-actionable social media goals you can use to help your team achieve great things. In total, we’ll walk through 9 very different, but effective social media goals and for each goal we also relevant metrics to track and share how to measure your results. Hope you enjoy! - Heather-Mae & Nate Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/library/social-media-goals About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If yo

Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions. Should you be replying to everyone? How can you make sure you capture all your mentions? What are the best ways to respond quickly? In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. - Heather-Mae & Nate Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/social-media-engagement-tips About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you're sure to find so

As always, a ton is happening in the world of social media, and it can be hard to catch every story. So we want to highlight some of the biggest news items from recent weeks that might impact your social media marketing. We’ll touch on Facebook’s most recent product changes and strategic plans, how Pinterest continues making splashes with its business and shopping features, and the latest data on social media trends and usage. Learn what’s coming next to Instagram and find out what’s more popular: Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, or Snapchat. - Heather-Mae & Nate Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/social-media-news-october-2019 About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply

Where can you practice storytelling in front of an audience of 500 million? Instagram Stories, of course. Instagram Stories are empowering marketers to tell better and deeper stories about our brands. There are some fantastic examples of great Stories out there. We've collected some favorites for you! In this episode, hear about 10 Instagram brands and influencers who have been doing rad things with Stories to give you some inspiration on what you could do for your Instagram Stories, too. - Heather-Mae & Nate Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/instagram-stories-who-to-follow About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you're sure to

Small-but-powerful. Front-and-center. Instagram bios are well worth the time and investment to write well and test often. They're one of the most visible descriptions of who you are and what you're about! We’ll sort out all the best practices, design tips, and strategies that the top brands and profiles are using today. Should you go highly descriptive of what you do, or keep it loose and aspirational?  Should you include contact info? hashtags? emoji?  And how often should you update it?  We’ll unpack these questions together and send you on your way with some tips that you can try on your bio today! - Heather-Mae & Nate Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/instagram-bio About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media tea

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas. Shopping season is just around the corner. We want to help you get prepared by looking at how some of today’s best brands are using Instagram to make sales on social media. These last months of the year are full of retail-focused holidays, and Instagram has become one of the key starting points for e-commerce and shopping lists. Come learn how top brands are approaching this channel with a stellar mix of organic and paid.  Plus, we’ll share a playbook full of actionable tips to help you capitalize on the biggest retail period in the calendar, happening right now. - Heather-Mae & Nate Read the Show Notes: https://lp.buffer.com/shopping-season-on-instagram About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team

If you're looking for inspiration for your next great Facebook ad, then we've got you covered with this episode! We're diving into the Facebook Ad Library to give you tips on how to research the ads of your competitors and how to find inspiration from some of the most creative and effective Facebook advertisers out there. We'll share some specific tips on how to get meaningful Facebook ad results, and we're hopeful you'll leave with a list of ideas that you can test today! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/facebook-ad-library About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you're sure to find something useful in each epi

When marketers wish for more time and resources, they often wish to spend it on video marketing. Well, what if you only needed six seconds of video to make your impression? The current run of 6-second ads on platforms like YouTube and Twitter has opened up new options for marketers who are looking to get their message heard via video without going overboard on video resources.  We’ve taken YouTube’s best practices and looked at the list of the best six-second ads to find all the secret ingredients behind short and snappy video marketing. We think these tips will help you craft the perfect YouTube bumper ad, Twitter video, Instagram story -- you name it -- and will make  video marketing a cinch for you and your brand. - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/six-second-video About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cuttin

When someone makes a purchase or signs up for your product, how do you know where they came from? Especially when it comes to a top-of-funnel channel like social media, how can you ensure social gets credit for the impact it’s having? Attribution to the rescue! Seeing the impact of your social media marketing is definitely possible with an attribution strategy that assigns value to the channels that send new business your way. In this episode, we’ll show you how to get started in a lean way and then go deep with robust solutions as you scale. Attribution can be a tricky science, so we’re hoping to give you some clear and actionable tips to start measuring attribution today. Whether you’re looking at running some omnichannel campaigns or if you’re wanting to measure the impact of some quick experiments, we hope these tips will have you covered. - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/attribution About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social med

Some of the very best brands on social media get by with a little help from their friends -- agencies and consultants and strategists.  If this is a route you've thought about exploring, then we think you'll find a lot to love in this week's episode all about agencies. Or if you already have an agency on board, then hopefully some of our examples will inspire your next collaboration.  In this episode, we'll discuss how to know if you need an agency, which factors to consider when looking for an ideal partner, and some examples of agency partnerships done well. We hope you find just the advice you need here! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/find-a-social-media-agency About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a so

Copywriting is one of the most essential skills for a marketer to have. Good copy is everywhere! Websites, advertisements, blog posts, and especially on social media. We want to give you the tools to write exceptional copy for even the tiniest of things on social: captions, tweets, Stories, and more. Consider this a crash course in copywriting for all the little things you write on social media everyday. Every word counts, and we want to help make sure even your small words have a big impact! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/copywriting-microcopy About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you're sure to find someth

Reddit is one of the most vibrant communities on the Internet and a powerful source of attention. A positive Reddit mention can mean thousands of visits to your website or your product. Your audience may be there. Opportunities certainly exist there. Should you be there, too? It's a tricky question to answer because one of the first rules for marketing on Reddit -- one of the first rules for marketing on any social media site, really -- is that you have to be genuinely engaged and committed to the communities you're part of.  But there's good news. You can gain so much from the awesome people at Reddit whether or not you have the time to fully dive in. Yes, there are marketing tactics to drive meaningful traffic. But there are also a handful of other ways to benefit by learning from the community, engaging with the community, and building a thoughtful Reddit strategy. We'll talk about it all in this week's episode. Come along! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/red

So much of social media marketing happens in our social media management tools. On today's episode, we want to make sure this feels like time well spent! We’d love to let you in on all the best secrets and time savers and game changers when it comes to using Buffer for your social media marketing. Plus, we’ll take things one step further and dive into some shortcuts and hacks to get the most out of Buffer plus marketing tools like Zapier, Pocket, Feedly, AirTable, Trello, and more.  Here's hoping you find some new workflows and quick tips to get even more out of Buffer. You got this! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/best-buffer-tips/ About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner

If you want to know if you've checked all the right boxes for your marketing, then look no further than this set of free marketing graders. You can see whether or not your social profiles are set up correctly, how well your website performs, how solid your brand seems. Grading tools can reveal a huge number of checkmarks to celebrate as well as a host of opportunities to shore up.  In today's episode, we'll show you 10 of our very favorite graders that reveal deep insight into your marketing ... and all you have to do is type in your brand, your handle, or your website. We hope you enjoy and that you find some encouraging scores that validate your hard work! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/website-graders-content-scores About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brand

They say bigger is better ... but in the case of influencer strategy, we think the opposite could be true! The latest data shows that micro-influencers, influencers with 10,000 or fewer followers, are getting the best results for brands and businesses. More engagement, more clicks, and lower ROI.  Join us for this episode as we dive into the world of micro-influencers and explain the ins and outs of this new trend toward going small with your influencer campaigns. If you're keen to dip your toe into influencer marketing or if you're just interested in a strategy shakeup, then we think you'll find a lot to love in this episode! - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/micro-influencers About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you'r

The Instagram app by itself is supremely powerful. But did you know all the best apps to take your Instagram marketing to even greater heights?  The trend of single-job, standalone apps has brought a huge amount of power into the hands of social media marketers, and we can’t wait to share our favorite picks with you today. Join us as we discuss how this trend has changed the game for social media, plus get your wishlist started with a number of the top apps for iOS and Android to help make your social media shine even brighter. - Dave & Heather-Mae Read the Show Notes: https://buffer.com/resources/instagram-apps About the Show: The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you're a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media mar