Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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Towards the end of 2020, the Buffer engineering team held a two-day hack event where the team explored ideas that aligned with both our personal and company values. Whilst we strive to bring our personal and company values into the things that we build, sometimes it’s good to take a step back and really focus on those things that are important to us. These two days of hacking allowed us to do just that, building out a collection of projects that clearly embedded our values. ❤️Leading up to the days, the team spent some time collating ideas in Trello. Here we discussed ideas, found projects that we wanted to work on and collaborators who we could work with on these projects!
With the projects laid out, we entered the hack-days with a clear vision of what it was we’d each be working on. Overall, a total of 14 projects were built. Some of these have already been shipped, whilst others need some more work or will be left as proof of concepts. Let’s take a dive into these projects and see what the engineering team built!

Emoji skin-tone support
Status: We have shipped this update to our engagement features but it still needs more work before we can add it to our publishing features.Within our publishing and engagement tools, we currently support the ability to select emojis to be inserted into the content input areas.
However, the existing implementation does not support the skin-tone functionality that the emoji ecosystem utilizes. In order to allow individuals to express themselves in the way that they want, this feels like an important aspect of emojis to support.
During hack-days Ana and Hamish from the Publish team took a dive into getting this support added to the Publish Composer. The result looks awesome and adds full support for the emoji skin-tone attribute.
As well as getting this into our Publish Composer, Boris and Sol from the team working on our engagement features added support to this in the composer under the engagement tab. Now, users across both of these areas can utilize emoji skin-tone support.

Hate speech detection
Status: We have not shipped this yet to any of our products, but are exploring the technical details for how we can make it possible.
When it comes to social media scheduling, there can be a lot of responsibility with the content that our users can send out to their networks. When it comes to facilitating this content currently, there is a manual process in place where accounts will be looked into if they breach our policies. David, Mike and Joe took a look to see if there was a way that we could automate some of these checks and prevent users from creating updates that breached certain policies of ours.
For this, David created an endpoint in our API so that clients could check whether textual content contained hateful speech. This was done using HateSonar and Perspective. This endpoint would return a score which would depict whether some text is deemed as offensive or hateful. With this endpoint available, Mike hooked it into the post creation flow for the composer in our publishing tool, meaning that when the user attempts to create an update that may contain hateful or offensive text they will be presented with an error message.
Joe took this same endpoint and hooked it into the snippet creation flow within our publish tool. Now, if a user attempts to create a snippet group that contains offensive or hateful hashtags, an error message will be presented and the group will not be created.

Creating a carbon footprint page
Status: We have not shipped this yet to any of our products, but are exploring the technical details for how we can make it possible.
Two of our charitable contributions last year were for climate focus organizations, so it was to be expected that there would be a project focused on the climate. Gisete, Phil, and Dan took a look at creating a page to display the carbon footprint of the servers that Buffer uses. This page not only shows a graph of the emissions, but also a breakdown of the server emissions, and some calculated equivalents. With this in place, this gives us the data and foundations required to start putting change in place for making our servers greener.

Diversifying campaign color options
Status: We have shipped this update to our mobile publishing features but it still needs more work before we can add it to our web publishing features.
Within our publishing tool, users are able to create Campaigns to hold a collection of upcoming posts. When creating a campaign, a color can be selected to be associated with it, however, this palette of colors did not include the color black. For Campaigns that might be focused around causes for Black people, this is a missed opportunity for inclusion. To fix this, our internal-tools engineer, Mick, added support for the color black in our publishing tool for both web and the Android app. With one of our iOS engineers, Jordan, adding this to the iOS app.

Snippet group suggestions
Status: We don’t have any plans to ship this to our publishing features in the near future, it will remain as a prototype for now.
Currently in our publishing tool, we offer the ability to create groups of hashtags, allowing our customers to re-use collections of hashtags across their posts. Currently they are required to create these groups themselves, so Joe took a look at how we could align some of his values with this feature. He added a new section to the feature that allows users to view a pre-defined collection of hashtag groups. This change allows us to display groups for any current events, allowing us to support these causes and raise the visibility of posts for them.

Fact-checking shared links
Status: We have not shipped this yet to any of our products, but are exploring the technical details for how we can make it possible.In our publishing tool, users have the ability to share external links directly into the composer of our mobile apps. When these links are imported, the composer body is generated based on the content of the provided link. Currently, any links could be shared into the composer, which could allow our users to fall victim to the sharing of false information to their networks. As a solution for this, Prateek and Michael worked on a project that allows us to check the links that are imported into the composer of our publishing tool. This checks whether the link has come from a source known to provide false information and if this the case, the app informs the user before they add the content to their queue.

‘Support Black’ brand badges
Status: We don’t have any plans to ship this to our publishing features in the near future, it will remain as a prototype for now.
Our Shop Grid feature enables brands to present multiple link-in-bio URLs in the form of a shoppable grid. Whilst this feature is used by many different kinds of small businesses, Char wanted to think about having a way for these brands to present their own values directly on their Shop Grid page. Char built out a quick prototype for what this could look like, by adding a Support Black-Owned Brands badge directly into the page. Not only would this allow shops to show support for Black-owned businesses, but it could be easily extended to allow further values to be shown on the page. For example, a brand could show that they are a Black-owned business or that they are carbon neutral business.

Adding alt-text to Facebook and LinkedIn media
Status: This needs more work before we can add it to our publishing features.At Buffer, we use our accessibility statement to not only share our value for accessibility, but also to give us some clear direction of how this is represented within our projects. When it comes to this, it’s not about the accessibility within our own products but also how we can support the accessibility features that are supported by networks that we share content too. Currently our composer supports adding alt-text to Twitter as this was available early in the Twitter API. For hack-days, Amy-Lee added alt-text support to images shared to Facebook and LinkedIn, which is support that was added more recently to the APIs for these networks. With this work in place, alt-text will be available to add to three different networks that we support, helping to make content shared by our publishing tool more accessible.

Adding badges to attached media
Status: This needs more work before we can add it to our publishing features. Within the composer for of our publishing tool, users are able to attach media attachments to be posted to supporting networks. Once these media items are attached, we offer the ability to crop these images but allow for no further customization. To offer some flexibility here and also provide a way for users to express their own values, Andy implemented a sticker feature for the publishing tool’s iOS app. This feature allows users to select a badge/watermark to be applied to an image before being shared to the desired networks.

Accessibility dashboard
Status: This will be shipped soon as an internal tool, but will not be released publicly in the near future.As mentioned earlier in this article, our accessibility statement defines and shares our value for accessibility along with some requirements that we strive for our products to meet. Joe wanted to take a look into how we might be able to monitor our accessibility errors and warnings for our web products, as this could help us to keep track of issues and spot any commonalities across our products. For this, Joe used the pa11y dashboard to spin up an internal service for a collection of pages across Buffer products allowing us to get daily reports of accessibility errors and warnings.

Running a federated social network
Status: We don’t have any plans to ship this, it will remain as a prototype.Our business is built around social networks, these are complex applications that have many different moving parts. One key thing that often arises around these networks are privacy and the control over your data. With this in mind, Eduardo decided to look into creating our own Buffer federated social network, using Plemora to do so. Whilst this is something we could use for retreats and other company gatherings, creating our own internal social network allows us to have control over our own data, as well as exposing us further to more in-depth concepts around social networking.

Theme support for the Safari extension of our publishing tool
Status: This has been shipped and is available for use with our publishing features.
Our publishing tool offers browser extensions that allow users to share the current browser page directly into the composer of that tool, removing the need to manually copy and paste the site URL. For the safari extension, we only supported a single icon theme; meaning that the black Buffer logo was always displayed. When using a dark theme in the browser, this resulted in the icon not being accessible as against the dark background of the browser, this icon was barely visible. To fix this, Andy added support for a light icon for when the dark theme is in use, resulting in an accessible extension icon regardless of the browser theme you are using.
With these 14 projects, the engineering team were able to focus in on our values and explore how they could be represented within our products. As you can see, this has been done in many different ways, along with many different goals being tackled.
I found it really inspiring to see everyone come together and build so many great features in such a short space of time. Whilst we strive to embed our values into our everyday work, it’s refreshing to take that time to step back and really focus in on what’s important to us. This helps us to nurture a pro-active mindset when it comes to the topics, as well as create a space to educate ourselves further in these areas. With this, hack week continues to prove a valuable investment in our engineering team.Do you engage in hack weeks for your engineering team? We’d love to hear what works for you if so! Send us a tweet anytime! And you don’t have hack weeks, it could be worth reflecting on how this time could contribute to your team and product. ❤️

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Many businesses find social media overwhelming — there are so many networks available, and they’re always adding new features for you to learn and integrate into your plan.
If you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts at your disposal, your success depends on creating a simple and sensible strategy that fits your resources and goals.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to develop a social media strategy that’ll not only drive traffic but will also quell that overwhelming feeling you get anytime you open Instagram or Twitter.

What is a social media strategy?
Your social media strategy is your master plan for how you create, post, and engage with your social media content.
It encompasses your social content guidelines, posting cadence, social media marketing campaigns, creative plans, and engagement strategy.

Why You Need a Social Media Strategy
The top three challenges that social media marketers face include reaching their audience, measuring ROI, and reaching business goals.
Crafting a social media strategy can help tackle these challenges and more. Social media strategies also equip you to set goals and guardrails, track their performance, and tweak your benchmarks over time. Without a starting point, you can’t measure what’s working and how to shift your activity to hit your goals.
A social media strategy also helps you set expectations for broader team involvement and get everyone aligned on what they should (and shouldn’t) do on your social networks.

Let’s unpack how to start building a social media strategy from scratch.
1. Define your target audience.
If you haven’t already identified and documented your buyer personas, start by defining the key demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach — age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies and interests, etc.
Consider their challenges and what problems they’re solving daily. Focus on no more than four types of people that represent the majority of your buyers. Don’t get hung up on the exceptions or outliers, or you’ll never get started!
2. Start blogging.
Fresh content is the linchpin of a successful social strategy, so commit to creating new, quality content on a consistent basis. Compile a list of common questions from prospects and commit to addressing these questions with at least one new blog post per week.
3. Create educational content.
Create downloadable content like ebooks, checklists, videos, and infographics that address your buyer’s pains. If your content is truly helpful, people will likely share it on social media and extend your reach.
4. Focus on a few key social channels.
Most startups and small businesses don’t have the bandwidth to establish and sustain a quality social media presence on every single channel. It’s also overwhelming to learn the rules of engagement on a bunch of different networks at one time.
Here’s a video by HubSpot Academy explaining the social channels on which you can post content for your business.

So, start small. Research key networks to learn where your target audience is spending time and focus your effort on building, nurturing, and sustaining a community there before moving on to another channel.
5. Develop a recipe card to guide you.
Social media isn’t an exact science (and doesn’t work the same for every business or industry). To see results for your business, establish a consistent posting and engagement schedule.
Develop a reasonable recipe card — one you can actually stick to and get your team to follow. Set goals for your posting and engagement frequency and hold yourself accountable to following your recipe.
Manage and plan your social media content with our free handy calendar guide and template.
6. Measure your results.
There are countless things to track on your social media channels. Start by looking at how much traffic your social accounts are driving to your website or blog.
Watch your posts to see what people are responding to, and look for trends related to particular topics or keywords that generate more interest than others. Once you get an idea of your average traffic and post performance, set goals for key metrics and keep a scorecard to measure your progress.
Be sure to choose metrics that are easy to gather – if it’s too time-consuming to track, you’ll fall off the wagon! Examples of simple metrics (to start with) include net new fans and followers, number of interactions, and visits to your website from social.
7. Adjust your tactics.
Social media won’t start working overnight. It takes time to build a following, establish your brand, and start seeing results. Experiment a bit to find the right combination of channels, content, and messaging that works for your audience.
Over time, you’ll be able to adjust your recipe card, content, and personas based on the information you’re gathering — which will help you fine tune your strategy and generate more consistent results.

Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media is a multipurpose business asset. It connects you with your audience, and it also promotes your products, services, and brand. Both functions are equally important.
Building a social media strategy for marketing is a bit different than the process we discussed above. How so? For example, your benchmarks and goals may be more specific to metrics you track for other marketing efforts.
When using social media to market your business, ensure the experience on your social networks is a positive, consistent one. All imagery and content on your social media accounts should be consistent with those on your website, blog, and other digital real estate.
Pay close attention to any questions or comments your audience posts, and be quick to address those (as that engagement could make or break a conversion or purchase).
Take a look at these social media marketing examples of what to stop, start, and keep doing in 2021.
Lastly, align the content you post and how you post it with marketing campaigns you’re running on other channels (e.g., email or ads). This brings us to our next section …

Social Media Content Strategy
Content is the crux of any social media strategy. Without content, you can’t engage with your audience, promote your products, or measure performance.
The somewhat fleeting (and brief) nature of social media may lead you to believe that you don’t have to plan its content as much as you do for, say, your emails or blogs. That’s untrue. Social media content may not be as static as your landing pages or blog content, but it’s still equally important for engaging your audience and representing your brand as a whole.
For that reason, you should also have a social media content strategy. This should include:

Posting guidelines and specs for each network on which you’re active (e.g., share GIFs on Twitter but avoid on Facebook)
Target audience nuances per network (e.g., the younger segment of your audience is more active on Instagram than LinkedIn)
Repurposing plans for long-form content from your blog, podcast, e-books, etc.
Who on your team is allowed to post and who’s responsible for engaging followers
The companies, publications, and individuals you’ll repost (and those who you won’t/can’t)

For more on creating a content strategy for social media, here’s a helpful video by HubSpot’s Aja Frost.

Social Media Strategy Templates
Social media is overwhelming; I get it. Starting your strategy from scratch is even more overwhelming, which is why we developed 10 free social media templates to help.
In the free download, you’ll receive:

Scheduling templates for every channel, since social media channels aren’t one-size-fits-all
Complete calendar of hashtag holidays, so you never forget to participate with new, fun content
Social auditing template to track your followers, engagement rates, and more
A social media content calendar to organize campaigns across every channel
A social reporting template to track your monthly social successes
A paid social template to help you manage and optimize your paid budget

Download our free social media template bundle to manage, optimize, and create more social content without sacrificing quality.
Time to Get Social
Still feel like social media is overwhelming? That’s OK; I’m not sure that feeling every fully fades. You can certainly diminish it, though, by leveraging the tips in this guide and the free templates above. Remember: Tackle one social network at a time, prioritize your audience, and focus the content that works. You’ll see results and traffic in no time.

In the SaaS industry, the most successful companies prioritize the retention of their existing customers over the acquisition of new customers. Why? Because SaaS companies charge a monthly subscription, so in order to turn a profit, they need their customers paying them for many months in a row. If they can’t retain their customers for X amount of months, they’ll ultimately lose money by acquiring them.
In content marketing, the same principle applies. Retaining your audience’s attention positively impacts your brand a lot more than merely acquiring attention.
When an audience engages with your content for long periods of time on a consistent basis, they can easily turn into a loyal tribe that’s passionate about your work and recommends your brand to all their friends. In other words, staying laser-focused on retaining attention is actually the best strategy for acquiring new attention because your current customers are providing so much word-of-mouth marketing — it’s like a flywheel.

On YouTube, you retain attention by attracting subscribers to your channel. Subscribers are your most loyal fans and made a public commitment to your brand, content, and values. They’re also most likely to be fervent brand evangelists.
In regard to benefiting your YouTube channel, subscribers are crucial because YouTube will send them notifications about your new videos and feature your videos on their homepage. This means they’ll see your videos more frequently, which will help you generate more engagement.
Subscribers also watch twice as much video as non-subscribers, so the more subscribers you have, the more watch time your videos will accumulate, and the more likely YouTube will rank them higher on search and feature them in the related section.
Additionally, YouTube keeps track of the number of viewers who subscribe to your channel right after watching one of your videos. So if one of your videos generates a lot of new subscribers, they’ll reward it with higher rankings and more features in the related section.
To help you grow your YouTube subscription, we’ve fleshed out these strategies that will help you retain attention on the video platform — and not just acquire it.
1. Craft amazing content.
Today, we work in an industry where a lot of people prioritize gaming the system over crafting the best content possible. Fortunately, in regard to their algorithm, YouTube has caught on to this hollow tactic. Their algorithm rewards engagement instead of using only vanity metrics like views and clicks, so creators are incentivized to produce videos that their audience actually enjoys watching.
To craft the most engaging videos for your YouTube channel, consider measuring your videos’ performance against engagement metrics, like watch time, average watch percentage, average view duration, audience retention, and average session duration. Then, analyze this data to figure out which topics and videos generate the most engagement. Once you pinpoint these videos, you can solely focus on creating the content that viewers are most likely to engage with, helping you rake in more subscribers.
2. Use playlists to increase engagement.
Placing your videos in playlists is an extremely effective way to organize your videos in a digestible fashion. They help your viewers easily consume videos about their favorite topics and prompts them to keep watching your content.
One way to get your viewers to watch the majority of your playlists is by starting your playlists with the videos that have the highest audience retention rate and ending them with the videos that have the lowest audience retention rate.
Even better, you could create a binge-able series or show and place entire seasons of it in a playlist. And just like your favorite Netflix show, your playlists can entice your viewers to watch entire seasons of your series, subscribe to your channel, and get excited for your show’s next season.
3. Add a subscription CTA to the end of your videos.
It seems obvious, but adding a subscription CTA to the end of your videos is one of the best ways to generate more YouTube subscribers. After your viewers watch your entire video, they’ll determine if they want to keep watching more of your videos, so to maximize your subscriber growth using CTAs, consider keeping them at the end.
Additionally, if you want more subscribers, just ask. At the end of your video when you include a CTA, ask your viewers to subscribe. This reminds them that you have more exciting content they’ll want to watch.
4. Optimize your videos.
To attract subscribers to your YouTube channel, you first need to be able to get found on YouTube. To start ranking, consider optimizing your videos and channel for popular search queries by placing relevant keywords in your videos’ titles, tags, descriptions, SRT files (which are transcriptions), video files, and thumbnail files.
You should also check out the most popular queries guiding viewers to your videos, which you can find on YouTube’s Search Report. If these queries are slightly different than your video’s topic, consider updating your video to fill these content gaps and adding these keywords to your metadata. If there’s a stark difference between your topics and the queries guiding viewers to your videos, consider making brand new videos about these popular queries.
5. Create beautiful thumbnails.
Another factor that can affect your search ranking on YouTube, and in turn, your subscriber growth are your videos’ thumbnails. Since a video’s click-through rate is one of the most important ranking factors in YouTube’s search algorithm, especially during its first hour on the platform, an eye-catching thumbnail can make a huge difference in ranking number one for a query and not ranking at all.
If your video has an ordinary or sub-par thumbnail, though, it won’t persuade anyone to click through, prompting YouTube to deem the video irrelevant and decide not to rank it in their search results or distribute it through the “Recommended Videos” feed.
To create a striking thumbnail, consider including a talking head. People are naturally drawn to human faces because it’s an ingrained survival mechanism to help us quickly gauge someone’s emotions and determine if they’re a friend or foe. Also, consider contrasting the colors of your thumbnail’s foreground and background to really make it pop.
6. Interact with your audience.
One of the main best practices to retain and acquire new YouTube subscribers is to interact with your audience. You should reply to every comment if you can, even if it’s just liking it. When a viewer watches your videos and scrolls to see your content, they’ll be excited to see that you engage with your audience and have created a community. In fact, it might make them want to join your community and get them to subscribe.
Interacting with your audience will also generate word of mouth and engagement. The more that your audience engages with you, the higher you’ll rank, and the more people will find your content.
7. Promote your videos in your other content.
Whether you have a blog or other social media platforms, it’s important to promote your YouTube videos in your other content. When you post a video, you should also promote it on social media to get your audience to watch it.
Additionally, if you have a blog, you can embed your YouTube videos as complementary content. This will help you increase your views, and tap into the audience you’ve already created. If someone follows you on Instagram, or reads your blog, they’re probably interested in what you have to say. Don’t be afraid to cross-promote on other channels to get more subscribers.
8. Release videos consistently.
One important factor in getting YouTube subscribers that isn’t discussed as much in the influencer industry is trust. When you’re creating content, your audience needs to trust you. They have to trust that you’re going to release quality content, consistently. Otherwise, why would they subscribe?
To build this trust, it’s important that your audience can rely on you. You should release your videos on a consistent basis. This doesn’t mean you need to value quantity over quality. Whatever your publishing schedule is doesn’t matter as much as being consistent with it. Whether you post once a week or twice a month.
9. Be creative.
As we mentioned above, when you’re creating YouTube videos, it’s important to optimize your content and keep in mind what your audience is searching for. However, that doesn’t mean all your videos need to be tied to a keyword.
Sometimes it’s okay to stray and just produce creative content that’s not necessarily supported by keywords. This content can be trendy, or rely on thought leaders. Regardless, don’t be afraid to use content that strays from the organic search strategy. This will help create buzz and hopefully convert viewers into subscribers.
10. Partner with other channels.
When the influencer industry began, brands recognized that they could leverage other people’s audience to market or promote their products. The same principles apply in YouTube. If you partner with other YouTube creators, you can use each other’s audience to promote your channel.
If you do this, make sure you choose channels that align with your audience’s interests, wants, and needs. It might not make sense, for instance, for a B2B company to parter with a B2C company. Your audiences should be similar enough that someone who subscribes to their channel might also be interested in your channel.
11. Make an engaging channel trailer.
After watching an engaging or interesting YouTube video, a viewer might click on your profile to see what your channel is about. In this short time period, you need to close the sale. One of the first things viewers see when they click on a channel is the trailer video. That’s why it’s important to create an engaging, fun channel trailer.
With this trailer, you can get a viewer to go from a casual viewer to a subscriber. In your trailer video, make sure you give your elevator pitch. Why should someone subscribe to your channel? What kind of content will they see?
12. Run YouTube advertising campaigns.
An oldie but a goodie. To promote your YouTube channel, run paid advertising campaigns. You can run banner or display ads promoting your channel across platforms. This will help you get the word out about your channel, get more views, rank higher, and hopefully get a few subscribers as well.
13. Produce subscriber only content.
You know how marketers create lead magnets to entice readers or viewers to download a piece of content? To get more YouTube subscribers, apply the same principle here. You can create specific lead magnetics to get people to subscribe.
For instance, perhaps every subscriber gets a free ebook. Or maybe it’s a template. Whatever it is, think of what will be helpful to your audience and might get them to subscribe to get it.
14. Pick a niche.
As with all content you produce, your YouTube videos should be highly targeted toward your audience. Pick a niche and a theme, and stick with it. While you might have a broad theme, you can create smaller subtopics and create several videos for those topics. Think of it like the pillar/cluster model for blog writing. While your blog will focus on one niche, like marketing, there are several pillar topics that you cover and cluster topics as well.
Using this model will help you create valuable content consistently. It’ll be easier to come up with targeted, personalized video ideas for your audience if you know what they want to see.
15. Know your audience.
Again, this is a classic marketing tip. On any channel you’re creating content on, you need to know your audience. For YouTube, think about whether your audience wants to watch long or short videos. This might vary by industry, so do some research to see what type of YouTube videos and what format your audience is looking for.
How to See Your Subscribers on YouTube
To see your YouTube subscribers, all you need to do is log on to your account, click your profile photo in the top right, and click “Your Channel.” From there, you should be able to see how many subscribers you have underneath your channel name.
It’s important to continue tracking this number as you’re trying to grow your YouTube channel. Now, let’s get into the discussion about buying YouTube subscribers and why you should never do it.
Buying YouTube Subscribers
First and foremost, let’s start with the fact that you should never buy YouTube subscribers. To start, it’s against the Terms of Service with YouTube, so your account will likely be suspended or terminated if you’re caught.
Second, buying YouTube subscribers will ultimately end up hurting your channel regardless of if you’re caught or not. Bought subscribers aren’t going to engage with your content, and after maybe one video, they won’t watch it either. Having a million subscribers doesn’t matter if only 50 people are actually watching the videos and engaging with your content. Those types of numbers are major red flags both for YouTube, but also for your average viewer.
Similar to the best SaaS companies, the top YouTube channels focus on building a subscriber base that can’t get enough of their videos and watches them on a consistent basis. Retaining attention has always been imperative to successful content marketing. Now, it’s time we actually prioritize it over acquiring as many darting eyeballs as possible.