Although my brother and I started our womenswear brand KESTAN as an e-commerce company, the real breakthrough for our online presence came when we opened our first brick-and-mortar store.  Our retail stores succeeded because we were able to deliver an entire brand experience rather than just be content to try and sell products. We were able to create a cohesive visual identity that people loved to surround themselves with. We were able to interact with customers to help them make purchasing decisions, give them styling ideas, and understand more about what they’re looking for to tailor o ..read more

Think nonprofits and Silicon Valley startups have nothing in common? Think again. I started my career working in a nonprofit setting, and now I’m a fractional marketing director for nonprofits. From higher education to arts and literacy organizations, I’ve seen it all.  As a tech writer and editor, I’ve also steeped in the “rocket fuel” of the startup world. From my experience, nonprofits and startups have startling similarities: Both have small teams of employees who wear multiple hats, and both depend on outside funding for operations, whether it's from investors or donors.  One k ..read more

In 2014, making money on social media was a feat for a select few people like travel creator Gabby Beckford (@packslight), who made $2,000 for six Instagram posts in the same year. It wasn’t a viable path for most creators — and there weren’t many options in the first place. Fast-forward a decade, and the landscape of creator monetization has changed completely. Now, it’s not only possible to supplement your regular income with content creation but to dwarf it entirely. Gabby makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from her content, netting nearly $300,000 in 2023. Top Instagram influencers re ..read more

“Work smarter, not harder” has always been one of my favorite phrases. But now that I’ve entered my working-mom-of-a-toddler era, it’s taken on a whole new meaning. I only have so many hours in a day, and if I want to have any semblance of free time, I need to make the most of them.  Enter: these AI productivity tools, all of which help me streamline, automate, and optimize as much as possible. Some of them help me save hours of work, others a few minutes, while some just help me maintain my sanity — it all counts. Every second I save goes toward that glorious hour or two when my work is ..read more

How do you know the number of likes, comments, and shares you’re getting is good enough? Your social media results don’t exist in a silo. To get the full picture, you need to compare your metrics to other businesses that look like yours. This article will delve into social media benchmarks for various industries and platforms. I’ve used data from the following reports: Buffer’s best times to post on social media — which analyzed one million posts sent through Buffer RivalIQ’s 2024 social media industry benchmark report — which analyzed 2,100 from over 14 industries Buffer’s best content for ..read more

I started dreaming of creating a tool for ice facials when I realized there was no easy and accessible tool out there. My mom and I were both obsessed with using cold temperatures to increase cellular turnover, reduce inflammation, and firm the skin, but I hated the experience of having to hold an ice cube in my hands for minutes at a time. I was shocked to find there were no solutions on the market, so asked my partner, Lewis Battersby, if we could use his 3D printer to test some ideas. After a few months of rapid prototyping, we had created something I was pretty happy with, and we were cur ..read more

Books have a way of changing our perspective and bringing new lenses to life and different mindsets to mind — which is why we recently kicked off a quarterly book club within our Customer Advocacy Team at Buffer. Late last year, Åsa Nyström, our VP of Customer Advocacy, introduced us to the book Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara, the former co-owner of legendary New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park.  As an Advocacy team, we had a goal to achieve more hospitable customer support in our everyday interactions, and this ..read more

In our article on the best type of content to post per platform, we discovered something interesting: LinkedIn carousels get the third highest engagement after videos and images. Perhaps more interestingly, we also discovered that LinkedIn is the social media channel where we saw the smallest difference between the various media types. For example, video posts only ranked 0.1 percent higher than photo posts, and photo posts were only 0.4 percent higher than PDF carousels. The timing of this discovery coincided with our introduction of PDF carousel uploads in Buffer, so I thought: why not tes ..read more

Picture this: the perfect idea for a TikTok, Instagram Reel, or YouTube Short strikes. It’s a simple, thought-provoking quote or statement in line with the text-over-simple-clip trend on Instagram and TikTok.  All you need now is the background footage to go with it.  So you hop onto your stock photo site of choice and spend hours scrolling through expensive, too-perfect, generic clips that just won’t work. After a while, you give up — and don’t post anything at all.  It’s a frustrating and all-too-common experience for marketers and creators alike. I can’t tell you how ma ..read more

Whether you’re a consumer or a company leader, it’s hard to go a day without feeling the effects of inflation. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, inflation has been the top concern for small businesses every quarter for the past two years. If you’re a small business owner, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Unfortunately, rising costs are nothing new for my artisan chocolate company, Harlem Chocolate Factory. My team and I dealt with it during Covid, when dairy output went down, and costs went up. We dealt with it a couple of years ago when our packaging man ..read more