I once spent a week speaking at three different conferences that focused on one of the favorite themes of events around the world: how to have … [Read more...]

LinkedIn has proven itself to be a powerhouse for over 500 million professionals looking to network and uncover new career opportunities. The platform has also a hub of activity for marketers looking to land talent, build authority and signal themselves as the go-to pro within their niches. For marketers looking to take full advantage of what LinkedIn has to offer, they should look at LinkedIn advertising not as a matter of “when” or “if,” but rather understand “how” to go about it. After all, advertising on LinkedIn is definitely a … [Read more...]

Every company is a media company these days, and Buffer is no different. We started the Buffer Social blog in January 2011 and since then it has been a key component in the success of the company. We have published more than 1,000 posts—and we’re honored to receive more than 1.5 million visits every month. It’s been a long, challenging journey, though. We first hit one million sessions in a calendar month during March 2015—a full 4 years after launching—and after months of floating around 1.1 to 1.2 million sessions, and struggling to … [Read more...]

What it does Act-on is a relatively new player in the marketing automation space, founded by some of the people behind Amazon’s collaborative filtering based recommendation … [Read more...]

When you launch a new feature, you can put adoption (or lack thereof) in four categories: Users that haven’t heard of the new feature Users that have heard of the new feature but haven’t used it Users that have heard of the new feature, used it once or a few times and stopped Users that have heard of the new feature, used it once and are continually using it Each group of users need to be treated differently. And each group can be learned from to drive more product adoption and help direct future product releases. Here’s how to do it in … [Read more...]

Ever since Instagram changed its algorithm from displaying photos chronologically, to now displaying posts from those that you interact with most, many businesses and influencers have complained about it being significantly harder to gain likes and followers. These two groups of users have a lot at stake whenever Instagram’s algorithm changes, as they both use the platform to generate revenue. On that note, Instagram is the preferred social platform of most influencers, many of whom receive money in exchange for sponsored posts put together for their audiences. … [Read more...]

Hosting a giveaway on your Instagram is one of the easiest ways to increase engagement. But to run a successful one is more challenging and requires some planning. We’ve created a guide on the basics of running an Instagram contest. For this article, we’ll focus specifically on Instagram photo contests that require user participation and entry creation. Among the variety of ways to run an Instagram contest, those that involve user-generated content risk a lower engagement. If customers are tasked with creating a recipe or snapping a photo, they have to be … [Read more...]

In the past, if you wanted to run Snap Ads (Snapchat’s full-screen video ads), you would need to go through one of their ads partners. Now, though, you can create Snap Ads yourself through Snapchat’s new self-serve ads tool, Snapchat Ad Manager. Snapchat has even included a video creation tool in the Snapchat Ad Manager to make creating engaging, awesome-looking vertical videos a breeze. We’re thrilled by the possibilities that Snapchat Ad Manager has brought about for marketers. And we would love to help you get started with creating your very own … [Read more...]

Visits and pageviews are nice. But conversions are all that matter at the end of the day. The trouble, of course, is that these don’t come ‘preloaded’ with each new analytics account. And you can’t get access to historical, legacy data, either. That means when you let days (or weeks) go by without setting up conversion goals properly, you’re going to lose all of that information forever. Key data points that could have helped you to quickly spot new revenue-boosting opportunities or money-saving costs to cut. Fortunately, setting up goal … [Read more...]

Curata overhauled our blog over April and May. Many painstaking hours and dollars later, we have a completely new blog. Two months after relaunch, we’ve seen a boost in blog traffic, decreased bounce rate, and enjoyed faster page loads. Why bother? Redesigning your blog should not only give it a sexy new look, it can improve everything from SEO to blog traffic to click-through rate. According to surveys by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded … [Read more...]