Whenever I hop onto Facebook to do something specific—find a link I saved for later or see what’s happening on Buffer’s Facebook page, perhaps—something strange happens.

Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my goal, I get sucked in. Suddenly I’m checking my own notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting why I came to Facebook in the first place.

This isn’t entirely by accident. There is science and psychology that explains why so many of us are glued to Facebook.

Researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Facebook—liking, posting, sharing, commenting and even lurking.

And there’s a ton of psychology involved in what makes Facebook so attractive in the first place. Here’s a look at the psychology of Facebook: what makes us like, post, share and keep coming back for more.

Why we love Facebook so much: It taps the brain’s pleasure center

Lots of studies have worked toward figuring out what exactly goes on in our brains when we’re participating in social media—specifically, Facebook.

A recent one discovered a strong connection between Facebook and the brain’s reward center, called the nucleus accumbens. This area processes rewarding feelings about things like food, sex, money and social acceptance.

When we get positive feedback on Facebook, the feeling lights up this part of our brain. The greater the intensity of our Facebook use, the greater the reward.

Another fascinating study recorded physiological reactions like pupil dilation in volunteers as they looked at their Facebook accounts to find that browsing Facebook can evoke what they call flow state, the feeling you get when you’re totally and happily engrossed in a project or new skill.

Why we “like:” Identity, empathy and practicality

Perhaps the most easily recognized currency of Facebook is the “like.”

According to Facebook:

“Like” is a way to give positive feedback or to connect with things you care about on Facebook. You can like content that your friends post to give them feedback or like a Page that you want to connect with on Facebook.

When the Pew Research Center surveyed thousands of Americans about their social media lives, they discovered that 44% of Facebook users “like” content posted by their friends at least once a day, with 29% doing so several times per day.

So what makes us like, or not like, a particular status, photo or page? Is there a method to liking? Here are some reasons why we like:

It’s a quick and easy nod

Maybe the easiest way to figure out what the like means to us is to stop using it. That’s what Elan Morgan did in a 2-week experiment she chronicled on Medium. Here’s what she discovered:

“The Like is the wordless nod of support in a loud room. It’s the easiest of yesses, I-agrees, and me-toos. I actually felt pangs of guilt over not liking some updates, as though the absence of my particular Like would translate as a disapproval or a withholding of affection. I felt as though my ability to communicate had been somehow hobbled. The Like function has saved me so much comment-typing over the years that I likely could have written a very quippy, War-and-Peace-length novel by now.”

To affirm something about ourselves

One element of Facebook that we may not realize is how often we use the Like to affirm something about ourselves. In a study of more than 58,000 people who made their likes public through a Facebook app, researchers discovered that Likes could predict a number of identification traits that users had not disclosed:

“Feeding people’s “likes” into an algorithm, information hidden in the lists of favorites predicted whether someone was white or African American with 95% accuracy, whether they were a gay male with 88% accuracy, and even identified participants as a Democrat or Republican with 85% accuracy.  The ‘likes’ list predicted gender with 93% accuracy and age could be reliably determined 75% of the time.”

To express virtual empathy

And sometimes we like in order to show solidarity or unity with a friend or acquaintance and their way of thinking. Social media can be a way of gaining “virtual empathy”—and that empathy can have real-world implications.

A study reported in Psychology Today showed that spending more time using social networks and engaging in instant message chats predicted more ability to be virtual empathic and that virtual empathy was a good indicator of being able to express real-world empathy.

Because it’s practical/we’ll get something in return

When it comes to how we choose to like brands and companies, the motivation is a bit simpler. A Syncapse study found that most people seem to make these decision based on practical reasons, like wanting to receive coupons and regular updates from companies they like.

Whereas our reasons for not liking a brand focus on privacy and quality of the social media experience:

Marketing takeaway: Likes are the penny of social media currency—spend them freely if you like, but don’t expect too much in return.

Why we comment

The answer to this one may seem kinda obvious—we comment when we have something to say!

One interesting things about receiving comments is how our brains reacts to those as compared to likes. Moira Burke, who is studying 1,200 Facebook users in an ongoing experiment, has found that personal messages are more satisfying to receivers than the one-click communication of likes. She calls them “composed communication:”

“People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” she said…. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

Elan Morgan, mentioned earlier for her experiment in quitting likes for 2 weeks, found an additional benefit to prioritizing commenting over “Liking”—it effectively retrained the Facebook algorithm to give her more of the content she wanted.

“Now that I am commenting more on Facebook and not clicking Like on anything at all, my feed has relaxed and become more conversational. It’s like all the shouty attention-getters were ushered out of the room as soon as I stopped incidentally asking for those kinds of updates by using the Like function.”

Marketing takeaway: Comments are a powerful emotional driver. Make the most of them by engaging often with your Facebook community and replying to fans’ comments to keep the conversation going.

Why we post status updates

A Pew Research study shows that although users “like” their friends’ content and comment on photos relatively frequently, most don’t change their own status that often.

• 10% of Facebook users change or update their own status on Facebook on a daily basis
• 4% updating their status several times per day
• 25% of Facebook users say that they never change or update their own Facebook status

This makes sense, given that the same study showed that “oversharing” was one of Facebook’s biggest annoyances for users:

So why do many of us take the time to update our status on Facebook? What is the motivation, and what are we hoping to get out of the experience? Here’s the science behind posting to Facebook.

Posting makes us feel connected

Researchers at the University of Arizona monitored a group of students and tracked their “loneliness levels” while posting Facebook status updates. The study found that when students updated their Facebook statuses more often, they reported lower levels of loneliness:

This was true even if no one liked or commented on their posts! Researcher link the drop in loneliness to an increase in feeling more socially connected.

On the other hand, when people see their social media statuses are not being engaged with as much as their peers, they can begin to feel like they don’t belong, as seen in this experiment.

What stops us from posting? A self-censoring study

Now that we know why we post, what do we know about when we don’t post? Researchers at Facebook conducted a study on self-censorship (that is, the posts you write and never actually publish).

Over 17 days, they tracked the activity of 3.9 million users and saw 71 percent of users type out at least one status or comment they decided not to submit. On average, users changed their mind about 4.52 statuses and 3.2 comments.

Researchers theorize that people are more likely to self-censor when they feel their audience is hard to define. Facebook audiences tend to be quite diverse which makes it hard to appeal to everyone. Users were less likely to censor their comments on someone else’s post because the audience was more concrete.

Marketing takeaway: People engage the most of Facebook when they feel connected to one another and understood by their audience. It’s a bonus if they think they’ll get a response in return. Can you create those conditions on your brand’s Facebook page?

Why we share: A guide to more shareable content

The New York Times did an awesome study on why we share a few years ago that remains one of the most informative on the topic of social media sharing. This study identified five major drivers for sharing:

• To bring valuable and entertaining content to one another. 49% of respondents say sharing allows them to inform others of products they care about and potentially change opinions or encourage action.
• To define ourselves to others.  68% of respondents said they share to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about.
• To grow and nourish our relationships. 78% of respondents said they share information online because it enables them to stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with
• For self-fulfillment. 69% said they share information because it allows them to feel more involved in the world.
• To get the word out about causes they care about.  84% of respondents share because it is a good way to support causes or issues they care about.

Our friends at CoSchedule put all this into an easy-to-remember infographic:

Another worldwide poll by Ipsos offers some similar findings, noting that around the globe, people seek primarily:

• to share interesting things (61%)
• to share important things (43%)
• to share funny things (43%)
• to let others know what I believe in and who I really am (37%)
• to recommend a product, service, movie, book, etc (30%)
• to add my support to a cause, an organization or a belief (29%)
• to share unique things (26%)
• to let others know what I’m doing (22%)
• to add to a thread or conversation (20%)
• to show I’m in the know (10%)

Here’s a cool country-by-country breakdown:

One more thing we know about what gets shared: High-share content tends to trigger a high-arousal emotion, like amusement, fear or anger, as opposed to a low-arousal emotion like sadness or contentment.

Marketing takeaway: For content that racks up the shares, tap into one of these urges.

• Create really entertaining or very useful content that will help your audience gain social status by looking smart, cool or “in the know”
• Create content that helps your audience share more of themselves with others. You can use your brand as a rallying point and identifier or simply help them share a message that taps into who they really are
• Create content that helps your audience engage with one another and interact together

One last note: What happens when we lurk and don’t participate

Is there a darker side to Facebook? Some of the studies I uncovered worried that Facebook could be making us more lonely, or isolated, or jealous of all the seemingly-perfect lives we see there. This down side of Facebook seems to emerge mostly when we become passive viewers of Facebook and not a part of the experience.

A 2010 study from Carnegie Mellon found that, when people engaged on Facebook—posting, messaging, Liking, etc.—their feelings of general social capital increased, while loneliness decreased. But when the study participants simply lurked, Facebook acted in the opposite way, increasing their sense of loneliness and isolation.

According to researcher Moira Burke, lurking on Facebook correlates to an increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says.

Do these findings ring true to you?

It turns out there is psychology behind almost every element of the Facebook experience—and researchers can’t seem to get enough of studying our habits there.

How do these findings fit with your experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or on Facebook! 

The post The Secret Psychology of Facebook: Why We Like, Share, Comment and Keep Coming Back appeared first on Social.

Whenever I hop onto Facebook to do something specific—find a link I saved for later or see what’s happening on Buffer’s Facebook page, perhaps—something strange happens.

Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my goal, I get sucked in. Suddenly I’m checking my own notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting why I came to Facebook in the first place.

This isn’t entirely by accident. There is science and psychology that explains why so many of us are glued to Facebook.

Researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Facebook—liking, posting, sharing, commenting and even lurking.

And there’s a ton of psychology involved in what makes Facebook so attractive in the first place. Here’s a look at the psychology of Facebook: what makes us like, post, share and keep coming back for more.

Why we love Facebook so much: It taps the brain’s pleasure center

Lots of studies have worked toward figuring out what exactly goes on in our brains when we’re participating in social media—specifically, Facebook.

A recent one discovered a strong connection between Facebook and the brain’s reward center, called the nucleus accumbens. This area processes rewarding feelings about things like food, sex, money and social acceptance.

When we get positive feedback on Facebook, the feeling lights up this part of our brain. The greater the intensity of our Facebook use, the greater the reward.

Another fascinating study recorded physiological reactions like pupil dilation in volunteers as they looked at their Facebook accounts to find that browsing Facebook can evoke what they call flow state, the feeling you get when you’re totally and happily engrossed in a project or new skill.

Why we “like:” Identity, empathy and practicality

Perhaps the most easily recognized currency of Facebook is the “like.”

According to Facebook:

“Like” is a way to give positive feedback or to connect with things you care about on Facebook. You can like content that your friends post to give them feedback or like a Page that you want to connect with on Facebook.

When the Pew Research Center surveyed thousands of Americans about their social media lives, they discovered that 44% of Facebook users “like” content posted by their friends at least once a day, with 29% doing so several times per day.

So what makes us like, or not like, a particular status, photo or page? Is there a method to liking? Here are some reasons why we like:

It’s a quick and easy nod

Maybe the easiest way to figure out what the like means to us is to stop using it. That’s what Elan Morgan did in a 2-week experiment she chronicled on Medium. Here’s what she discovered:

“The Like is the wordless nod of support in a loud room. It’s the easiest of yesses, I-agrees, and me-toos. I actually felt pangs of guilt over not liking some updates, as though the absence of my particular Like would translate as a disapproval or a withholding of affection. I felt as though my ability to communicate had been somehow hobbled. The Like function has saved me so much comment-typing over the years that I likely could have written a very quippy, War-and-Peace-length novel by now.”

To affirm something about ourselves

One element of Facebook that we may not realize is how often we use the Like to affirm something about ourselves. In a study of more than 58,000 people who made their likes public through a Facebook app, researchers discovered that Likes could predict a number of identification traits that users had not disclosed:

“Feeding people’s “likes” into an algorithm, information hidden in the lists of favorites predicted whether someone was white or African American with 95% accuracy, whether they were a gay male with 88% accuracy, and even identified participants as a Democrat or Republican with 85% accuracy.  The ‘likes’ list predicted gender with 93% accuracy and age could be reliably determined 75% of the time.”

To express virtual empathy

And sometimes we like in order to show solidarity or unity with a friend or acquaintance and their way of thinking. Social media can be a way of gaining “virtual empathy”—and that empathy can have real-world implications.

A study reported in Psychology Today showed that spending more time using social networks and engaging in instant message chats predicted more ability to be virtual empathic and that virtual empathy was a good indicator of being able to express real-world empathy.

Because it’s practical/we’ll get something in return

When it comes to how we choose to like brands and companies, the motivation is a bit simpler. A Syncapse study found that most people seem to make these decision based on practical reasons, like wanting to receive coupons and regular updates from companies they like.

Whereas our reasons for not liking a brand focus on privacy and quality of the social media experience:

Marketing takeaway: Likes are the penny of social media currency—spend them freely if you like, but don’t expect too much in return.

Why we comment

The answer to this one may seem kinda obvious—we comment when we have something to say!

One interesting things about receiving comments is how our brains reacts to those as compared to likes. Moira Burke, who is studying 1,200 Facebook users in an ongoing experiment, has found that personal messages are more satisfying to receivers than the one-click communication of likes. She calls them “composed communication:”

“People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” she said…. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

Elan Morgan, mentioned earlier for her experiment in quitting likes for 2 weeks, found an additional benefit to prioritizing commenting over “Liking”—it effectively retrained the Facebook algorithm to give her more of the content she wanted.

“Now that I am commenting more on Facebook and not clicking Like on anything at all, my feed has relaxed and become more conversational. It’s like all the shouty attention-getters were ushered out of the room as soon as I stopped incidentally asking for those kinds of updates by using the Like function.”

Marketing takeaway: Comments are a powerful emotional driver. Make the most of them by engaging often with your Facebook community and replying to fans’ comments to keep the conversation going.

Why we post status updates

A Pew Research study shows that although users “like” their friends’ content and comment on photos relatively frequently, most don’t change their own status that often.

• 10% of Facebook users change or update their own status on Facebook on a daily basis
• 4% updating their status several times per day
• 25% of Facebook users say that they never change or update their own Facebook status

This makes sense, given that the same study showed that “oversharing” was one of Facebook’s biggest annoyances for users:

So why do many of us take the time to update our status on Facebook? What is the motivation, and what are we hoping to get out of the experience? Here’s the science behind posting to Facebook.

Posting makes us feel connected

Researchers at the University of Arizona monitored a group of students and tracked their “loneliness levels” while posting Facebook status updates. The study found that when students updated their Facebook statuses more often, they reported lower levels of loneliness:

This was true even if no one liked or commented on their posts! Researcher link the drop in loneliness to an increase in feeling more socially connected.

On the other hand, when people see their social media statuses are not being engaged with as much as their peers, they can begin to feel like they don’t belong, as seen in this experiment.

What stops us from posting? A self-censoring study

Now that we know why we post, what do we know about when we don’t post? Researchers at Facebook conducted a study on self-censorship (that is, the posts you write and never actually publish).

Over 17 days, they tracked the activity of 3.9 million users and saw 71 percent of users type out at least one status or comment they decided not to submit. On average, users changed their mind about 4.52 statuses and 3.2 comments.

Researchers theorize that people are more likely to self-censor when they feel their audience is hard to define. Facebook audiences tend to be quite diverse which makes it hard to appeal to everyone. Users were less likely to censor their comments on someone else’s post because the audience was more concrete.

Marketing takeaway: People engage the most of Facebook when they feel connected to one another and understood by their audience. It’s a bonus if they think they’ll get a response in return. Can you create those conditions on your brand’s Facebook page?

Why we share: A guide to more shareable content

The New York Times did an awesome study on why we share a few years ago that remains one of the most informative on the topic of social media sharing. This study identified five major drivers for sharing:

• To bring valuable and entertaining content to one another. 49% of respondents say sharing allows them to inform others of products they care about and potentially change opinions or encourage action.
• To define ourselves to others.  68% of respondents said they share to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about.
• To grow and nourish our relationships. 78% of respondents said they share information online because it enables them to stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with
• For self-fulfillment. 69% said they share information because it allows them to feel more involved in the world.
• To get the word out about causes they care about.  84% of respondents share because it is a good way to support causes or issues they care about.

Our friends at CoSchedule put all this into an easy-to-remember infographic:

Another worldwide poll by Ipsos offers some similar findings, noting that around the globe, people seek primarily:

• to share interesting things (61%)
• to share important things (43%)
• to share funny things (43%)
• to let others know what I believe in and who I really am (37%)
• to recommend a product, service, movie, book, etc (30%)
• to add my support to a cause, an organization or a belief (29%)
• to share unique things (26%)
• to let others know what I’m doing (22%)
• to add to a thread or conversation (20%)
• to show I’m in the know (10%)

Here’s a cool country-by-country breakdown:

One more thing we know about what gets shared: High-share content tends to trigger a high-arousal emotion, like amusement, fear or anger, as opposed to a low-arousal emotion like sadness or contentment.

Marketing takeaway: For content that racks up the shares, tap into one of these urges.

• Create really entertaining or very useful content that will help your audience gain social status by looking smart, cool or “in the know”
• Create content that helps your audience share more of themselves with others. You can use your brand as a rallying point and identifier or simply help them share a message that taps into who they really are
• Create content that helps your audience engage with one another and interact together

One last note: What happens when we lurk and don’t participate

Is there a darker side to Facebook? Some of the studies I uncovered worried that Facebook could be making us more lonely, or isolated, or jealous of all the seemingly-perfect lives we see there. This down side of Facebook seems to emerge mostly when we become passive viewers of Facebook and not a part of the experience.

A 2010 study from Carnegie Mellon found that, when people engaged on Facebook—posting, messaging, Liking, etc.—their feelings of general social capital increased, while loneliness decreased. But when the study participants simply lurked, Facebook acted in the opposite way, increasing their sense of loneliness and isolation.

According to researcher Moira Burke, lurking on Facebook correlates to an increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says.

Do these findings ring true to you?

It turns out there is psychology behind almost every element of the Facebook experience—and researchers can’t seem to get enough of studying our habits there.

How do these findings fit with your experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or on Facebook! 

The post The Secret Psychology of Facebook: Why We Like, Share, Comment and Keep Coming Back appeared first on Social.

Have you heard this advice before: “Follow your passions!” “Do what you love!”?

And have you thought, what if my passions are my hobbies? Things that I could never be paid for?

For some, the advice to “do what you love” seems possible only if you have a passion for things like finance or accounting or coding. Well, I’ve been happy to find that it’s possible to follow your passions into a career, no matter what those passions may be. With social media, you now have a platform to do what you love—and to make a career out of it.

I found 15 amazing entrepreneurs who built their entire businesses and careers around social media, many earning $100,000 or more. 

I’d love to share their stories with you—and how you can follow their lead to turn your passions into a career, through social media.

How to Earn an Income Doing What You Love on Social Media

It sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?

Posting photographs or tweets a few times each day to launch a lucrative career doing what you love.

And you might be wondering how these social media entrepreneurs make money. Because after all, a career requires an income.

I’ll get into the specific stories of 15 entrepreneurs below. First, I thought I’d share the many number of ways—the specific avenues and channels—that they use to make money on social media.

1. Sponsorships

Sponsorships are responsible for a lot of the money earned through social media, especially for those just starting off. Brittany Furlan, Caitlin Turner and Shaun McBride all started with sponsorships.

Sponsorships occur when brands pay to be associated with you. When a tourism board pays Instagrammer Lauren Bath to work with them and feature their location, they are sponsoring Lauren.

Podcasts are usually funded through sponsorships as well. The sponsor will pay to be featured on the podcast at some point during the episode.

2. Advertisements

Advertisements are another popular method of monetizing social media. YouTubers like Liz Meghan use ads to make a living through their social media accounts.

Advertisements differ from sponsorships in that there’s usually not a long term relationship with the entrepreneur.

3. Selling products

If you have a product based business like an eCommerce store, this is perfect for you.

Social media can be a great place to sell your products – or, at the least, build up a following and redirect those followers to your website to buy your products.

4. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing allows you to work with brands to help them sell their products, earning you a commission each time somebody buys through your affiliate link.

Many social media channels allow affiliate links to be placed within a post, and when the follower clicks on the link and makes a purchase through it, the poster gets a portion of that sale.

5. Promoting services

If a service-based business is more up your alley, you don’t want to look past social media as a marketing channel.

From hair stylists who post their work on Instagram to coaches who use Facebook as a platform to engage with potential clients, there is a lot of opportunity on social media to promote your services.

6. Boosting your visibility as an artist

If you’re an artist, writer, or creative entrepreneur, social media can be an amazing tool to boost your visibility.

Artists like Us the Duo, Grace Ciao, and writer Jeff Goins all have used their social media channels as methods of boosting their visibility to book gigs and sell their art.

Why Social Media Works

Creating social media content every day. Scheduling it at the right times. Analyzing what followers respond to and what they ignore. The time it takes to manage a social media marketing strategy can be significant.

Here are two reasons why the time is well worth it, especially for those looking to build a new career.

1. Social Media Expands Your Reach by 1,000x

How many people visit your website each day?

200? 1,000?

Those aren’t bad numbers. And it may make sense for you to spend time on your own website rather than social media because your website is like your online home.

But think about it:

• Instagram has 100 million active users
• Twitter has over 135 million active users
• Youtube sees over 1 billion active users each month

Even if only 0.1% of the people on those channels are interested in what you’re doing, you’ve still amplified your reach by over 1,000 times by using social media to spread your message and share your passion.

2. Social Media Establishes Your Expertise 

The lifeblood of social media is content.

Even if you’re posting a 6-second video on Vine or a photo on Instagram, you’re posting content.

When you’re consistently posting content about a specific topic, you establish yourself as an expert.

Take, for example, two mathematicians who love numbers. Who establishes herself as an expert?

• Mathematician A, who loves her work but avoids social media, or
• Mathematician B, who teaches others how to do math on Youtube and has 200,000 followers?

They’re both experts, but Mathematician B has established herself as an expert. She has built an audience, and provides value to others by demonstrating her knowledge on social media.

15 Entrepreneurs Who Built New Careers Through Social Media

1. Brandon Stanton

The creator of Humans of New York

In 2010, after losing his job, Brandon Stanton began to take candid photographs of people on the streets of New York and post them to Facebook.

Self-taught, Brandon took photos that reflected his passion, and these photos quickly began to gain traction on Facebook.

Humans of New York now has over 12 million Facebook likes, and it has launched a speaking, photography, philanthropic and media career for Brandon.The revenue generated by HONY prints sold goes directly to charity, and Brandon makes a living from the royalties of books sales and new freelancing opportunities. He went into a bit more detail about the specifics in a Reddit AMA:

How are you able to pay for your daily needs? Does HONY support you financially?

I’ve said publicly that I don’t want to “cash out” or “monetize” HONY. I like to say it publicly because I want my audience to keep me on mission. HONY print sales have raised nearly $500,000 for charity in the past six months. I want to further monetize the site for non-profit ventures. I honestly want to “give” HONY to New York in some way.

Freelancing and book royalties are keeping me afloat now. I get money for collaborations, occasional magazine pieces, occasional speeches, etc. And I signed two book deals which pay the rent. Also, I live cheaply.

2. Jeff Goins

Author and Blogger behind Goins, Writer

Two years ago, Jeff Goins quit his day job to pursue his passion for writing full-time.

He now has built a tribe of over 100,000 people, and has just launched his fourth book, The Art of Work.

This is all made possible by social media.

Jeff began writing on his blog, Goinswriter.com, and continued to work in his day job. He then began to earn more on his blog doing what he loved part-time than he was in his full-time job.

My blog (which accounted for less than 10 hours per week) was now contributing more income than my full-time job (which took up at least 40 hours per week).

His first product—a $2.99 ebook—earned $1,500 in its first week, convincing Jeff that his hobby could be a business.

His blog gave him a platform to follow his passion and do what he loves.

3. Grace Ciao

Fashion Designer and Artist

Grace Ciao is the ultimate accidental social media entrepreneur.

Since she was a little girl, Grace has had a passion for fashion design, and one day, she noticed a flower a boy had given her was dying. So Grace created a fashion illustration out of the petals of the flower.

She took a photo of her illustration and posted it on Instagram, which quickly became popular.

Grace earns a living as a full-time illustrator, and has used her platform to book engagements for events.

4. Michael and Carissa Alvarado

Husband and Wife Singers, Us The Duo

 

Michael and Carissa Alvarado were making music before they began posting 6-second videos on Vine, but nothing has skyrocketed their careers more than Vine has.

The couple was already trying to gain more traction on Youtube when they decided to put snippets of their covers on Vine, which served them well.

They now have 4.6 million Vine followers, and signed a record deal with Republic Records in 2014, allowing them to follow their passion by getting their start on social media.

5. Rosanna Pansino

Nerd and Baker at Nerdy Nummies

If you’ve ever thought the only way to pursue your passion for baking is by opening a bakery or through feeding your family, think again.

Rosanna Pansino built a career on social media centered around her love of baking when she was egged on by friends (pun intended) to start a Youtube channel.

Rosanna’s Youtube Channel, Nerdy Nummies has over 3.6 million subscribers.

6. Justin Halpern

Comedian from Sh!t My Dad Says

“Don’t focus on the one guy who hates you. You don’t go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog sh–.”

— Justin (@shitmydadsays) June 28, 2010

Let me guess.

It seems as if every time you open Twitter, you’re instantly barraged with links to mediocre blog posts, pictures of people’s lattes and announcements of what the newest member of oversharers-anonymous is having for lunch that day.

You could never imagine Twitter as a platform to build a career, right?

Well, Justin Halpern did just that.

He took his comedy writing career to the next level by starting the popular Twitter account Sh!t My Dad Says, where he began to Tweet snippets of conversations with his father.

The Twitter account quickly gained traction and morphed into a television series and book.

7. Lain Ehmann

Scrapbooker and Blogger from Layout a Day

If you’ve ever felt as if your interests or hobbies were impossible to build a career from, you may be inspired by Lain Ehmann, who built her career from a blog about scrapbooking.

Yes, you read that right.

She’s built a six figure business around a niche that is traditionally a hobby niche, teaching others how to scrapbook and holding live online events through her blog.

The power of the internet allows us to connect with people who are interested in the things that we’re interested in, and if we can provide enough value to those people, Lain proves that lucrative careers can be built.

8. Shaun McBride

Artist and Snapchatter

Shaun McBride learned how to draw by looking at other artists’ drawings and trying his hand out at the craft.

After Snapchatting his drawing/photo mashups, he was featured on some popular websites, which boosted his career.

He now can make tens of thousands of dollars from one advertising deal with a brand through his Snapchat account, according to Forbes, and “several thousand dollars per image”.

9. Shawn Stevenson

Health Enthusiast of The Model Health Show

If text or images doesn’t interest you when it comes to building a career on social media, maybe audio does.

Shawn Stevenson runs the #1 health podcast on iTunes, the Model Health Show, allowing him to follow his passion for fitness and health through a different medium.

Instead of taking the traditional route of personal training, Shawn interviews guests on his podcast, creating content and giving listeners the tools to live healthy lives.

10. Lauren Bath

Traveller and Professional Instagrammer

Lauren Bath has arguably the best job in the world. Not only is she paid to Instagram, but she also gets paid to travel.

Lauren was the “first professional Instagrammer” of Australia, and quit her job as a chef to pursue her passions for photography and travel.

Lauren works with tourism boards and brands to provide exposure through her huge Instagram account to make a living.

While she doesn’t reveal her rates in interviews, she tells Successful Blogging that she works with brands such as Nikon and Tourism Boards to offer them sponsorships:

Well I can’t talk for others but for me I charge a base rate to travel away from home and that rate includes posting whatever images I like with all content available to the client.

11. Joey Korneman

Animator and Teacher from School of Motion

Joey Korneman is the founder of  School of Motion, where he teaches his students through online courses to animate using the principles of motion design.

Most of Joey’s traffic comes from Vimeo, as he tells Pat Flynn’s mastermind group in a recent episode of the Smart Passive Income Podcast.

He has 5,000 followers on Vimeo, which is high for that social media channel, and, as he tells Pat’s mastermind group, “Vimeo is very high-quality traffic for motion design”.

Joey makes a living teaching motion design by directing his Vimeo followers to his website, where he sells courses.

12. Mignon Fogarty

Grammarian and Podcaster at Grammar Girl

Passions come in all shapes and sizes, and Mignon Fogarty’s passion is unique.

Mignon has a passion for grammar, and works full time in the field by teaching grammar principles to her rabid fans of her Grammar Girl podcast.

Through social media, she has been able to build an amazing career around grammar, as she blogs as well.

13. Caitlin Turner

Yogi and Instagrammer GypsetGoddess

Caitlin’s passion for yoga has provided her with the unique opportunity to build an entire career from it – on Instagram.

Catlin’s Instagram account is still relatively new – about three years old – but she still has earned over 220,000 followers.

Caitlin told Yoganonymous that “Instagram has definitely been a huge career chance for me. It’s connected me professionally to different brands and people I wouldn’t have found before because I had no reason to. This is my career now.”

14. Brittany Furlan

Actress and Vine Comedian

Social media has helped people like Brittany Furlan launch comedic and acting careers in a way that was never possible before.

Brittany used Vine to launch her career in comedy and acting and now has 8.9 million followers on Vine.

Brittany told The Wrap that she makes a comfortable living through her Vines.

Those videos — which include a repertoire of outlandish characters (“Ghetto Dora De Explora“), quick-to-the-punchline sketches or pranks on the unsuspecting public — are worth between $7,000 and $20,000 to brands targeting Furlan’s massive audience.

She’s now gone on to partner with Seth Green to create a sketch show.

15. Liz Meghan

Youtuber and Makeup Artist

Liz Meghan had a passion for makeup, and she channeled that passion into Youtube.

With over 672,000 subscribers on her Youtube channel, Liz makes a living doing what she loves through makeup tutorials and sharing what she’s learned about makeup over the years.

Liz tells the Huffington Post that she makes a living off of her Youtube channel because Youtube pays her to put ads on her videos.

There’s no better time than now to do what you love

As these inspiring entrepreneurs demonstrate, by building a following online using social media, you can:

• Get paid to do what you love
• Establish yourself as an expert and
• Grow a following around your passions.

There’s no excuse to not get out there, pick a social media channel, and start posting.

Have you found success in building a career or a following on social media? Are you inspired by others who have taken this route to follow their dreams? I’d love to hear more about what you’ve experienced and learned in the comments.

Image sources: Pablo, Unsplash, IconFinder, Humansofnewyork.com, Art of Work Book, Ryanseacrest.com, Newmediarockstars.com, Shonduras.com, iTunes, Laurenbath.com,
Vimeo,  Gypsetgoddess.com, Thewrap.com, Youtube.com

The post 15 Inspiring Entrepreneurs Who Built Careers Around Their Passions Through Social Media appeared first on Social.

Have you heard this advice before: “Follow your passions!” “Do what you love!”?

And have you thought, what if my passions are my hobbies? Things that I could never be paid for?

For some, the advice to “do what you love” seems possible only if you have a passion for things like finance or accounting or coding. Well, I’ve been happy to find that it’s possible to follow your passions into a career, no matter what those passions may be. With social media, you now have a platform to do what you love—and to make a career out of it.

I found 15 amazing entrepreneurs who built their entire businesses and careers around social media, many earning $100,000 or more. 

I’d love to share their stories with you—and how you can follow their lead to turn your passions into a career, through social media.

How to Earn an Income Doing What You Love on Social Media

It sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?

Posting photographs or tweets a few times each day to launch a lucrative career doing what you love.

And you might be wondering how these social media entrepreneurs make money. Because after all, a career requires an income.

I’ll get into the specific stories of 15 entrepreneurs below. First, I thought I’d share the many number of ways—the specific avenues and channels—that they use to make money on social media.

1. Sponsorships

Sponsorships are responsible for a lot of the money earned through social media, especially for those just starting off. Brittany Furlan, Caitlin Turner and Shaun McBride all started with sponsorships.

Sponsorships occur when brands pay to be associated with you. When a tourism board pays Instagrammer Lauren Bath to work with them and feature their location, they are sponsoring Lauren.

Podcasts are usually funded through sponsorships as well. The sponsor will pay to be featured on the podcast at some point during the episode.

2. Advertisements

Advertisements are another popular method of monetizing social media. YouTubers like Liz Meghan use ads to make a living through their social media accounts.

Advertisements differ from sponsorships in that there’s usually not a long term relationship with the entrepreneur.

3. Selling products

If you have a product based business like an eCommerce store, this is perfect for you.

Social media can be a great place to sell your products – or, at the least, build up a following and redirect those followers to your website to buy your products.

4. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing allows you to work with brands to help them sell their products, earning you a commission each time somebody buys through your affiliate link.

Many social media channels allow affiliate links to be placed within a post, and when the follower clicks on the link and makes a purchase through it, the poster gets a portion of that sale.

5. Promoting services

If a service-based business is more up your alley, you don’t want to look past social media as a marketing channel.

From hair stylists who post their work on Instagram to coaches who use Facebook as a platform to engage with potential clients, there is a lot of opportunity on social media to promote your services.

6. Boosting your visibility as an artist

If you’re an artist, writer, or creative entrepreneur, social media can be an amazing tool to boost your visibility.

Artists like Us the Duo, Grace Ciao, and writer Jeff Goins all have used their social media channels as methods of boosting their visibility to book gigs and sell their art.

Why Social Media Works

Creating social media content every day. Scheduling it at the right times. Analyzing what followers respond to and what they ignore. The time it takes to manage a social media marketing strategy can be significant.

Here are two reasons why the time is well worth it, especially for those looking to build a new career.

1. Social Media Expands Your Reach by 1,000x

How many people visit your website each day?

200? 1,000?

Those aren’t bad numbers. And it may make sense for you to spend time on your own website rather than social media because your website is like your online home.

But think about it:

• Instagram has 100 million active users
• Twitter has over 135 million active users
• Youtube sees over 1 billion active users each month

Even if only 0.1% of the people on those channels are interested in what you’re doing, you’ve still amplified your reach by over 1,000 times by using social media to spread your message and share your passion.

2. Social Media Establishes Your Expertise 

The lifeblood of social media is content.

Even if you’re posting a 6-second video on Vine or a photo on Instagram, you’re posting content.

When you’re consistently posting content about a specific topic, you establish yourself as an expert.

Take, for example, two mathematicians who love numbers. Who establishes herself as an expert?

• Mathematician A, who loves her work but avoids social media, or
• Mathematician B, who teaches others how to do math on Youtube and has 200,000 followers?

They’re both experts, but Mathematician B has established herself as an expert. She has built an audience, and provides value to others by demonstrating her knowledge on social media.

15 Entrepreneurs Who Built New Careers Through Social Media

1. Brandon Stanton

The creator of Humans of New York

In 2010, after losing his job, Brandon Stanton began to take candid photographs of people on the streets of New York and post them to Facebook.

Self-taught, Brandon took photos that reflected his passion, and these photos quickly began to gain traction on Facebook.

Humans of New York now has over 12 million Facebook likes, and it has launched a speaking, photography, philanthropic and media career for Brandon.The revenue generated by HONY prints sold goes directly to charity, and Brandon makes a living from the royalties of books sales and new freelancing opportunities. He went into a bit more detail about the specifics in a Reddit AMA:

How are you able to pay for your daily needs? Does HONY support you financially?

I’ve said publicly that I don’t want to “cash out” or “monetize” HONY. I like to say it publicly because I want my audience to keep me on mission. HONY print sales have raised nearly $500,000 for charity in the past six months. I want to further monetize the site for non-profit ventures. I honestly want to “give” HONY to New York in some way.

Freelancing and book royalties are keeping me afloat now. I get money for collaborations, occasional magazine pieces, occasional speeches, etc. And I signed two book deals which pay the rent. Also, I live cheaply.

2. Jeff Goins

Author and Blogger behind Goins, Writer

Two years ago, Jeff Goins quit his day job to pursue his passion for writing full-time.

He now has built a tribe of over 100,000 people, and has just launched his fourth book, The Art of Work.

This is all made possible by social media.

Jeff began writing on his blog, Goinswriter.com, and continued to work in his day job. He then began to earn more on his blog doing what he loved part-time than he was in his full-time job.

My blog (which accounted for less than 10 hours per week) was now contributing more income than my full-time job (which took up at least 40 hours per week).

His first product—a $2.99 ebook—earned $1,500 in its first week, convincing Jeff that his hobby could be a business.

His blog gave him a platform to follow his passion and do what he loves.

3. Grace Ciao

Fashion Designer and Artist

Grace Ciao is the ultimate accidental social media entrepreneur.

Since she was a little girl, Grace has had a passion for fashion design, and one day, she noticed a flower a boy had given her was dying. So Grace created a fashion illustration out of the petals of the flower.

She took a photo of her illustration and posted it on Instagram, which quickly became popular.

Grace earns a living as a full-time illustrator, and has used her platform to book engagements for events.

4. Michael and Carissa Alvarado

Husband and Wife Singers, Us The Duo

 

Michael and Carissa Alvarado were making music before they began posting 6-second videos on Vine, but nothing has skyrocketed their careers more than Vine has.

The couple was already trying to gain more traction on Youtube when they decided to put snippets of their covers on Vine, which served them well.

They now have 4.6 million Vine followers, and signed a record deal with Republic Records in 2014, allowing them to follow their passion by getting their start on social media.

5. Rosanna Pansino

Nerd and Baker at Nerdy Nummies

If you’ve ever thought the only way to pursue your passion for baking is by opening a bakery or through feeding your family, think again.

Rosanna Pansino built a career on social media centered around her love of baking when she was egged on by friends (pun intended) to start a Youtube channel.

Rosanna’s Youtube Channel, Nerdy Nummies has over 3.6 million subscribers.

6. Justin Halpern

Comedian from Sh!t My Dad Says

“Don’t focus on the one guy who hates you. You don’t go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog sh–.”

— Justin (@shitmydadsays) June 28, 2010

Let me guess.

It seems as if every time you open Twitter, you’re instantly barraged with links to mediocre blog posts, pictures of people’s lattes and announcements of what the newest member of oversharers-anonymous is having for lunch that day.

You could never imagine Twitter as a platform to build a career, right?

Well, Justin Halpern did just that.

He took his comedy writing career to the next level by starting the popular Twitter account Sh!t My Dad Says, where he began to Tweet snippets of conversations with his father.

The Twitter account quickly gained traction and morphed into a television series and book.

7. Lain Ehmann

Scrapbooker and Blogger from Layout a Day

If you’ve ever felt as if your interests or hobbies were impossible to build a career from, you may be inspired by Lain Ehmann, who built her career from a blog about scrapbooking.

Yes, you read that right.

She’s built a six figure business around a niche that is traditionally a hobby niche, teaching others how to scrapbook and holding live online events through her blog.

The power of the internet allows us to connect with people who are interested in the things that we’re interested in, and if we can provide enough value to those people, Lain proves that lucrative careers can be built.

8. Shaun McBride

Artist and Snapchatter

Shaun McBride learned how to draw by looking at other artists’ drawings and trying his hand out at the craft.

After Snapchatting his drawing/photo mashups, he was featured on some popular websites, which boosted his career.

He now can make tens of thousands of dollars from one advertising deal with a brand through his Snapchat account, according to Forbes, and “several thousand dollars per image”.

9. Shawn Stevenson

Health Enthusiast of The Model Health Show

If text or images doesn’t interest you when it comes to building a career on social media, maybe audio does.

Shawn Stevenson runs the #1 health podcast on iTunes, the Model Health Show, allowing him to follow his passion for fitness and health through a different medium.

Instead of taking the traditional route of personal training, Shawn interviews guests on his podcast, creating content and giving listeners the tools to live healthy lives.

10. Lauren Bath

Traveller and Professional Instagrammer

Lauren Bath has arguably the best job in the world. Not only is she paid to Instagram, but she also gets paid to travel.

Lauren was the “first professional Instagrammer” of Australia, and quit her job as a chef to pursue her passions for photography and travel.

Lauren works with tourism boards and brands to provide exposure through her huge Instagram account to make a living.

While she doesn’t reveal her rates in interviews, she tells Successful Blogging that she works with brands such as Nikon and Tourism Boards to offer them sponsorships:

Well I can’t talk for others but for me I charge a base rate to travel away from home and that rate includes posting whatever images I like with all content available to the client.

11. Joey Korneman

Animator and Teacher from School of Motion

Joey Korneman is the founder of  School of Motion, where he teaches his students through online courses to animate using the principles of motion design.

Most of Joey’s traffic comes from Vimeo, as he tells Pat Flynn’s mastermind group in a recent episode of the Smart Passive Income Podcast.

He has 5,000 followers on Vimeo, which is high for that social media channel, and, as he tells Pat’s mastermind group, “Vimeo is very high-quality traffic for motion design”.

Joey makes a living teaching motion design by directing his Vimeo followers to his website, where he sells courses.

12. Mignon Fogarty

Grammarian and Podcaster at Grammar Girl

Passions come in all shapes and sizes, and Mignon Fogarty’s passion is unique.

Mignon has a passion for grammar, and works full time in the field by teaching grammar principles to her rabid fans of her Grammar Girl podcast.

Through social media, she has been able to build an amazing career around grammar, as she blogs as well.

13. Caitlin Turner

Yogi and Instagrammer GypsetGoddess

Caitlin’s passion for yoga has provided her with the unique opportunity to build an entire career from it – on Instagram.

Catlin’s Instagram account is still relatively new – about three years old – but she still has earned over 220,000 followers.

Caitlin told Yoganonymous that “Instagram has definitely been a huge career chance for me. It’s connected me professionally to different brands and people I wouldn’t have found before because I had no reason to. This is my career now.”

14. Brittany Furlan

Actress and Vine Comedian

Social media has helped people like Brittany Furlan launch comedic and acting careers in a way that was never possible before.

Brittany used Vine to launch her career in comedy and acting and now has 8.9 million followers on Vine.

Brittany told The Wrap that she makes a comfortable living through her Vines.

Those videos — which include a repertoire of outlandish characters (“Ghetto Dora De Explora“), quick-to-the-punchline sketches or pranks on the unsuspecting public — are worth between $7,000 and $20,000 to brands targeting Furlan’s massive audience.

She’s now gone on to partner with Seth Green to create a sketch show.

15. Liz Meghan

Youtuber and Makeup Artist

Liz Meghan had a passion for makeup, and she channeled that passion into Youtube.

With over 672,000 subscribers on her Youtube channel, Liz makes a living doing what she loves through makeup tutorials and sharing what she’s learned about makeup over the years.

Liz tells the Huffington Post that she makes a living off of her Youtube channel because Youtube pays her to put ads on her videos.

There’s no better time than now to do what you love

As these inspiring entrepreneurs demonstrate, by building a following online using social media, you can:

• Get paid to do what you love
• Establish yourself as an expert and
• Grow a following around your passions.

There’s no excuse to not get out there, pick a social media channel, and start posting.

Have you found success in building a career or a following on social media? Are you inspired by others who have taken this route to follow their dreams? I’d love to hear more about what you’ve experienced and learned in the comments.

Image sources: Pablo, Unsplash, IconFinder, Humansofnewyork.com, Art of Work Book, Ryanseacrest.com, Newmediarockstars.com, Shonduras.com, iTunes, Laurenbath.com,
Vimeo,  Gypsetgoddess.com, Thewrap.com, Youtube.com

The post 15 Inspiring Entrepreneurs Who Built Careers Around Their Passions Through Social Media appeared first on Social.

Big or small, influencer or newcomer, everyone looking to get more followers and more likes on social media—more engagement, period—seeks out strategies that work.

And what works with a platform of 11 million followers tends to work for platforms with 100, too.

Social media is a moving ocean of posts, images, tools, ideas, and content that flows at a fast pace. You can find success by building your own social media strategy and keeping it fluid by checking and rechecking what’s working.

I’ve had the chance to check and recheck dozens of different social media strategies in managing a social media platform of 11 million. How do I do everything that I do? And what do I do, specifically? Well, I’d love to share the details with you!

My network of 11 million

I’ve had the privilege to assist Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist at Canva and former evangelist at Apple, on his social media marketing, and I’ve worked on building a social media following for myself.

I manage a huge social media platform across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. I started at zero on all my accounts, just like you, and I’m not a celebrity or household name. This is how I’ve worked to build a great social platform – and you can too!

What I manage:

• An audience of 10,637,540 for Guy
• An audience of 935,793 for me

Total: an audience of 11.5 million people

I’ve had the opportunity to take the skills and tricks I’ve learned along the way, managing my own social media platform and applying it to Guy’s social media and for clients we work with, and implement them in some exciting ways. Fortunately, a lot of the strategies have worked! And if things aren’t working, I find a different way to do them.

What is social strategy?

Your social strategy is the plan that’s going to make your social media work.

It’s a combination of content creation, content curation, creativity, and organization.

Random acts of social media won’t do a darn thing to help people find you or to be known for a topic area. To build your authority in your niche, you need to create a solid social strategy that will help people find out who you are, what you do, and most importantly how you can help them.

Answer these questions before you begin the work on your social strategy:

1. What need will you fill for the people who will follow you?
2. Why should they follow you?
3. What will you consistently provide to them?

Let’s use the Buffer blog as an example since their wildly popular blog helped put them on the technology tool map. (Here’s a look back at the blog in late 2013.)

First they created their great product, Buffer, then they started their blog to help get the word out. Leo Widrich started early awareness for Buffer with an extensive guest blogging plan; this was before Buffer had a big team. They’ve since moved to an in-house blogging method with a team of great writers and a social media plan to get their message to as many people as possible.

Their goal was to find people to use Buffer. What they did to achieve that strategy was guest blogging with social media to boost it and they’ve scaled it to match their growth.

You’ll need to be willing to grind it out to make your social media strategy work. Nothing works unless you do.

There are different elements to the social strategy I work with. I’ll go more in depth into each of these:

1. Content creation
2. Content curation
3. Social media amplification
4. Social media conversations
5. Social media listening

Content creation & content curation

What is the difference between creation and curation?

Content creation is creating your media in the form of writing, graphics, design work, video, or any combination of these together.

Creating the media to share and express your blog or brand is very important to help build awareness and trust with your targeted audience.

Content curation is finding content that other people have created to share on your social media accounts.

From Buffer’s Complete Guide to Content Curation:

Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.

You’ll want to find content that matches the message that you’re presenting with your own content creation. Your curated content should boost your created content and work together. This is what you use to feed the content monster every day – a mixture of your own content and your curated content.

If you’re an artist, you might want to share curated content about art, creativity, and being an entrepreneur. The items that you curate and share are woven into your own social message so what you share is as important as what you create.

There are three ways I’ve found to make creation and curation as efficient and effective as possible:

1. Be organized
2. Load your tool belt
3. Automate what you can

1. Be organized

Organization is the most important cog in the wheel of your social strategy – a world of planning means nothing without implementation. Keep this in mind when choosing what to do so you can plan time in your schedule to get it all done. Being realistic in your time, motivations, and ability to implement is key.

2. Load your tool belt

• Buffer – Social media scheduling
• Canva – Quick and easy image creation
• Tailwind – Pinterest management
• Feedly – RSS
• Zapier – Automation
• Pinterest

 

This screen shot is from Feedly. I’ve set up my Feedly profile so I can batch process my content curation and easily find content for different accounts. For example, the highlighted accounts show Guy’s LinkedIn. I have RSS feeds set up to go into Guy’s LinkedIn folder based on the appropriate content for his LinkedIn account. You can choose an article, read it in Feedly and quickly send it to Buffer.

 

One key to great curation is to not share things all at once – let Buffer work for you by filling it in batches and sharing at the most optimal times.

Chrome extensions are invaluable to me. They are quick and efficient allowing you to do more in less time. A few of my must-have extensions:

• Buffer
• Bitly
• Eye Dropper Tool
• Pinterest Pin it Button
• Awesome Screenshot App

3. Automate what you can

• Big list of IFTTT recipes to grab:
• Big list of Zaps from Zapier

Using IFTTT or Zapier to streamline repetitive tasks can save you time. Both of these services link other app services together. My favorite IFTTT recipe shares my Instagram photos to Twitter with the image. If you don’t use this to share images from Instagram to Twitter, it will tweet but without the image.

My favorite Zapier zap posts my pins from Pinterest to my Buffer account. Once they are in Buffer, I can edit the description to customize it for a tweet and add a hashtag. I don’t want all my pins to go to Twitter so this gives me a chance to select them or I can edit the Zap to share only pins that I post to a certain board.

Creating your own social media shortcuts with IFTTT or Zapier can save time but make sure that you’re vigilant and check what is being processed on your social media accounts to make sure everything is going smoothly. You don’t want to share suboptimal content to save time. Quality is always important when posting.

Engagement [Social Media Conversations]

The wind beneath your wings for your social content.

A big part of the social media magic happens in the comments and conversations that take place on social media channels. When you post on social media, be prepared to have conversations with people. Scheduling your content frees you up to do other work and provides you with time to respond to tweets and posts.

Automating your content isn’t a free pass to be offline and unavailable. People will notice. While you don’t have to be online all day long unless you’re a social media pro or community manager, make sure that you plan several times a day to check your social media.

When you post new blog content, you want to make sure you’re available at that time to respond especially succinctly to comments or discussions that pop up around your new article.

Typically, I like to respond on each social platform. If you like to streamline tasks further, find a way to see and respond to the comments on each social platform that you use. A few that I like:

• Tailwind for Pinterest
• Hootsuite for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+
• Iconosquare for Instagram

Cleaning house [Social Media Comments]

While you’re busy checking your comments, make sure that you take the time to sweep out all the spam comments from your posts. These come in different forms by platform.

• LinkedIn published posts are being plagued by the LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) spamming the comments with “invitations to connect.” Remove these comments from your posts to keep it clean for real comments and thoughts.
• Facebook posts get spam in post comments leaving requests to like their page or some other off-topic link.
• Instagram spammers leave their messages and requests to visit their page and follow them.

Keeping your community spam and profanity free makes it nice for other people to be there as well as encourages positive commenting. This is a daily, on-going task that shouldn’t be ignored.

Build a reciprocal network [Social Media Amplification]

A big part of my overall social media strategy is to post great content that people will love to share whether I write it or share someone else’s content. I feel that this creates a social media presence that people will love to follow and look to for great content to share.

I don’t advocate begging people to share content or bugging influencers to share your content. Simply share great content and people will find it. I have a solid distribution process for sharing my own content and don’t ask others to share it.

I use the Social Warfare plugin on my blog because how things are shared when I’m not there to do it are important! It takes time to load the images into the plugin but it’s worth it for fantastic social sharing and it reduces the load time of the page since the images are behind the scenes.

This is a little of what I do when I publish new blog content. Guy calls this “Pegging a post.”

1. Create images for social sharing:
   > Pinterest 735 x 1102 pixels
   > Facebook 940 x 788 pixels
   > Twitter 1024 x 512 pixels
   > Instagram 640 x 640
2. Create blog graphics (560 x 315) for Open graph sharing
3. Pin blog post on Pinterest first
4. Share on Twitter with an image
5. Schedule later in the day for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+
6. Schedule tweets to go out on future dates for more traffic
7. Add relevant hashtags to content based on the social platform and what’s acceptable.
8. My posts go automatically into Triberr
9. I also use Comment Luv on my blog so my latest blog post is shared when I comment on blogs.
10. Add click to tweets into Social Warfare with quotes from the blog post

It’s important to customize the text and style on each social media platform. Dumping a link everywhere at the same time won’t get you social conversation or blog traffic.

Final step: Lather, rinse, repeat.

Being consistent with your social media and blogging is essential to success. I publish once a week on my blog and every day on all the social platforms that I’m active on.

Getting started on social media may seem like a big task but that’s just the beginning. Sticking with it and sharing great content every day is what creates social media platforms worth talking about.

Over to you

I hope this peek into what I do every day gives you some ideas to boost your social media efforts. If you want more, grab a copy of The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users and really get serious.

Have you tried some of these tips with your social media strategy? What would you add to the list here that’s worked for you? It’d be great to hear from you in the comments.

Image sources: Pablo, UnSplash, IconFinder, Wayback Machine

The post How I Manage a Social Media Platform of Over 11 Million Followers Every Day appeared first on Social.

What happens when you tweet at a company, asking for help with their product?

What’s been your experience with mentioning or tagging someone with a large following, looking to connect or engage?

In order for companies and brands to excel at responding to their audience in a genuine way, they must first excel at social listening. They tune in to the right conversations, by using the right tools, and then are able to respond, engage, and delight.

Having the right tools can be key—as well as knowing how to use them. I’m happy to share some ideas on how to build a social listening dashboard so you can track the right conversations and key words and get involved in all the conversations that matter to you!

What is social listening?

Social listening allows you to watch people’s feedback, questions, conversations or comments in order to discover opportunities or curate interesting content for those audiences.

It’s a combination of paying attention and knowing the best way to respond and act.

Rion Martin of Infegy has a helpful definition also:

The practice of tracking online conversations about a specific phrase, word, or brand. A social listening platform provides the basic capability of systematically collecting online conversations about a specific phrase, word, or brand and is able to provide some degree of insights through the analysis of those conversations.

What’s the difference between social listening and social media monitoring?

The line can often be a little blurry between monitoring and listening, and for understandable reasons: Both terms involve heavy doses of finding and joining important conversations online.

One of the best ways I’ve found to describe the difference is this, from Dan Neely of Marketing Profs:

Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.

This analogy from Dan sheds even more light:

To borrow an analogy from public health, imagine that a mysterious illness has struck your city. The equivalent of a monitoring solution is to find as many sick people as you can and treat them. You could “monitor,” going door to door, checking each person for signs of sickness and then treating each one. You would have an effect, but it would take many doctors and nurses—and a lot of time. And if you don’t get at the root cause, another outbreak could occur across town.

The listening analytics approach looks for themes and patterns in the data. A listening approach would discover what caused the illness—”Aha! They all were exposed to the leak!”—how it spreads, which treatments are working, and (perhaps) how to prevent it in the future.

The key with social listening—just like listening in real life—is to identify and analyze the meaningful parts of a discussion.

Monitoring takes a scrape and dump approach, which can be helpful for collecting any and every mention. Listening takes a reflect-and-analyze approach, helping to notice patterns and insights, things like sentiment (how do people feel when they talk about me?) and channels (where are the conversations happening?).

Social listening is not a metric (though social metrics are very important!), social listening is an art. It is a delicate balance between listening and connecting with people in a valuable and meaningful way.

Why is social listening important?

You can use listening to spark new conversations, gain valuable audience insight, identify advocates or influencers, build affinity for your brand, or find customer support and sales opportunities in real-time.

The support gurus over at the Provide Support Blog have an interesting statistic when it comes to social media:

9 out of 10 consumers expect to receive a consistent experience over multiple contact channels

Bottom line, your audiences are talking all over the internet and if they’re talking to you, they are expecting a response. And they’re not just expecting a canned response! They want you to make them feel listened to as is evident by this mind-blowing fact:

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated.

I guess you know what they say: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar!

Nurturing the conversations, questions, comments that you find online is a great way to organically build a community of happy people.

How to set up a social listening strategy

For A3, aim for less ego-centric #bufferchat pic.twitter.com/YAIGXyGJgy

— Simon Kemp (@eskimon) July 9, 2014

The above tweet from Simon Kemp of We Are Social was included in the social media monitoring #bufferchat (along with tons of other great tips and tools). There’s a host of great getting-started resources there, as well as in Courtney’s post about finding keywords and phrases to monitor.

To get started with social listening, choose a few brands (including your own) or keyword phrases that you want to listen to.

• Are you looking for customer service opportunities?
• Are you looking to identify influencers?
• Do you have a phrase or hashtag that you’d like to watch?

For example, you could want to listen for people talking about your product or service, so you might have a keyword phrase like this:

A helpful tip: You don’t need to include the “@” symbol when setting up an alert to watch the mentions of you or your brand. Many people forget to @-mention the company or they don’t necessarily want to mention you directly, for example:

Buffer help their staff use the right language with customers. Love it! Every support team should have one: http://t.co/B3KL8uGIPN#itsm

— Dave O’Reardon (@Silversix_Dave) March 28, 2015

Or you might want to keep an eye on a conversation that’s relevant to your industry and in that case you might want to monitor a keyword phrase or hashtag like this:

The more you diversify the topics you listen for, the more likely you are to find insights or opportunities for all of the above!

How to set up a social listening dashboard

1. The Mention + Feedly dashboard

Step 1: Build keyword phrase alerts in Mention.

Now that you have your list of keyword phrases, you can set up streams to watch using the free tool Mention, which also integrates with your Buffer account!

To start setting up alerts, click on the “Create a new alert” callout in the bottom-left corner of your Mention dashboard.

Once the new alert opens up, name your alert, I recommend using the same keyword phrase you intend to watch, then wait for your keyword phrase to populate in the “Keyword” field. When you’re done, click the “Next step” button in the bottom-right corner.

In this next step, you can select the social media channels you’d like to monitor as well as enter websites that you’d like to block from your results, and if you choose to keep the “Priority” filter activated, it will identify mentions coming from influential sites! Once you are done customizing your alert, click on the “Create my alert” button in the bottom-right.

Helpful tip: Connect your Buffer profile to your Mention account in the “Settings” of your dashboard to be able to respond or schedule content via your Buffer account.

Step 2: Import Your Mention updates into Feedly.

To pull your Mention alerts into Feedly, click on the RSS icon in your Mention account, found in the “Settings” section under “Manage my alerts.” Copy the URL from the popup.

Next, go into your Feedly account and click the “Add Content” button on the left-hand menu, then paste the URL in the field provided.

Once you’ve added your Mention feed, you can organize it under one of your Feedly categories.

Now you have a centralized location to view and share the content and social mentions you want to be listening to!

2. Email notifications

All major social networks offer to send you updates with any mentions or valuable content. In most cases, you can customize the emails you receive so that you’re getting the ones that fit your listening strategy best.

For Twitter, click on your profile picture in the top right corner and choose Settings from the drop-down list. Then click Email Notifications from the left menu.

Or you can click here.

One unique thing about Twitter is that it has a bit of a built-in listening service in that you can choose whether to be emailed any time an activity occurs or in a Tailored for you way, which customizes (and can significantly minimize) the emails you receive.

Here’s one way to set up an email notifications dashboard for Twitter emails:

For Facebook, click the small down-arrow in the top right corner and choose Settings from the drop-down list. Then click Notifications from the left menu and Email from the next page.

Or you can click here.

Among the Facebook email settings, a few that could be useful for adding to a listening dashboard include comments on your links and weekly page updates.

A similar setting is available for page admins by going to your page and clicking Settings > Notifications.

3. Your best combo of Google Alerts, Talkwalker, and Mention

Each of the above options does an excellent job of searching the web for mentions of your brand name and keywords. Each can deliver the results to your inbox, at the frequency you choose, and you can filter and sort the results from there.

Interestingly, some variation occurs from service to service. Results may vary, so to speak, which is why some people swear by Google Alerts and others Talkwalker and others Mention.

Feel free to play around with the right combination for you.

4. Slack channel or chat room

With a big assist from IFTTT or Zapier, you can connect a huge variety of services to post to your Slack chat room when new notifications come in.

For instance, here are some of the neat integrations between IFTTT and Slack.

• If you’re mentioned on Twitter, post a message in Slack
• If you receive a Google Alert, post a message in Slack
• If a new item comes into Feedly (like the Feedly + Mention dashboard shown above), post a message in Slack

5. Sparkcentral all-in-one dashboard

Some brands find great value in being able to find and respond to conversations all in the same place. Buffer, for example, uses Sparkcentral as its tool for handling all Twitter engagement, everything from @-mentions and direct messages to keyword searches.

Solutions like these make it pretty easy to set up and dive in. Many also come at a price. Sparkcentral and others are enterprise solutions with a monthly subscription.

Here are some other tools in the mold of Sparkcentral:

• Spider
• Brand24
• Salesforce
• Simply Measured
• Meltwater

6. Custom Tweetdeck dashboard

For social listening on Twitter specifically, there are many great Twitter tools that help surface mentions and hashtags that are valuable to you.

One of the best—and most official (it’s owned by Twitter!)—is Tweetdeck, which lets you build horizontal columns of notifications and activity, completely customized to your tastes.

Here’s a simple workflow for building a smart listening column for notifications and for searches.

For notifications:

1. Add a new column. Select “Mentions” from the column list. Add to your dashboard.
2. In the top right corner of your new Mentions column, click to open the settings.
3. For “Content,” you can clean up the results in the column by filtering out retweets or including tweets with a certain media type (video, GIF, etc.).
4. If you get a lot of @-mentions on the content you write, you can attempt to filter some of these results out in order to highlight conversational tweets by adding “via by” to the “excluding” setting.

For searches:

1. Click the search icon from the left menu.
2. Enter a search for your name or company name.
3. If you have an @-mention dashboard set up, you can exclude your username from the results (e.g., @caerleyhill).
4. For the Engagement setting, you can choose to show results that have a certain number of retweets, favorites, or replies.
5. When finished, click Add Column to add to your dashboard.

For content curation:

1. Add a new column for a favorite Twitter list or search.
2. For the Content setting, choose to show only tweets with links.

Summary: Always remember, listen & reply with care!

However you’re planning on structuring your communities, it’s important to remember that the content you are curating and responding with should be in-line with the existing conversation or add value to it.

A good rule of thumb I like to remember is that people don’t enjoy being “talked at,” this is “Human to Human” contact that you’re creating. People will respond to the way you make them feel, so make them feel listened to!

What social listening tips have you found to be most useful for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Image source: Pablo, IconFinder, UnSplash, Irina Blok

The post Track Every Important Conversation: 6 Simple Ways to Build a Social Listening Dashboard appeared first on Social.

In my experience, one of the best ways to write great content is to make time to write great content.

I’m grateful that the team at Buffer emphasizes the blog as a means of helping others, spreading the word about Buffer, and sharing our learnings and improvements. This allows me to spend the time writing.

And how do I spend that time?

I’d love to show you.

We publish four posts per week on the Buffer blog, each post at least 1,500 words (and typically over 2,000). I write three of these posts. And for the past two weeks, I tracked every minute I spent on a blog post from research through promotion. Here’s how it all breaks down.

How Much Time It Takes to Write a Buffer Blog Post

I write a Buffer blog post in an average of 2 hours, 58 minutes.

The longest post took 3 hours, 33 minutes.

The shortest post took 2 hours, 23 minutes.

The post I’m writing right now took 2 hours, 42 minutes (I added it all up once I finished).

In total, I tracked six different blog posts. Here’s a breakdown of the word count and the time involved in each of the six posts from the past two weeks.

The times were really interesting to see as they’ve improved quite a bit from when I started with Buffer. Much like Belle’s post on how she cut her writing time from 2 days to 4 hours, I’d say that my writing time has decreased significantly also.

Previously, I would spend 8 to 12 hours per post. It’s amazing to see how that time has shrunk as I’ve gained experience and confidence in writing for the Buffer blog.

How I Spend My Time Writing Blog Posts

From a bird’s-eye view, here’s a quick overview of how the three hours of time break down specifically, according to the different stages of my writing process. I’d love to get into even more detail on each of these stages below.

And a tip of the hat to the free time-tracking tool Toggl for helping me easily track and compile all these stats.

Research – 40 minutes per post

One of the hallmarks of the blog posts on the Buffer blog is the fact that they are research-backed, scientific, data-oriented articles with specific, actionable takeaways.

Because of this, it’s key to spend as much time as possible to come up with the research, science, and data to share.

My research process has sped up quite a bit as I’ve gained experience with social media and with the Buffer way of things. I’m able to pull from the past to write good chunks of articles now, with less switching back and forth between old articles and old threads.

To quickly find an article we’ve written about in the past, I do a site: search in Google.

site:blog.bufferapp.com keyword

To find resources to quote and dig into for social media stats or strategies, I do a lot of custom Google searches, both at google.com and at Google Scholar (tons of great research papers and scientific studies).

• I’ll start with a series of keywords, entering each into a Google search.
• I’ll refine the search terms, based on autofill suggestions and suggested searches at the bottom of the page
• I’ll change the date settings to only show results from the past year

In addition to these workflows, I also find that a lot of research can be done before you even start researching a blog post.

Seems a bit counterintuitive, right? Well, the way this has worked at Buffer is that we collect and store any interesting research in personal Evernote files or in our team Trello blog post board. I’ve used a method of highlighting and tagging articles in Pocket, or favoriting tweets that I might want to reference later for information.

However you choose to do it, this pre-research phase can be a great time saver when it comes to starting a fresh blog post.

Outline – 4 minutes per post

Some posts—not all posts—go through an outline stage where I’ll  take the research and organize it into a loose flow. It’s all very tentative and guess-heavy; I expect the final product to change a lot from the initial outline.

The outline is as simple as jotting down the sections that I’ll end up writing and the order in which I think they’ll appear, then moving the research, stats, and quotables into each section.

It helps to move things along for the writing stage (next).

Writing – 59 minutes per post

WordPress used to have this cool Easter egg when you switched to the distraction-free editor. The bottom of the editor would say, “Just Write.”

And this is such good advice. At this stage of my writing process, just writing is the most valuable thing I can do. I close everything off, hop into the distraction-free WordPress editor, and let fly whatever comes to mind.

I always write the intro first, as it helps me focus on where the article is headed and makes it a bit easier psychologically to get stuck into writing the post since I’m not working from an entirely blank page.

As I write, I’ll keep in mind things like:

• Varying sentence length
• Varying paragraph size
• Adding space for images (I use a placeholder text of “//pic”)
• Reminders to come back and add stats or specifics (I leave an “xx” for missing info)

And beyond that, there’s not a whole lot else I’ll do. Just write. Even if it’s terrible. (Terrible is better than zilch.)

By the end of the writing stage, I’ll often have 2,000 or more words to work with.

Editing – 26 minutes per post

I give myself the freedom to throw a bunch of ideas, thoughts, and rambles into the post during the writing stage because I know the editing stage is coming. I’ll have a chance to clean things up.

And in a lot of ways, editing is quite a bit like Writing: Part II. There are times when I’ll cut out huge portions of what I’ve written before and start from scratch.

And one of the most helpful ways I’ve found to edit is to give the article some time to simmer, a couple hours or preferably a day. When I can come back to something with fresh eyes, I’m often able to see things from a better perspective.

During the actual editing process, I’ll do the following:

• Tighten up the intro and make sure it includes a copywriting formula or hook
• Double-check that the headings are descriptive and noticeable
• Double-check that the headings are the proper sizes (in our case, H2 vs H3 vs bold)
• Add links to past Buffer articles in the intro and throughout the story where appropriate
• Add any missing info like stats or source attribution
• Remove sections that don’t add value to the article; trim down super long sections
• Add formatting like bold, italics, blockquote, indent, bullet lists, numbered lists
• Proofread

Creating images – 30 minutes per post

Content with visuals gets 94 percent more views.

So we aim to be quite purposeful in finding and creating great visuals for each and every post.

I’ll typically find or create the following images for each new article:

1. A title image made in Pablo, featuring the keyword of the post, a subhead, and an icon
2. A main image to serve as the background for the article heading
3. Screenshots
4. Pinterest-sized graphic, vertical and 735 x 1102
5. Miscellaneous graphics, as needed

For creating all this cool stuff, I’ve found a pretty solid go-to list of tools and websites. Here are the ones I visit most often:

• Pablo, for title images and quote images
• Canva, for miscellaneous graphics and Pinterest-sized graphics
• Skitch, for annotated screenshots
• Cloud App, for animated GIFs
• Compressor.io, for compressing large images into smaller file sizes
• IconFinder and The Noun Project, for icons
• UnSplash and Death to the Stock Photo, for free images (there’re are tons of other great, free image sources as well)

Real quick, here’s a sample of what I do when creating the title image for blog posts. I’ve got this down to about two minutes of time.

1. Enter the headline, set the headline to Open Sans font, Extra Large, Bold
2. Click to add secondary text, set the text to Satisfy font, Large
3. Find an image on UnSplash, abstract yet perhaps somewhat related to the post, e.g. a car dashboard for a post about metrics or an airplane for a post about growth
4. Upload the image, set to Blur
5. Find an icon at IconFinder, set the search to Flat Icons only
6. Download the icon and upload to Pablo as the “Add a logo” option, resize as needed
7. Center all elements
8. Download to my computer

SEO – 4 minutes per blog post

For SEO, a lot of it comes into place early on in our blogging process. In fact, it often happens before the process even begins.

The idea stage is sometimes the best time to consider the keyword you’ll be focusing on in the story. When you have a keyword in mind from the start, the SEO part of the writing process goes pretty quick.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the privilege of writing posts with clear keywords like “content promotion,” “collaboration tools,” and “social media checklist.”

Of course, there are times when the keyword isn’t quite as crystal clear. When I’m in doubt about which keyword to focus on, I’ll do a quick search in Google.

I go to trends.google.com and type in the keywords I’m considering. Here’s what Google Trends had to say about this post on how to spend your time writing a blog post.

Also, another method is to open an incognito browser window, go to Google, and begin typing potential keywords and noticing the Autofill results that come up.

For the Buffer blog, we use a WordPress plugin, Yoast SEO, to handle the specifics of implementing SEO strategy into each post.This makes it so that we have just a few small tasks to do on each post in order to set the SEO.

• Choose a focus keyword
• Write an SEO headline—used on Google, Facebook, etc.
• Write a description
• Edit the article URL

Occasionally, to make sure that the content is focused on that keyword or phrase, I’ll do a quick search inside the article (CTRL+F) to see how many times the keyword is mentioned or to rewrite any phrases that are perhaps similar.

Headlines – 6 minutes per post

Recently, I began an attempt at a sort of Upworthy headline challenge.

The writers at Upworthy write 25 headlines for every post and then choose the best ones from the list to share on social media and test as the winning headline.

I’ve been able to do 15 headlines per post so far, and it’s been a really awesome exercise.

Perhaps what’s helped me most with this is being able to reference a couple of articles on the Buffer blog that talk about headlines:

• Ultimate Headline Formulas
• Headline Strategies and the Psychology Behind Them

Having these close by is really useful for brainstorming the different options for headlines, and it’s helped me expand my creativity and openness to new headline ideas.

And not all of the headlines are winners! (In my experience so far, about 1/3 of them might be worth keeping.) For example, here is the list of headlines I brainstormed for the post that eventually was titled The Delightfully Short Guide to Social Media ROI.

Promotion – 7 minutes per post

There are so many cool tips and techniques for promoting your content. I’m keen to explore a lot of them further; at this stage, we do just a couple of things for Buffer blog posts.

What I’ll do is share each new post multiple times to social media, according to a sharing schedule we’ve iterated on here at Buffer: multiple times over the first few days to Twitter, once today and once later in the week to Facebook and Google+, once to LinkedIn.

And then each new post also goes out to our RSS email list (you can sign up here if you’re interested). And this process happens automatically. Each new post is grabbed by MailChimp and sent out at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

How my process has changed over time

One thing I’ve found about my writing process is that it routinely seems to change.

Things happen during the week that allow me to adjust the schedule and I’ll stumble upon a new system of writing—and keep that system until a new one falls into place.

I particularly enjoyed a system I used when starting out at Buffer: The 3-day Blogpost Process. It worked like this:

• Day one: Research
• Day two: Writing
• Day three: Editing

And the idea is to stagger the schedule so that you’re doing one of each stage for three different blog posts each day.

In this way, I was able to write up to five blog posts per week and felt great about the extra time to focus and reflect on the content that I was publishing.

(My schedule has shifted slightly to more of a one-day method of writing where I’ll get the majority done in one day and then do a final read-over on the day of publish.)

What does your blogging process look like?

It’d be awesome to hear how you blog, how you spend your time, and any tips you’ve picked up.

Feel free to share your experience in the comments or ask any follow-up about the way I do things at Buffer.

Image sources: Pablo, Startup Stock Photos, WordPress, Kapost

The post The Time It Takes to Write a Buffer Blog Post (And How We Spend Every Minute) appeared first on Social.

Sometimes when you get a good content idea, you can feel it. You just know that it’s fully formed, ready to be executed, and sure to be a hit.

Other times, the idea isn’t quite so clear. Maybe it’s only a partial idea, or you’re not quite sure what actually creating it would look like.

Anyone who’s dipped their toes in the content marketing pool knows that creating content can be incredibly taxing of our creativity. Worth it, but time consuming.

Luckily, there are plenty of strategies and tools for getting new ideas, fleshing out existing ideas and evolving good ideas into awesome ones.

In this post, we’ll walk through tons of different tools and strategies (35+!) to take your ideas further. Read on to learn how to find, validate, research and execute more killer ideas in less time.

From good to great: 5 ways to make the most of any idea

Let’s say you’ve already identified your target audience and created reader personas. You know which topics they’re most interested in and have created a giant list of content ideas based on this intel.

Now to determine which ideas are going to resonate with and engage your audience most. Here are five methods to try:

• Use your metrics: Once you’ve built a bit of a following and published enough content to serve as a benchmark, you can turn to metrics to determine what your audience is responding to. Metrics such as time on page (SumoMe’s Content Analytics and Heat Map tools are great for this), click-throughs, bounce rate, and rate of return visits (i.e. how many times a reader visits your site after the post you’re measuring) can help helpful content KPIs.
• Ask your editor or a friend. This post was originally going to be a list of tools. When I submitted my initial outline, Courtney suggested I add the advice you’re reading right now, about evolving ideas. Brainstorming and talking ideas through with people who have differing perspectives can evolve an idea into an awesome one.
• Find points of idea intersection. Can two or three of your topic ideas be combined to create one monster piece? Or maybe there are points from each idea that can be turned into a normal-sized but more valuable piece of content.
• Research what’s already been written. No need to reinvent the wheel. Do a quick Google search for all of your validated ideas. See what’s already been written on and what has been said. How can you add your own twist and perspective to the topic?
• Leverage your research and remain open minded. Once you think you’ve nailed down an idea and started conducting the research necessary to write the piece, you may stumble across new information that has you second guessing the topic. Let your idea to twist and turn to grow and become something else. As long as it still accomplishes your goals, you’ll be better off letting the idea take on a life of its own.

You can then take these findings and apply them when qualifying and prioritizing your list of ideas. Now that you’ve got a plan for zeroing in on good ideas and taking them to the next level, let’s get to the research tools and strategies.

Keep a swipe file with bookmarking tools

Bookmarking tools are especially useful when you know your topic buckets or general categories. When you’re browsing the web, you can save interesting articles and resources and add them to your swipe file or collection of resources that will be helpful when it comes time to produce your content. Having an established library of resources to reference creates efficiencies in conducting research. Here are a few bookmarking tools I like:

• Pocket (Chrome Extension): I love Pocket. It’s free to use and available on the web and mobile. Best part is, if you download your Pocketed stories via the app when you have service or wifi, they’re then available offline so you can read them on the train, for example. If you’d like to save these resources forever, you can pay $4.99/month for Premium.
• Pinboard.in (Chrome Extension): At $11/year, Pinboard feels a bit more like a research tool than Pocket does. It’s handy because you can search your own pins, or pins from the public like you would a search engine. You can also see how many times each piece of research has been pinned.
• Kifi (Chrome Extension): Kifi is a new community around resource sharing that’s free to join. You can create public or private libraries, and follow people. I really like how information is organized within the libraries with color coding and tagging.

Pro tip: Proper tagging is crucial to making the most of these tools so that all saved content is easily discoverable and organized according to your preferred workflow. Keep tags consistent among tools to save time and to keep yourself organized.

Get inspired by industry news and conversations

Once you have general topic buckets in mind (i.e. community strategy, remote work, or e-commerce, for example) and a tagging system in place, you can start to narrow down what your go-to resources are.

To get you started, here are some great places to find information, news and conversations on a variety of topics.

Forums and communities

• GrowthHackers: Great discussions and articles around anything marketing.
• Inbound.org: Covers anything inbound and content marketing, and has developed a very dedicated community with AMAs and native blog posts.
• Quora: The ultimate Q&A forum. The engagement on Quora can be unreal.
• Reddit: Once you’ve found your groove on Reddit, you’ve struck gold. To avoid being overwhelmed, definitely stick with relevant subreddits. Check out this list Kevan at Buffer put together. Potentially the most active communities on the Internet, here are Reddit’s engagement stats for one day:

Niche search engines

• Topsy: Search popular stories around a given topic.
• BuzzSumo: Identifies influential pieces measured by social shares on any given topic searched.

Curation platforms

• Buffer Suggestions and Daily by Buffer: One of my favorite places to find high-quality content on a variety of topics including marketing, entrepreneurship, lifehacks, and more, including Buffer’s own picks. You can also directly add the stories to your social queue, which is pretty handy.
• The Latest: Polls influencers for the top links shared on Twitter each day.
• This.: A forum where all members only post one piece of content per day — so you know it’s going to be good!
• Quibb: An invite-only community popular among startup folks.
• Feedly: Today’s go-to RSS feed.
• Flipboard: A favorite among iPad users, Flipboard creates a beautiful flip book with articles relevant to your interests.
• Swayyy.co: See what articles are most popular among your networks on any given topic.
• Sidebar.io: A hand-curated list of links from around the web.

Social networks and content platforms

• Slideshare: Slideshare is perfect for data and stat-packed content in an easily digestible form. Some people and organizations use it to house slides from presentations, others use it solely for repurposing content into more digestible pieces. Some of my favorite slides come from Rand Fishkin of Moz and Kapost.
• Twitter lists: Make a list of all the people or brands you follow on Twitter that share valuable information as it relates to your focus areas. Then, when it comes time to produce your piece, you can quickly scan the feed for anything that jumps out to you. Here’s my list of go-to content pros and people discussing community experience.
• Medium: This has become one of my favorite places to find unique stories around all sorts of different topics, including everything from entrepreneurship to music discovery.

Newsletters

• Crew: Great for research-heavy stories on freelance workflows, entrepreneurship, work-life balance, and more.
• Remotive: From Buffer’s own Rodolphe Dutel, Remotive provides resources to remote workers and digital nomads across the globe.
• SwissMiss: By far one of my favorite blogs and newsletters, Tina Roth Eisenberg shares unique products and designery things that will make anyone’s life better. Great for content inspiration!
• Brain Pickings: Maria Popova’s blog and newsletter is the ultimate literary and art nerd’s bible, with pieces of psychology and science sewn throughout.
• Austin Kleon: Best-selling author Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter might have THE most interesting links around the web.
• Paul Jarvis’ Sunday Dispatch: A mix of personal anecdotes and research. If nothing else, Paul’s Sunday Dispatch will inspire you to get moving on that piece of content!
• CloudPeeps: Ok, so personal plug here. We’re now sending weekly emails with our latest content and resources that will be helpful to anyone interested in freelance and remote work, community building, habits, and more!

Those are just my personal favorites. Check out these 25 newsletters for shareable content from Kevan.

Pro tip: Set up a filter in your inbox to file newsletters in a folder associated with the topic bucket it’s relevant to. That way when it comes time to write your piece, you can quickly peruse the latest issues for information that might be helpful.

Collaborate with your team

Others on your team are likely a pretty great source for ideas, news and resources. Make it easy for your team to share with you as they stumble across valuable information.

At CloudPeeps, we have a #readinglist channel within Slack—our preferred team collaboration and messaging platform—that we use for sharing interesting articles and resources. You can then mark these messages with a star to be able to view them later.

You could also collaborate with your team by making a shared library within a platform like Kifi, discussed earlier.

Crowdsource from your circles

If you already have a topic in mind, it’s likely that it’s really on your mind. Next time you attend an event or chat with a friend, ask questions around that topic—even if the person you’re speaking with is not an expert! The differing perspective might help you to evolve your idea into one a specific audience wants or needs. (Make sure to carry your notebook!)

Another option is to ask the groups you’re active in on Facebook, LinkedIn, listservs, Slack Groups, etc. for insights. I have written entire pieces based on findings from a Slack Group of content marketers that I formed a while back, including this winter reading list.

Gather the data

Adding some stats, facts or other science-based research to your topic is a great way to flesh out an idea and to make your content more persuasive.

There are plenty of free research databases online that will allow you to discover the cold hard facts on any topic. These will also be helpful in vetting information gathered from your networks:

• Jurn
• Google Scholar
• Academia.edu
• Springer
• RefSeek
• A list of academic databases and search engines via Wikipedia

Another trick is to refine your Google search to only include results from .gov or .edu sites:

Build a research habit

Like most other things in life, content research comes more naturally when it is a habit. Try carving out a certain amount of time each day or week for your research.

Better yet, implement if-then planning to build this habit. For example, you could make an if-then rule for yourself, such as: “If I hit a wall writing an article, I will spend five minutes researching a new topic.” Or “If I take a coffee break, I will read two articles.”

Personally, I carve out time (~20 min) in the morning, at lunch, and before signing off each day for browsing forums and catching up on saved articles. So for me, one of my if-then rules is “If I wrapped up my work for the day, I will research remote working habits for 15 minutes before I pack up.”

Have more tips or tools to add? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

The post Next-Level Content: 35+ Research Tools and Strategies to Push Your Ideas Further appeared first on Social.

Did you know: Some bloggers recommend you spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it.

(Derek Halpern of Social Triggers has an 80/20 split: 80 percent promotion, 20 percent writing.)

Wow, this is an area I fall well short on. I’m so impressed by those who hustle to get their content out there and in front of as many people as possible who can gain value from it.

Over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot from content promotion experts and am starting (slowly) to work some of these practices into sharing the blog posts I write here at Buffer. I’d love to pass along a few of the strategies I’ve tried already and the ones I’m excited to experiment with. I’m hopeful you’ll find some insights here that can work no matter the size of your blog or audience.

Content Promotion Strategies for Blogs Big and Small

1. Send new content to your email list

One of the best things you can do for your blog or brand is to build an email list. It’s one of the best channels for reaching the largest percentage of your followers. People have opted in to hear from you; they’re primed and ready to open, click, and engage with what you send.

For an example of the power of email, we send each new Buffer blog post to 40,000 people (thanks, everyone, and if you want to sign up, you can do so here.)

Of those 40,000 people, 7,500 open the email and read what’s inside, and 1,800 people click through to the full article.

 

By comparison, an average Facebook post for us is seen by 1,800 people and clicked 51 times (all our latest social media stats are here).

The takeaway: Grow an email list.

We were fortunate to be able to double our email list growth in one month by focusing on a few key strategies. We did this without an email popup, which is a great strategy for lots of blogs but just didn’t quite feel right for us. Our most successful CTAs are:

• Slideup CTA that comes up from the right corner of the page after a user scrolls 60% down
• HelloBar (pinned to the top)
• Feature signup box on the main blog domain (blog.buffer.com but no other article pages)

2. Share multiple times to social media

We’re grateful for the chance to share with large audiences on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Sharing once to these networks let us get a new post in front of 1,000s of readers who then have the potential to share it with thousands of their readers, and so on and so on.

Jeremy Waite shared this amazing stat in a post about social media rules:

1 active user is a BIG deal. They have 140 friends. And their friends have 140 friends each. Therefore 1 piece of great content has the chops to reach 2.7m people within just 4 generations.

And we share each blog post more than once, according to a promotion schedule that spreads the promotion across a week or more (often stretching out to a month).

3. Syndication

Over a year-and-a-half ago, we shifted focus on Buffer blog outreach from guest post opportunities to syndication. We started pitching our best-performing blog posts to other blogs in case they’d be interested in republishing.

This was super useful for us because it

a) allowed our content to help a new audience

b) provided great value and fast content for websites we admire

c) was a bit of a minting machine for our content—instead of spending 8 hours writing a new guest post that would be published one time, we spent 8 hours writing a great post for our blog and another hour or two helping get the same post published on a number of other sites.

We shared a bit about this process in our post “How to Become a Columnist.” At a very high level, these are a few of the techniques that were most helpful as we got started.

1. Start with guest posting. The more, the better. Buffer’s co-founder, Leo, wrote around 150 guest posts in a nine-month period.
2. Refine and improve the content on your own site. Writing tons of articles, on your own site and on sites of others, can only help but improve the work you publish and promote. This process led to a couple big hits on the Buffer blog.
3. Submit your top-performing posts. These often come with built-in validation (in terms of social shares, comments, views) that make it an easier decision for the potential publisher to say yes.
4. Expect some no’s along the way. We didn’t get into all our top choice blogs right away.

4. Send an outreach email

I’m really excited to share this one.

This strategy had a 66 percent success rate for us.

Two-thirds of the people we reached out to regarding a post of ours responded and shared with their social media crowds. For our post 10 Time-Saving Tools, I wrote a greeting to each of the brands that were mentioned, more of a “thanks for creating an awesome tool” rather than “please share this post.”

Here’s the exact email I sent.

I’m quite new to this strategy, so there’s likely a lot of ways I could improve here. The tone and message, for instance, is somewhat in line with the How to Win Friends values that guide our actions here at Buffer. (And I imagine you could possibly get away with being a bit more direct with the ask.)

One assumption I’ve made: People love hearing good things about themselves.

Sharing these positive mentions seems like a natural outcome.

I’ve found that we do this at Buffer, sharing links on Twitter that mention us in a list of tools or cool work cultures.

And here’s a neat tip if you’re interested in this strategy: You can use a tool like contentmarketer.io to scan your post and get you the names and contact info for anyone you’ve mentioned. Lickety-split.

5. Mention an influencer (then mention that you’ve mentioned him or her)

If you need a reason to reach out to a big name in your industry, include the person in your post. Then give them a heads up.

One of the quickest ways to do this is with a quote. You can ask ahead of time to see if they’d be willing to share something for your story, or you can pull from an article or interview they’ve done elsewhere and cite the source. Either way, it gets your foot in the door for reaching out later on, once the post is published, and you then have the potential big bump from their audience if they choose to share.

Adam Connell of BloggingWizard wrote about the value of a roundup post—a piece of content where a number of influencers are asked to contribute, e.g. “40 Experts Share Their Favorite…”, that sort of thing.

One of the reasons why these posts are so effective is because influencers have contributed content that they have written themselves. This makes them far more invested in the success of the content and the fact that appear next to other extremely influential people within their market sector makes them even more willing to show off the content to their following.

(And if I so choose, I could now reach out to Adam, letting him know I mentioned him here!)

6. Submit the post to a content community

Here’re a few that are specific to our niche:

• Inbound.org – Marketing
• Growth Hackers – Growth hacking
• Hacker News – Tech

To be honest, this is one strategy I wish I was better at. I don’t submit any Buffer blog posts to these places; any mentions come organically from those submitting our posts on their own (thanks, all!).

From what I’ve studied, there are a couple of unwritten rules at play here:

• Focus on more than just self-promotion. Don’t join the community and solely share your own stuff. Share other articles, comment and vote on other stories, be part of the community.
• Share your best stuff. Don’t share every single article you write.

So perhaps the best way to go about sharing is to focus first on spending time with the community. Bookmark the site. Pin it to your browser. Put it on your home screen. Engage and interact regularly for a week or more before you submit your first self-promotional post and keep on engaging afterward.

7. Connect with a mentoring/peer group

I’m part of this really cool group of marketing friends who drop by a Slack chat room. Every so often when a new piece of content gets published, the writer hops onto the group and asks others to take a look and provide any feedback. And to share it, if we’d like.

If you’ve got a similar set of like-minded friends or colleagues, you can combine forces and creative energy into a group like this. Slack is a wonderful way to organize. Not only can groups like these help you become better at what you do, they can be a great source for helping with promotion and growth of your content.

8. Make it easy for readers to share your content

One of your best content promotion sources is the people reading your content.

Make it easy for readers to share your story by adding social media buttons in strategic places. Here are a few of my favorite tools and tips on how:

1. Click to Tweet. Grab quotable snippets from your story and include them as Tweetable blurbs. With a tool like Click to Tweet, you can turn the quote into a shareable sound bite that a reader can send to Twitter with one click.

2. Pin it button. For the visuals and infographics you create for the post, add a Pin It button so that readers can easily share to Pinterest. You can grab the code from Pinterest’s webiste. We use a WordPress plugin that gives us a bit more control; for instance, we have the Pin It button turned off by default and we can add it manually to any image we want by simply adding an image class of “pinthis.”

3. Image Sharer. Similar to the Pin It button, SumoMe has a really great website add-on that creates a social share button overlay onto your images. You can choose networks like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and (yes!) Buffer, and you can control where on the image the buttons appear when a user hovers.

9. Focus on the places that get the best results

One of the best posts I’ve read on content promotion strategies is by Shannon Byrne on KISSmetrics. She shares all the strategies she’s used at Mention, which is super helpful to see how to put a plan in place.

She’s got this one section in particular that shows how to go about finding the distribution channels that work best (and focusing on those places moving forward).

Her tips:

1. Looking at referral sources in Google Analytics
2. Monitoring keywords to discover what conversations are happening, where
3. Looking at what content is trending on the forums our audience is on

Take a look at the forums and groups you’ve identified as relevant distribution channels. Which posts are being discussed the most? Which are seeing the most upvotes? Use these are inspiration during topic ideation, then write a post (or webinar, or podcast) from your unique perspective.

One report in particular, related to the referral sources in Google Analytics, has been really insightful for us on the Buffer blog. Shannon recommends pulling the referral sources report (going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals) and noting the bounce rate for each channel.

The average bounce rate for our referrals is 80 percent. From this report, I can see that Feedly and Fast Company are good sources for us and that it might make sense not to focus too much on additional reach at Growth Hackers.

10. Paid ads and remarketing

Of course, you can always go the paid route, spending money on social media advertising or pay-per-click ads on search engines.

Robin Burton of SEO Site Checkup even recommends a look into remarketing, the process of setting a cookie on site visitors that then shows your ads to these folks when they’re on other sites.

You can chase your audience across the Google Display Network with image ads by using the cookies you obtained when they read your content. You can reach up to 84% of your visitors across 5-10 different sites between 10-18 days a month, which is well worth the effort for a strong brand campaign!

11. Repurposing

This tip stretches a bit into ways to get more out of existing content. Distribution is often just about getting your new content as wide of reach as possible. So with repurposing, it’s important to make sure the original content shines as brightly as can be.

So one of the ways to work with repurposing is to grab snippets and excerpts and repost them to websites like Quora and LinkedIn that have their own publishing tools.

Medium’s recent announcement of dashboard-writing also is a sleek option for getting bits and pieces of your article out there (and linking back to the original to read the rest).

Summary

There are tons of great strategies to try for getting your content seen by the most people possible. This list touches on a few. Are there any of your favorites that you don’t see here?

1. Send to your email list
2. Share on social media
3. Syndication
4. Send an outreach email
5. Mention an influencer
6. Submit to a content community
7. Connect with a mentoring/peer group
8. Make it easy for your readers to share
9. Focus on the places that get the best results
10. Paid ads and remarketing
11. Repurposing

Which of these promotion strategies have you tried? It’d be great to hear your thoughts on the topic! I’d love to hear any of your comments below.

The post How Content Promotion Works for Blogs Big and Small: Our 11 Favorite Content Distribution Strategies appeared first on Social.

One of our favorite tips on getting more value out of social media:

Share your blog posts and articles more than once.

We’ve come up with a sharing schedule for every new blog post that publishes on the Buffer blog—sharing the post when it publishes, later the same day, the next day, later in the week, and on and on into the future. And in doing so, we’ve come across some really interesting pearls of wisdom.

There are some headlines that just keep collecting clicks no matter how many times we tweet them.

I’d love to share with you what these headlines are, what makes them so effective, and how (and why) we’ve built a process to keep sharing this content that our audience finds valuable. We’d love to hear any thoughts this brings up for you!

10 Eternally Clickable Headlines of Buffer

Here’s a selection from our go-to list of social media posts that we share to Twitter:

1. Twitter Tips for Beginners: Everything I Wish I Knew When I Started
2. How I Got 4x Faster Writing Blogposts
3. The Origin of the 8-Hour Work Day and Why We Should Rethink It
4. 59 Free Twitter Tools and Apps That Do Pretty Much Everything
5. Shave 20 Hours Off Your Work Week With This Email Template
6. How to Get Your First 1,000 Followers on Twitter — A step-by-step guide!
7. 30 Little-Known Features of the #SocialMedia Sites You Use Every Day
8. How to Easily Save 60 Minutes Every Day on the Internet
9. 7 Ways I Accidentally Got More Twitter Followers (and How You Can on Purpose!)
10. 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts

Our tweets average 100 to 150 clicks each. These headlines? They routinely pull in 200+ clicks every time we share them.

Here’s a peek at the Twitter Tips for Beginners headline, shared in the past 90 days.

What makes these headlines great?

There’s a lot that goes into a clickable, shareworthy headline—things like formulas and psychology and science.

We’ve written before about the psychological reasons why some headlines grab readers tighter than others.

We’ve written about headline formulas where you can plug-and-play with different words and orders.

We’ve found the most popular words and the most viral content.

And given all this research and insight, we’ve been grateful for the chance to try it all out and build a few headlines that lots of people love. Here’s what we think might be at work behind the eternally clickable headlines in the above list.

1. An aspirational theme

What’s one thing that all these headlines have in common? They’re about working smarter and less!

And a lot of people seem to be interested in those topics. (For very understandable reasons!)

Sure, to a certain degree, the aspirational tone of a headline somewhat relates to the type of content you’re publishing and sharing. Aspirational headlines come a bit easier for certain topics like life-hacking or productivity, for instance.

That being said, I think any industry or niche can come up with improvement-focused headlines like these if the content is framed appropriately.

Take, for example, some of the aspirational headlines in our list (about topics like social media and email that aren’t necessarily thought of as aspirational):

• Shave 20 Hours Off Your Work Week With This Email Template
• How I Got 4x Faster Writing Blog Posts
• How to Get Your First 1,000 Followers / Get More Followers

They share a common theme of efficiency and time-saving. Now, how might you put these thoughts into action if you were to, say, be blogging about classroom education? Perhaps:

• The 5 Hacks That Help Me Grade Papers and Still Have Time for Netflix
• How I Got 4x Faster Writing Lesson Plans
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Helping Your Most Challenging Students Shine

2. Psychological learnings

In Courtney’s post about the psychology of headlines, she listed eight different headline types that might affect a person’s reaction and emotion.

1. Surprise
2. Questions
3. Curiosity
4. Negatives
5. “How to”
6. Numbers
7. Audience Referencing (e.g., “You”)
8. Specificity

 

The psychological factors that are evident in our most clickable headlines are

• How to
• Numbers
• Audience Referencing, and
• Specificity

Four of the 10 headlines use the word “how.” (The post you’re reading now includes “How” also!)

Nine of the 10 include numbers.

Five of the 10 use a form of the word “You.”

And specificity is apparent in the headlines like “save 60 minutes” (instead of the broader “an hour”) and “got 4x faster.”

(Sidenote: A few of the other psychological headline types on this list we choose to avoid, perhaps due to our blog’s voice and tone or based on experience. Questions, for example, is one we seldom use, perhaps based a bit on Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”)

3. Smooth-sounding formula

As part of our idea process, we sometimes come up with articles based solely on a headline that sounds really cool. (We did this with the Delightfully Short Guide to Social Media ROI, which was borne from  Zen Habits’s The Delightfully Short Guide to Reading More Books.)

Some headlines just seem destined for clicks.

This is the case with a few of the eternally clickable headlines on the list. And if you break it down far enough, you’ll see that a lot of these great headlines are based on a formula.

______ for Beginners

Everything I Wish I Knew About ____ When I Started

The Origin of the _________

How to Get Your First ________

Little-Known Secrets of _______

There’re tons more headline formulas that have been proven to work

4. Targeted for our audience

We benefit greatly from being a social media blog that shares our content on social media. There’s a built-in interest already there for a large majority of our content.

Looking at some of the top headlines here, four of them reference Twitter.

Makes sense that the Twitter audience would find these relevant and click-worthy.

So what might you take away from this if you aren’t writing about Twitter tips and strategies (which I assume is a good portion of you)? I think there’s still something to be said for targeting your audience’s interests, problems, and needs.

For instance, we know that the Buffer community is super interested in ways to work smarter. So we have a pretty good feeling about headlines that tell you how to save time online.

Can you think of similar passions for your audience?

How We Find Our Best-Performing Headlines

Inside Buffer’s new sortable analytics

One of my favorite ways to optimize the social media marketing we do at Buffer (and to keep our Buffer queue full) is to discover the posts that have done best in the past.

And there’s a super easy way to do this in the Buffer dashboard.

Using the new sortable analytics, I can sort all the posts that have been shared to the Buffer queues, sorting by metrics like clicks and retweets, then filtering by date (past 7 days, past 30 days, or even a custom timeframe).

When I do this for the past 30 days, here are the top results that I get:

(It’s also super easy to click to re-buffer these top-performing posts, tweak them, and share them again.)

Why we share the same blog post multiple times

Reposting your best content to social media is a strategy that we’ve been following for quite some time now. It’s one that big brands like Moz use and recommend.

And though I help with this strategy in sharing to Buffer, I still find myself needing a reminder to implement this with my personal brand. There’re so many great reasons why. Here are the big three.

1. Reach people who did not see your tweet the first time.

Each tweet is only seen by a small percentage of your followers—in some cases, a super small percentage.

At Buffer, 4 percent of our followers (12,000 out of 300,000) see any given tweet.

(And this percentage is likely inflated by the impressions from other people retweeting a tweet.)

That leaves 288,000 people who did not see a Buffer tweet the first time we sent it out. Potentially, we could send the same exact tweet 25 times without anyone seeing it twice.

2. Reach your new followers

By the time you’ve tweeted out something to your followers, you very well may have gained new ones—new ones with little to no prior history of what you’ve shared before.

For instance, we average about 450 new followers each day on the Buffer Twitter account. In one week’s time, that’s 3,150 new people who might be interested in content we’ve shared in the past.

3. Reach followers in multiple time zones

Guy Kawasaki has a great quote about the time zone rationale (it works for people with varying social media habits, too, like a couple of San Francisco-based followers who check Twitter at different times of day).

We provide content repeatedly because people live in different time zones and have different social media habits.

Followerwonk is a great tool for finding out the geographic location of your Twitter following. Here’s what the map looks like for my personal account. It’s quite spread out, similar to that of Buffer’s, which is why we tend to share on a 24/7 social media schedule.

I’d love to ask: How does this resharing feel to you, as a member of the audience? I’m keen to understand things fully from your perspective, too, on whether or not this feels too self-promotional or out of line with what you picture in a social media strategy.

Takeaways

Thanks for letting us share a bit about some of our most click-worthy Twitter headlines. It’s been neat to see the kind of response that these posts get. What it seems they have in common:

1. Aspirational tone or message (“work smarter and save time!”)
2. How to, Numbers, “You,” and Specifics
3. Tried-and-true headline formula
4. Catered to the interests, problems, and needs of our audience

I hope you can find some inspiration here for any headline experiments you’re eager to try.

What do you notice from this list of click-worthy headlines? What stands out? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

 Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, Unsplash, Death to the Stock Photo

The post The Eternally Clickable Headlines of Buffer (And How to Write and Find Your Own) appeared first on Social.