Computers Internet – My Blog

9 New Instagram Features and How to Use Them

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:43:55 +0000

From AI stickers to Broadcast Channels, here’s everything you need to know about Instagram’s latest features, with a step-by-step guide to using them all.

With 2.9 billion active users, Facebook is the most popular social network of them all – and short-form video is the hottest content format on the block. So a Reels feature was an inevitable addition.

As a creator or a brand, diving into Facebook Reels could be a game-changer, getting a fresh set of eyes on your content with content you can repurpose from your current efforts. We reckon publishing Reels on Facebook is the fastest way to grow your audience. Read on to see how. 👇

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Start scheduling Facebook Reels in Buffer →

What are Facebook Reels?

Facebook Reels are like their Instagram counterparts — trend-focused, short-form videos that use different unique editing tricks, sounds, and filters to engage viewers. Here's a breakdown of their core attributes:

Duration: Ranging from three to 60 seconds, these snippets are perfect for quick, engaging storytelling.
Format: Designed for mobile, they boast a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio, catering to on-the-go viewing.
Creative tools to unleash your creativity with various features:
- Music
- Text overlays
- Filters
- Stickers
Accessibility: Reels live in a dedicated section on your Facebook app, beckoning the scrolling enthusiasts for a visual treat.

With a balance of brevity and engagement, Facebook Reels provide a fresh avenue for content creators and brands to show off their content.

Harnessing Facebook Reels for audience growth

Data about Facebook engagement from January 2023 reveals that the average Facebook post gets an engagement rate of .07 percent.

For context, the average link post gets just 0.03 percent engagement. It suggests that video content is one of the best ways to boost your engagement rate.

Increased engagement signals the Facebook algorithm, propelling its content recommendation engine. Thus, a single highly engaging piece of content can be just the jumpstart you need to draw attention to your other content.

What’s more, the potential ad audience for Facebook Reels is 697.1 million people.

To put that in perspective, Reels sits way above other Facebook products like Marketplace and Instant articles, but still below Stories:

Stories: 1.25 billion users
Facebook Marketplace: 495.7 million users
Instant a

Bootstrapping a $30 Million Dollar Company: The Strategies Behind Our Decade of Growth

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:43:53 +0000

Peek behind the curtain at the strategies that helped this bootstrapped founder grow a multi-million dollar company.

When it comes to curating a cohesive brand and an aesthetic Instagram feed, templates are a marketer/creator/business owner’s best friend.

Because, let’s be honest: who has a brilliant designer or video editor on hand to expertly craft every single post, Story, or Reel you need to grow on Instagram?

Here at Buffer, we’re a small Marketing team that doesn’t! We do have a brilliant designer who lends a hand for launches and special projects, but many of the Instagram posts, Stories, carousels, and Reels you’ll find on Buffer’s Instagram feed were created with the help of templates.

In this article, I’ll unpack Buffer’s go-to template sources, plus my personal favorites. Even if you’re a graphic design or video-editing novice, this template list will have you creating beautiful Instagram content in a couple of minutes.

Instagram templates for feed posts, carousels, and Stories

Free Instagram templates for Stories, feed, and carousel posts are relatively easy to come by these days. The sites and platforms below are all worth adding to your content creation toolkit.

1. Canva

How could I not start with Canva? Canva is a lightweight, easy-to-use design and video editing tool to help you create designer-quality creatives. It’s usually Buffer’s first port of call for Instagram post templates.

Canva has a library of thousands of eye-catching templates for Instagram Stories, feed posts, and even Reels. You can even filter through options for square and portrait templates for your feed if you need something specific. Gradients, font pairings, stickers, infographics… Canva is a digital marketing dream tool.

Some social media templates are only available as part of their premium plan (those with the little crown icons on the top right corner), but there are thousands of great free options.

Bonus: there’s even a handy Buffer-Canva integration you can use to schedule your Canva-ma

Fancy a Challenge? 2x Your Growth in 2 Weeks with the AI Accelerator

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:43:47 +0000

Fancy a challenge?

Why not try to double your growth in two weeks?

That’s the goal of the AI Accelerator, Buffer's bespoke video-based course that hundreds of creators and social media pros have joined.

What’s the AI Accelerator?

This isn't just

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At Buffer, we’ve long aimed to default to transparency, a practice we believe helps eliminate inequality and gives everyone a greater chance of succeeding. Financial transparency is especially close to our hearts, which is why we’re proud to share Open Books, a series of small business owners giving us a peek inside their books in the spirit of being open about finances as well. Join us as we explore the highs, lows, and hard-won financial lessons that have paved their paths, and discover how you can apply their insights to your own small business journey.

Kat Boogaard’s journey into freelance writing isn’t all that unique: She was working full-time in marketing but yearned for more flexibility, creativity, and control in her work. Reflecting on her past projects and assignments, she noticed that writing was a common thread. So, she quit her full-time job to build a freelance writing business.

Her growth path, however, has been pretty uncommon. For one, she has built a stable and viable business, achieving six figures in revenue every year for the past five years and even bringing in multiple-six-figures in 2021 when she expanded her business with subcontractors. But, she’s also made the intentional decision to scale back over the past couple of years, stopping her work with subcontractors, cutting down client projects to what she could manage on her own, and reducing her revenue by over $100,000.

Below, she shares more about this new direction, the ways that decision has helped her life grow, and her advice for anyone trying to grow as a freelancer—on their own terms.

15+ Tips to Grow On YouTube Shorts

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:55 +0000

Get 16 of the top recommendations with varying levels of ease to apply to growing on YouTube Shorts.

The beauty of short-form video is that it allows anyone to become a creator. With a phone and the Internet, you can start growing a platform for yourself. The other side to this, however, is that the bar for quality has been reduced, and you’ll need to put in extra effort to see meaningful growth.

This is as true for YouTube Shorts as for any other platform. Shorts reduced the barrier to entry for becoming a YouTuber (a highly sought-after profession), and it offers a unique opportunity to engage audiences in a concise yet impactful manner. Shorts also come with their own unique recommendation algorithm that could make your one life-changing video a reality.

But the path to virality, meaningful growth, and monetization is paved with unclear instructions and ever-changing platforms. I did the research, so you don’t have to find the top recommendations with varying levels of ease to apply to growing on YouTube Shorts. Let’s get into it.

1. Optimize the text in your video and on your channel for SEO

Search engine optimization isn't just for blogs and websites; it's crucial for YouTube Shorts as well. The title, description, and tags you use for your Shorts can significantly impact their visibility. Here are some tactics to adopt to help optimize your YouTube Shorts for SEO:

Conduct keyword research to identify relevant and frequently searched terms for your video or niche. Use SEO tools like TubeBuddy or VidIQ to optimize these elements to find high-ranking keywords related to your niche. Or simply type in search terms you think would be used to discover your videos and incorporate what you see in the search bar in your caption, title, and hashtags.
Speaking of hashtags, remember to use at least three per video. It helps the YouTube search engine effectively to categorize your content and make it more discoverable.

Craft a caption that includes your keyword and is intriguing enough to encourage clicks. Test different captions to see which perform best regarding views and engagement.
Consider using captions and transcripts to make your content accessible and to provide additional text that can be indexed by search engines.

Regardless of the platform you’re using it for, SEO is meant to help boost the discoverability of your videos, so you should try each task at least once to se

Monday Social Media News Roundup: Week of October 23rd

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:49 +0000

Get the latest updates in the social media industry and creator economy – with a side of Buffer flavor.

Get the need-to-know highlights from the social media industry that happened the week of October 16-20.

Threads

Facebook Post Display & Branded Content Tags

Threads is integrating with Facebook by displaying posts and testing branded content tags, expanding its reach and advertising potential. Explore Threads' growing interconnectivity with other platforms to amplify your content visibility.

Instagram Profile Tags & Direct Messaging

New features facilitate tagging Instagram users and possibly a unique messaging feature, enriching inter-platform connectivity.

Instagram

"Get Orders" Feature

The new "Get Orders" button on posts offers an additional interaction point for businesses and creators. Use this feature to streamline order processes and enhance customer interaction.

Web Tracking Opt-out

Meta now allows users to prevent Instagram from tracking their web activity, bolstering privacy controls.

Reels Play Bonus Discontinued

The discontinuation of a significant income source via Reels Play Bonus has sparked creators' dissatisfaction.

Link Addit

How I’ve Grown To 6 Figures In 3+ Years As A Content Agency Owner

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:47 +0000

Here are five lessons Laura Martisiute learned along the path of small business ownership

I never thought I’d own a business. I also never thought I’d be able to make a living from writing.

Yet here I am, with a (small) content marketing agency, selling services to companies, including series A startups and tech enterprises, and making a six-figure dollar income each year.

All this because I stumbled onto writing for a living accidentally.

Back in 2015, I was in college and needed a job, but the market was tough, and no one was hiring. One day, I typed into Google “get paid to write” and stumbled on an ad for a site that paid writers $100 for accepted pitches about interesting topics.

When I told my parents I got paid $100 for writing an article online, they were amazed. So was I.

After graduating, I worked in various B2C marketing roles with tourism companies and heritage sites, which meant working alongside digital marketing agencies. I also kept writing, mostly for affiliate marketing agencies, as a side hustle.

But, during my day job, I noticed that quality content (blogs and web copy readers would actually engage with) was missing from most service offerings.

Agencies that were good at providing technical assistance or managing paid channels left clients, like my employers and other businesses we worked with, hanging when it came to content strategy and development.

I kept seeing content being tacked onto a marketing package as an afterthought, something that was typically outsourced to freelancers of variable quality or left up to internal teams that needed more capacity or expertise to deliver results.

This felt like a missed opportunity. After all, most leads consume three to four pieces of content from a vendor before engaging with their sales team.

When I started looking at other businesses' content marketing efforts online, I saw that subpar content seemed to be the norm rather than the exception. In 2020, with the tourism space suffering its worst crisis ever, I decided to start an agency dedicated to fixing that.

Last year, my business made just under $150,000 gross profit after paying its two employees (including me).

Here are five lessons I learned along the way that I wish I had known sooner.

Figure out the nexus between your customers' needs and those of your own

When I started Content Visit

From $400 to $180,000: How This Founder Bootstrapped a Six-Figure Business

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:42 +0000

Meet Rachel Pereyra, who bootstrapped her business from $400 to $180,000. Read all about it in Open Books, a series by Buffer.

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At Buffer, we’ve long aimed to default to transparency, a practice we believe helps eliminate inequality and gives everyone a greater chance of succeeding. Financial transparency is especially close to our hearts, which is why we’re proud to share Open Books, a series of small business owners giving us a peek inside their books in the spirit of being open about finances as well. Join us as we explore the highs, lows, and hard-won financial lessons that have paved their paths, and discover how you can apply their insights to your own small business journey.

Rachel Pereyra began freelancing as a virtual assistant in January of 2020 to earn extra money to help her and her wife pay off their debt and save for a house. By that summer, she had proven she could secure a steady stream of clients and charge enough for her work that she could actually make money working for herself.

Later in 2020 when the pandemic required her to leave her corporate job and care for their children, she started leaning more heavily on freelancing work, and Mastermind Business Services was born. Her consultancy helps scaling agencies optimize their internal processes and tech tools. She has collaborated with over 50 clients during her three years in business, and those clients have achieved remarkable outcomes.

Now the primary breadwinner in her family as her wife changes careers, she doesn’t have the luxury of not being able to bring home the necessary income. This reality has required her to invest as little as possible (she started her company with only a $400 laptop and has bootstrapped her growth at every step). Plus, she’s had to be profitable from the start. Below, she shares exactly how she made it happen.

Years in business: 3

Number of employees: 7 contractors

Location: Austin, Texas, with team members across the U.S. and in Europe and Canada

Initial capital invested: $400

Financial support for business: I have leveraged credit cards and

How to Schedule Posts to Bluesky and Cross-post from Other Platforms

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:32 +0000

This simple shortcut will help you cross-post and schedule posts to Bluesky with your iPhone.

Bluesky is fast emerging as one of the major contenders in the race for the top Twitter (X) alternative — and with good reason.

The new platform is easy to use, it offers a high degree of control over your timeline, and — thankfully, given X recently axed the feature — headlines still pull through with links.

Bluesky, which was created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is a decentralized, invite-only social network built on an open-source protocol. People are flooding to the platform — it hit 1 million users in September 2023. And what with Pebble/T2, another Twitter alternative, closing shop, Bluesky may soon see another spike in popularity.

It makes sense that users are looking to add it to their social media management system — and that having Bluesky as a channel in Buffer is a highly requested feature! Rest assured, we are working on it. You can keep up to date with our progress on that front in our transparent feature request system, Buffer Suggestions.

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If you’re a Bluesky newbie or on the fence about signing up, I recommend checking out our Bluesky beginner’s guide for everything you need to know about the platform.

In the meantime, Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne and Staff Product Manager Brandon Green have been playing around with a pretty nifty iOS app, Shortcuts, and came up with a really simple workaround.

Not only does it cross-post content from another platform to Bluesky (really handy if you’re maintaining a presence on X), but you can also schedule that content with Buffer. We thought it would be helpful to share it here.

Wait, what are Shortcuts?

Shortcuts is an app by Apple that you’ll find preinstalled on your iPhone. In a nutshell, Shortcuts creates a simple way for you to help your apps talk to each other, so you can link various actions together to create shortcuts and automation.

The former are manually triggered in the Shortcuts app, and the latter will happen automatically. Many of them can be used with Siri voice commands, so you don’t even have to touch your phone to set off a chain of events.

Here are some useful, albeit basic, examples:

Take a Break allows you to set an alarm and turn on Do Not Disturb until that alarm goes off.

Tex

5 Tried-and-tested Strategies I’ve Used to Grow to 30K LinkedIn Followers

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:29 +0000

Growing her LinkedIn following helped Aarushi Singh take her consulting business from a $0 startup to a thriving $100,000 yearly. Here’s how she did it.

I may not have Justin Welsh's celebrity status on LinkedIn with half a million followers, but my journey is worth sharing. With just 30,000 engaged followers on LinkedIn, I managed to take my consulting business from a $0 startup to a thriving $100,000 yearly.

I started as a content marketing consultant, leaving behind my nine-to-five corporate engineering job in 2018. My LinkedIn became my business’ lifeline, connecting me with clients and global brands, while giving me the freedom and flexibility to earn more.

While I enjoyed my stint as an engineer at a big corporation, I soon realized it wasn’t for me. I wanted to build something of my own with a flexible schedule and better pay. I wanted the chance to network with industry leaders and work with more prominent brands.

I had dabbled in content marketing, but that moment five years ago was when I started taking freelancing more seriously. It wasn’t long before LinkedIn became my go-to platform for building awareness about my services, finding exciting projects, and networking with potential clients.

It’s been a long journey with lots of trial and error to get to where I am now. There are so many things I wish I had realized sooner — which is why I took all of my core lessons and created this guide to help you build your LinkedIn following more sustainably.

Note: There’s no right or wrong “strategy” to grow your LinkedIn following. What matters most is how sustainable is a strategy for you, not for a hundred other people. Factors such as how much time you can dedicate to LinkedIn, your experience with content creation tools at your disposal, your writing skills, and existing connections play a huge role in your success.

LinkedIn growth tactics that worked for me

There are countless tactics that people swear by — post six times every week, publish a carousel, text, video, everything all at once, comment under at least 50 posts as soon as influencers hit publish, etc.

The problem? It’s unsustainable.

You’re probably going to create content for a couple of days, get overwhelmed by these quantity-first strategies, and abandon your LinkedIn content creation journey. This is especially likely if you’re an introvert or still undecided on whether or not LinkedIn is “right” for you and worth investing time and effort into.

I’ve been there — I’d create a massive Notion database with conte

Introducing Tags: Organize and Categorize Your Content

admin — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 08:25:22 +0000

Organize all of your ideas in one place with Buffer’s new tagging feature. Manage your creative output. Track the success of different types of content. And build a searchable library of content.

In the ever-evolving landscape of content creation, where the competition for attention is relentless, the ability to connect with an audience or foster a thriving community hinges on one crucial aspect: the content itself.

You might know Buffer as a trusty tool for social media scheduling, but what you might not know is that people are creating thousands of content ideas and saving them to Buffer every day. They’re harnessing Buffer to build their own universe of content.

This chart shows the weekly growth in the number of ideas that have been added to Buffer.

These are not just snippets or clever captions waiting to be unleashed; they are seeds of potential, each with the promise of becoming a blog post, a captivating podcast, an engaging YouTube video, a viral Reel, or perhaps even all of the above. With the influx of ideas flooding into Buffer, the need to keep them organized and accessible had never been more pressing.

Enter Tags, a new way to organize your content and manage your creative output.

Using Tags to organize your content

This is the new “Create” space in Buffer, and it’s where your content ideas live. 👇

The content space in Buffer.

As you add more ideas to this space, it can become tricky to locate a specific post. This is where tags come in! See those colorful labels? You can search and filter all your ideas based on the tags you’ve created.

Computers Internet – My Blog

9 New Instagram Features and How to Use Them

What are Facebook Reels?

Harnessing Facebook Reels for audience growth

Bootstrapping a $30 Million Dollar Company: The Strategies Behind Our Decade of Growth

Instagram templates for feed posts, carousels, and Stories

1. Canva

Fancy a Challenge? 2x Your Growth in 2 Weeks with the AI Accelerator

What’s the AI Accelerator?

15+ Tips to Grow On YouTube Shorts

1. Optimize the text in your video and on your channel for SEO

Monday Social Media News Roundup: Week of October 23rd

Meta

Threads

Instagram

How I’ve Grown To 6 Figures In 3+ Years As A Content Agency Owner

Figure out the nexus between your customers' needs and those of your own

From $400 to $180,000: How This Founder Bootstrapped a Six-Figure Business

How to Schedule Posts to Bluesky and Cross-post from Other Platforms

Wait, what are Shortcuts?

5 Tried-and-tested Strategies I’ve Used to Grow to 30K LinkedIn Followers

LinkedIn growth tactics that worked for me

Introducing Tags: Organize and Categorize Your Content

Using Tags to organize your content