Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread

As the New Year approaches, many of us find ourselves in a reflective mood. And that’s exactly how JotForm founder, Aytekin ‏Tank, felt as 2017 was drawing to a close.

As he walked along the Embarcadero, one of the liveliest and most scenic areas in San Francisco, looking back on the year, he was a little zoned out to everything happening around him. Meditative. Introspective. Contemplative.

He had many things to celebrate: JotForm had grown to a team of more than 130 people across the globe, it had more than 3.2 million users and its revenues continued to climb every month. It’s also worth noting that all of this happened without taking a dollar in outside funding — a not-so-common story in Silicon Valley these days.

But despite all the good news, there was something that didn’t quite sit right with him.

“Our competitors were super loud on the internet and their user numbers weren’t even close to ours,” he explained to me. “They were announcing one investment round after another, ending up on top of TechCrunch, and we were just quietly going about our business.”

During these moments of reflection, Aytekin realized that, like his competitors, he also had a story to tell.

So he decided to do just that — share his story. But in his own unique way.

Building a brand through stories

The first order of business for Aytekin was simple:

Write stories to share the JotForm journey.

With autonomous teams around him , he was able to dedicate his time to whatever tasks he felt would impact the business the most, so going all-in on content was an easy decision for him.

His first post — How NOT following my dreams enabled me to build a startup with 3.2 million users — was published in a popular Medium Publication, The Startup, and reached over +50K pageviews almost overnight.

His second post — Time off or the top of TechCrunch? — was equally as successful.

“I published these stories on December 18th and 26th respectively”, he explained. “Given their traction and how they resonated with a huge audience, I made my mind up. I was going to get serious about writing in 2018.”

Aytekin had found his niche.

His authentic, honest stories resonated with startup enthusiasts and he decided to write at least two posts per week throughout 2018 to share his journey as founder and CEO of JotForm.

Embracing Twitter: A $24,098 Twitter ads experiment

After his initial success on Medium, Aytekin was keen to share JotForm’s story across multiple channels in order to reach new audiences.

In July 2018, he decided to experiment with Twitter. Specifically, he was curious:

1. If Twitter could be a great platform to repurpose content
2. How Twitter ads could help him amplify his content.

After all, Twitter and blogging aren’t really too different:

“Apart from its character limit, Twitter isn’t any different when it comes to sharing your authentic voice,” he explained. “It’s blogging in 280 characters.”

As a platform, Twitter may not have changed too much since over the years — except increasing the character limit from 140 to 280 characters.

But what has changed significantly is the way people use the platform.

Twitter used to feel almost like an RSS feed, full of people sharing links and hashtags, trying to hijack every ounce of attention possible. But now, as Nathan Bashaw pointed out, things are changing:

Interesting example of how internet culture has evolved:

In the early days of Twitter, people used to just share links and headlines all the time. That basically never happens anymore. Now you have to say something in your own voice when you share something.

It’s better.

— Nathan Bashaw (@nbashaw) May 11, 2018

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Some of the best performing tweets nowadays are those that tell authentic stories.

For example, Rodolphe Dutel’s recent tweet about workplace culture really resonated with his audience (and beyond), picking up 31,265 retweets and 134,655 likes.

Dear tech companies,

Employees don’t need ping pong tables or beer fridges at work.

Employees need flexibility to do their best work and enjoy life. For instance, working remotely.

Please offer trust, not toys.

— Rodolphe Dutel (@rdutel) September 15, 2018

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Would it have been as successful if Rodolphe had simply shared an article link and headline? Probably not.

Kicking off the experiment

Having seen various tweets and threads succeed like Rodolphe’s, Aytekin set out to reverse engineer a “viral” tweet of his own.

The plan was simple:

Repurpose a successful Medium post into a Twitter thread and boost it with Twitter ads to test the limits of Twitter as a platform to spread Aytekin and JotForm’s message. 

In order to craft the Twitter thread, Aytekin used his Medium analytics for inspiration:

With this data, he was able to see which articles had resonated most with his audience and tell a story that he was sure would connect with people on Twitter.

He chose to create a Twitter thread based on his post entitled: ‘Don’t listen to those productivity gurus: why waking up at 6am won’t make you successful’.

Here’s a link to the thread:

1/ Don’t listen to those productivity gurus.

 Waking up at 6am won’t make you successful.

A thread

— Aytekin (@aytekintank) July 16, 2018

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The results: 17 million impressions

The aim of this experiment was to test the limits of the Twitter algorithm, and the power of Twitter ads, so Aytekin decided to spend as much as possible on this ad: $24,098 in total.

The tweet generated 17,177,432 impressions on Twitter.

Here are the results in full:

Aytekin didn’t jump right in and spend $24,000 overnight. In fact, when the experiment started, the plan was to spend a maximum of $5,000.

But as the tweet began to take off, the budget was raised accordingly.

“We started this experiment by saying we wouldn’t exceed $5K in spend,” he explained. “But we kept a close eye on the Cost Per Engagement and Impressions, and raised budget accordingly.”

As the advert was seeing super high engagement rates (over 20 percent at times):

And low Cost Per Engagement:

Aytekin continued to ramp up the spend until results started to diminish. In the end, the experiment ran for over a month in total (between July 15 – August 24).

Due to the high engagement, the thread also received plenty of organic reach on Twitter.

Out of 17 million impressions, 4.7 million were organic — so in other words, 27.4 percent of reach was free vs 72.6 percent paid.

Some key takeaways from this experiment follow…

Lessons learned from this Twitter experiment

1. Twitter is a great place to repurpose content

If you’re creating content of any form: videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc, repurposing it across multiple channels is a great way to get the most bang for your buck.

But repurposing doesn’t just mean copying and pasting a link over to Twitter.

If you want to be successful, you need to think about how you can tell each story natively to the platform you’re publishing on.

For this experiment, Aytekin could have simply shared a tweet linking to his blog post and boosted it, but I’m sure that wouldn’t have performed anywhere near as well as the Twitter thread.

By using a format native to Twitter, Aytekin was able to share his story in a way that Twitter users would respond to and be happy to engage with.

2. A Twitter thread can help you to achieve multiple goals at the same time

Impressions and engagement are awesome — especially when you’re quite new to the content marketing game.

But when you use a Twitter thread, you’re able to feature multiple types of content within your tweets and achieve various goals.

For example, in the fifth tweet in the thread Aytekin included a link back to the original article on Medium:

This tweet received more than 1.1 million impressions and over 35,000 clicks, helping to drive traffic back to the original post on Medium.

The sixth tweet in the thread mentioned @JotForm and 4,346 people clicked from this tweet to JotForm’s profile to learn more about the business:

Aytekin also picked up 5,752 followers from this thread.

When it comes to planning an experiment like this of your own, try to think about the goals you’d like to achieve:

• If it’s all about impressions and engagement, you could tell the whole story on Twitter.
• If you want to drive traffic, add a link back to your website.
• To increase your following, @ mention your profile.

Remember: It’s important to tell a great story in a native format, so ensure you use your first few tweets to get people hooked into your narrative before including any links.

3. Twitter is a great place to start a conversation

With any highly shared tweet, you’ll always get a few trolls pop up here and there, but if you look past this, you’ll realize that Twitter is still an incredible place to start a conversation and build relationships.

Following Aytekin’s thread, he received plenty of questions about JotForm and how the business operates. This enabled him to build new relationships with people he previously wouldn’t have reached.

So, do Twitter ads really work?

This experiment was designed to test the limits of Twitter ads and the results speak for themselves:

• Over 17 million impressions
• 35,000 visits to the original article
• 5,752 followers for Aytekin
• 4,346 profile views for @JotForm

But that’s not to say everything was perfect.

Due to the way Twitter ads work there’s no real way to tell exactly how many unique people saw the ad and many people reached out to Aytekin to say they’d seen the ad multiple times.

And for every great conversation started by this thread, there was another slightly negative reaction. It seems that some Twitter users don’t quite accept ads in their feed like they do on Facebook or Instagram, where ads are more ingrained within the platforms.

Overall though, Aytekin sees the experiment as worthwhile:

“Even though the initial cost was high, the 5,000 followers we gained from this experiment are permanent,” he explained.

“Every time I publish a new post, I get clicks, likes, retweets and comments from these followers. So the results are compounding over time. I can’t be sure if they will become long-term, highly-engaged audience members, but they seem to stick around for now.”

And the great thing is that you can replicate this experiment yourself with a budget of any size.

Simply take a piece of content that’s been successful for you on another channel:

• A highly-viewed Facebook video.
• One of your top podcast episodes.
• Your #1 blog post.
• A copy of your email newsletter.

And repurpose that content into a succinct story on Twitter.

Even if you don’t want to invest any budget in it, repurposing content to Twitter is a great way to connect with your audience and share your stories to another platform.

Have you used Twitter ads? Do you repurpose content from other platforms to Twitter? I’d love to chat about your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

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Thank Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread for first publishing this post.

How Ahrefs and Buffer Drive 300K+ Sessions Per Month with Evergreen Content and Social Media

• Learn how we drive the growth of our blog here at Buffer using free, organic traffic strategies.
• Understand how to amplify blog content by reverse engineering social media videos that your audience will love.
• See how we generated more than 30,000 clicks to to our content using paid acquisition channels, and how we optimize ads to lower CPC while simultaneously increasing CTR.

Building your website traffic in 2018 is no easy task.

Today, businesses are faced with an ever-increasing amount of online content as well as ongoing changes from search engines such as Google, and constant algorithm updates from platforms like Facebook.

But, if you’re in a competitive industry that is dominated by established sites, all is not lost.

You can still get tons of website traffic with a resourceful content marketing strategy that revolves around producing quality, evergreen pieces of content.

We recently teamed up with Tim Soulo, head of marketing and product strategy at Ahrefs, to discuss what the most successful businesses are doing to generate quality website traffic in 2018.

Prefer video? Check out our webinar below:

Generating quality website traffic

Did you know that more than 90 percent of website pages generate no organic search traffic from Google? In fact, if you look closely, less than 1 percent of website pages drive the majority of organic traffic online:

That’s why it’s critical to have a content strategy in place that incorporates well-researched, evergreen topics that will drive long-term traffic to your website.

The Buffer blog, for example, gets about 1.3 million visits every month, and more than 80 percent of our website traffic comes from people searching for social media marketing topics on Google and finding our blog posts. This 80 percent is also known as organic traffic and is the most scalable and reliable traffic source for most websites.

We achieved this with having only two content writers for most of the past seven years. If we can do it, you can, too!

Here’s how we approach traffic growth:

Write about evergreen topics and promote them regularly

This first chart shows the traffic of most blog posts written nowadays. The blog post gets a nice spike of traffic from social media and email on the day of publishing. But the traffic fades away over time because the blog post doesn’t rank well on Google and isn’t being promoted on marketing channels anymore.

Now, compare that chart with this second one:

This blog post also had a nice spike of traffic on the day of publishing. But the traffic didn’t drop over time. In fact, it continues to grow and grow. After three years, this blog post has been viewed more than two million times.

There are several ways to generate evergreen content ideas, but Soulo recommends two proven tactics to consistently increase your success rate.

1. Find popular search terms

Using a tool like the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, you can search for a single word or phrase related to your product or service:

Not only will you be able to view the search volume around the term entered, you’ll also be able to view all related keywords and search volume – providing you with even more content ideas.

2. Research your peers and competitors

Another way to generate keyword and content ideas is by research your peers and competitors.

We particularly like this strategy because it helps to provide even deeper insights into the exact pages other businesses in your industry are ranking for. In other words, you can discover exactly what problems and challenges potential customers are trying to solve.

Ahrefs Site Explorer provides you with an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL:

Of course, you should never rely on organic search volume alone to help generate evergreen content ideas for your website or blog, but performing the two steps above is one of the best places to start when planning your content for the month, quarter, or year.

“It’s all about studying. Studying what people search for in terms of the topic that you are targeting. If there are a lot of searches, you might want to create an article that would cover most of them. If there aren’t a ton of searches around a particular topic, then there isn’t much opportunity to have your page rank for several keywords and bring you a healthy amount of search traffic.”

Tim Soulo (@timsoulo)
Head of Marketing, Ahrefs

Besides choosing the right topics to write (through keyword research) and promoting the blog posts regularly (which you’ll learn more below), we also consistently update our blog posts.

Updating and relaunching your blog posts

Another thing we do is to regularly update our old blog posts to ensure that they are still relevant and useful to our readers.

In the social media space, many things, such as social media image sizes, can change frequently. Many of the blog posts that we write would no longer be helpful to our readers if the information is outdated.

Updating your old blog posts not only keeps your content relevant to your readers but it can also help you rank better on Google and get more sustainable traffic. For example, when we updated our social media analytics tools blog post last year, the number of daily page views more than doubled!

Here’s what we did with that blog post:

1. Update the content: We added new tools, moved dysfunctional tools, and updated screenshots.
2. Fine-tune the writing: We re-wrote certain parts to make them read better, added a section on what’s social media analytics, and added anchor tags to make navigation easier.
3. Relaunch the blog post: Then we updated the published date within WordPress and promoted the blog post on social media and via our email list.

“A good way to look at generating sustainable traffic (or organic traffic) is to think of it as creating helpful and relevant content for your target audience. What topics are your audience always searching for? Write a blog post to help answer their questions. Are your blog posts becoming outdated? Update the content so that your audience will still find it useful.

We have a blog post that goes into more details about how we grew our readership to over a million visits per month. If you are interested in learning more about the intricacies of SEO and generating organic traffic, I would recommend following Ahref’s blog and Moz’s Whiteboard Friday.”

Alfred Lua (@alfred_lua)
Growth Editor, Buffer

But even with the most quality content in the world, potential customers won’t visit your website unless they know the content is there.

That’s where social media, particularly video and advertising, can help boost the results of your evergreen content strategy above.

Here’s how.

Amplifying content success with social media video

Video is one of the most compelling ways to reach your audience because video is the preferred way people consume information in 2018 and will be for the foreseeable future.

Here is a simple formula for amplifying the success of your content and boosting website traffic.

1. Create video topics from what works

Video is not a whole new type of marketing  – video is a way to amplify your existing marketing strategy.

Start by sorting your most visited blog posts or pages from the previous 90 days in Google Analytics. To access this information, head to Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages:

Sorting by Pageviews gives you a precise look at what people are most interested in learning about from your business. It’s a good indication of what sorts of content will make for an engaging video topic.

Next, we create a list of possible video topic ideas based on our most popular website content in Excel:

Feel free to “make a copy” of the above Excel spreadsheet template for your own use!

This strategy has helped us create well-liked videos such as this and this on social media as well as drive additional website traffic (traffic we would not have gotten without video content).

2. Create video topics from scratch

If you don’t have a ton of existing content to amplify, that’s alright! You can still drive traffic to your website by creating compelling video content ideas from scratch.

There are lots of great (free and paid) tools available that will help you to uncover popular topics. Here are two of our favorites:

• BuzzSumo

You can use BuzzSumo to find the most shared content from any URL – instantly allowing you to determine what content has worked for your peers and competitors. You can also find the most shared content for any topic.

For example, let’s say we were interested in driving website traffic based on the topic of social media marketing. We’d simply enter that search term into BuzzSumo and the results would look something like this:

Discovering relevant topics using search terms and website URLs are my favorite way to use BuzzSumo.

• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Another great way to generate a list of video ideas to drive quality traffic to your website is with a keyword tool such as Ahref Keywords Explorer.

Keywords explorer can allows you to identify thousands of keyword and topic possibilities in a matter of seconds (and which topics are most popular based on search volume!)

For example, let’s say you’re interested in driving website traffic focused on healthy juices. Simply enter your search term into Keywords Explorer and Ahrefs does all of the work:

The best part is that the tool provides “alternatives” for your selected keyword and related topics that might be useful for your business.

Other great tools for generating engaging video topics:

• Facebook Pages to Watch
• Reddit
• Quora
• YouTube
• Twitter Lists
• Slack communities
• Facebook Groups

3. Create videos to promote your content

Once you have a list of video topics, it’s time to create the content. There are plethora of great marketing tools to help you create video content, but to help dwindle it down, here are a few of our favorites:

At Buffer, we regularly use Animoto  to create short, engaging blog post summaries that we can share across social media to drive website traffic back to Buffer.

There are tons of best-practices that help to make videos on social media engaging, but quite possibly the most important factor is video length. Keep in mind that people are often browsing social media from their mobile phone and so quick, compelling videos will perform best.

For a complete guide on creating engaging short videos for social media, check out our in-depth blog post where we cover everything you need to know.

Amplifying website traffic with social media ads

Social media advertising has been an effective way for us at Buffer to boost website traffic around top performing blog posts, strategic marketing initiatives, landing pages, and even our podcast.

When comparing Facebook and Instagram advertising to other options such a PPC, we realized that we could generate hundreds of thousands of visits at a fraction of the cost (often less than $0.10 per click).

The best part is that it’s extremely easy to get started. Here’s our simple approach to social media advertising.

Boost your top-performing content

A straightforward way to drive traffic to your website with advertising is to boost your top performing content on Facebook and Instagram. Here’s how:

1. Start by posting your content organically to Facebook and Instagram
2. Check your analytics to see which posts have a high engagement rate (engagement / reach * 100)
3. Use Facebook Ads Manager to create a custom audience that is likely to interact with your content
4. Create a custom “Traffic” campaign in Ads Manager or use the “Boost” button to promote your top posts
5. Generate social proof by regularly responding to comments and interacting with your audience

For example, we posted an article to Facebook about “how to grow your Instagram account” and it immediately received higher-than-normal organic interaction.

In order to promote the post, we created a new traffic campaign and ad set, targeting folks interested in topics such as social media marketing, social media manager, and Social Media Examiner.

We then set a daily budget of $20 and promoted the post. Here’s what it looks like:

To date, this ad has generated more than 125,000 visits to the Buffer Blog for right around $0.06 per click, which has led to thousands of trials and hundreds of customers.

Create social media advertising content from scratch

Naturally, there will be times when you’ll want to promote content, initiatives, and projects that aren’t necessarily classified as top-performers.

We wanted to increase the number of downloads to the Buffer Podcast, for example, and looked to social media advertising as a means to do so. Today, we’ve generated more than 30,000 clicks to the Buffer podcast on iTunes, resulting in a 65 percent increase in downloads in less than six months.

Here’s how we did it:

• We set up a Custom Audience targeting all traffic to the Buffer Blog and buffer.com knowing that brand awareness would increase our CTR and decrease our CPC.
• Next we added an additional targeting filter to only deliver ads to iPhone, iPad, and other iOS devices and linked directly to the episode on iTunes (rather than the show notes or podcast landing page). This reduced the friction of going from podcast ad >> podcast subscriber.
• We chose the most popular episodes from the podcast and started there — $10 per day using the “Post Traffic” campaign option in Facebook. We keep a close eye on CPC and whenever it creeps above $0.25–0.30 we shut it off and start a new ad.

“Social media advertising has been an effective way for us at Buffer to boost website traffic around top performing blog posts, strategic marketing initiatives, landing pages, and even our podcast. In the past year alone, we’ve used Facebook and Instagram advertising to generate more than 100,000 unique targeted visits to our website for less than $0.25 per click, which has resulted in thousands of leads and hundreds of new customers. Plus, it has had a huge impact on brand awareness and word-of-mouth marketing.”.

Brian Peters (@brian_g_peters)
Digital Marketing, Buffer

Social media advertising best-practices:

• Test images, captions, and headlines until you find the right combination
• Look for a relevancy score of 8-10 on brand awareness type content
• Increase budget with successful posts (immediately shut down others)
• Keep an eye on frequency rate (try not to exceed 2.0)
• Evergreen content can run as long as you want!

If you’re just getting started with social media advertising or you’re looking to build upon what you already know, we have a brand new Skillshare class all about advertising (we’re happy to offer you a free month of Skillshare Premium)

Over to you

We hope you enjoyed our webinar with Ahrefs and all of the content included in this post!

We’d love to hear from you as well.

What tactics and strategies have worked for your business to generate lots of quality website traffic? Feel free to drop a comment below!

Learn more about how Ahrefs can help your business here or check out more of Tim Soulo’s work here.

Want more content like this?

More than 45,000 marketers and small business owners subscribe to our newsletter to receive our blog posts and exclusive email-only content.

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Thank How Ahrefs and Buffer Drive 300K+ Sessions Per Month with Evergreen Content and Social Media for first publishing this post.

How Companies Like Bored Panda, REI, and Vox Are Growing Their Organic Reach on Social Media

In 2013, a Facebook Page could easily reach about 12 percent of its fans with each post.

Just a year later, in 2014, it would reach only about six percent of its fans.

Today, in 2018, that number is very likely to be smaller than six percent. That means for every 100 fans of a Page, an organic post will reach, on average, only five or fewer people1These data are from a research by Social@Ogilvy..

Is it the end of organic reach on social media?

I don’t think so.

Yes, the (average) organic reach on social media has been falling over the years. But I’m very optimistic that it’s still possible to get organic reach. Why? Because we’ve seen businesses, including ourselves, growing their organic reach on social media in the last few years.

How? Let’s find out.

How to (still) get organic reach on social media

1. Understand and stay up-to-date with the social media algorithms

Social media organic reach is very dependent on the social media algorithms. The algorithm determines what every user sees on their timeline. And that’s why it’s key to understand how the algorithms work so as to maximize your organic reach.

The algorithm is ever-changing, always improving to make sure that users see what they want to see most. For example, in the first half of 2018 alone, Facebook reported five major changes to the News Feed (and there are probably many more small tweaks that were not reported).

So how does each of the social media algorithms work?

Facebook algorithm

The Facebook algorithm consists of four key components that organize the content people see on their News Feed: inventory, signals, predictions, and relevancy score.

In our in-depth analysis of how the Facebook News Feed works in 2018, we realized that signals are what we marketers and brands can focus on to increase our organic reach. The more active interactions, such as shares, comments, and reactions, a post has, the more people will see the post.

By posting content that connects your target audience or that naturally creates meaningful interactions (e.g. Facebook Live) or by building a niche community through a Facebook Group, you can likely get a higher organic reach. (You can read more about these tactics here.)

Instagram algorithm

Instagram recently revealed the three main factors that determine the posts a user sees on her Instagram feed:

• Interest: Posts that Instagram thinks she will be interested in will appear higher in her feed.
• Timeliness: Recent posts will tend to appear higher in her feed than older posts.
• Relationship: Posts from accounts she has regularly interacted with will also tend to appear higher in her feed.

There are also three other factors that contribute to the ranking of Instagram posts, but to a smaller extent:

• Frequency: Instagram aims to show her the best posts since her last visit.
• Following: If she follows many Instagram accounts, Instagram tries to show posts from a wide range of accounts rather than many posts from a few accounts.
• Usage: Instagram tries to show the best posts first. If she browses Instagram for a long time, she will see posts that might be less relevant or interesting to her.

If you want to dig into the Instagram algorithm, here’s our guide on the Instagram algorithm in 2018.

Twitter algorithm

While the Twitter timeline seems mostly reverse chronological, it also uses an algorithm to show an individual the tweets that it thinks she might be interested in. Similar to Facebook, every tweet is given a score based on how relevant Twitter thinks the tweet is to her. According to Twitter, here are some of the factors it considers:

• The tweet itself: its recency, presence of media cards (image or video), and overall engagement (including retweets, clicks, favorites, and time spent reading it)
• The tweet’s author: her past interactions with this author, the strength of her connection to them, and the origin of her relationship
• You: tweets she found engaging in the past, how often and how heavily she use Twitter

Once given a relevance score, the tweet is categorized into one of the three sections on her timeline:

1. “Ranked tweets” (recent relevant tweets)
2. “In case you missed” (older relevant tweets)
3. Remaining tweets in reverse-chronological order

It seems that the Twitter algorithm prioritizes tweets with many interactions. So here are some ways to increase your Twitter engagement, and, in turn, organic reach.

2. Fewer but better posts

“I can’t compete with the big guys, so I have to do less articles but do them better,” said Bored Panda founder Tomas Banišauskas to WIRED.

In 2016, Bored Panda was visited by about 17 million people, on average, per month. By October 2017, that number grew to 116 million — mostly thanks to organic reach on and organic traffic from Facebook. How did Banišauskas and his team do it?

Fewer but better posts.

While his competitors were hacking the Facebook algorithm, using clickbait, and growing their Facebook Page and website, Banišauskas decided against such a strategy. He believes in the importance of delivering quality content, even if that means he has to do less.

This made Bored Panda’s Facebook Page the most engaged publisher Facebook Page last October, according to NewsWhip. (Bored Panda also received the highest average engagement on LinkedIn and Pinterest among publishers.) By writing and sharing fewer but higher quality content, Bored Panda managed to avoid the fall in organic reach and traffic due to changes in the Facebook algorithm. In fact, Banišauskas thinks that “the others were losing that traffic and we were getting it”2I learned about this story and took the quotes from WIRED’s article..

Using a similar fewer-but-better strategy, we also managed to grow our Facebook reach by more than three times in 2017.

When we realized that more than 100 of our posts were reaching less than two percent of our Facebook fans, we cut our posting frequency by more than half and truly focused on sharing only the best content we can find or create. This encouraged us to focus on quality over quantity and grew our Facebook reach.

If you want to implement this strategy, here are a few things you could try:

• Experiment with posting only one to two pieces of content a day
• Post only the best content you can find each day
• Never do clickbait

3. Curate user-generated content

From 2015 to 2016, Brian Peters, our then social media manager, grew our Instagram following from 4,250 to more than 21,000. That’s an amazing 400 percent growth!

His secret? User-generated content.

The easiest way to think about user-generated content is this: “brands taking the best-of-the-best user content from around the web and featuring it on their own social media or other platforms while giving credit to the original creator,” said Brian.

This is the same strategy used by brands such as REI, Birchbox, and Fedex.

Sundays are for sleepy morning snuggles. Photo: @allabouttwomutts, #Colorado. #OptOutside

A post shared by REI (@rei) on Jun 24, 2018 at 4:21am PDT

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

So how can you apply this strategy?

A great place to start is by hosting photo contests where your customers can submit (or share with your branded hashtag) photos of your brand to win prizes. You can also encourage your followers to share photos of your brand by mentioning it in your Instagram bio.

It can take a few weeks or even months for photo contests to pick up momentum and generate enough photos for you to re-post. In the meantime, you could do hashtag searches to find Instagram posts that are relevant to your brand and re-post them.

Next is the most important step for a user-generated content strategy. You definitely should reach out to the original creator and ask for permission to re-post their photo on your profile before reposting their work.

When resharing their photo on your own profile, you should also attribute the photo back to the original creator. Here are a few possible ways to attribute:

• Photo: @username
• Regram: @username
• : @username

If you want to run a user-generated content campaign, this blog post goes into the fine details, including examples and tools you can use.

4. Invest in groups

Imagine your fans actively posting constructive thoughts and participating in civil discussions on topics around your brand, besides simply liking your posts?

That’s what Vox has been doing with its The Weeds Facebook Group. It is a private, moderated Facebook Group for its semiweekly podcast, with more than 18,000 members, who added more than 100 new posts in the last 30 days3The points below about Vox’s Facebook Groups are from this awesome article by The Lenfest Institute..

There has been a general trend towards niche and more active groups on social media, with Facebook, the largest social media network, leading the way to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”4Facebook’s latest mission statement, according to Mark Zuckerberg..

And social media groups could become the next top channel for organic reach on social media. Members of a well-managed, active social media group, by definition, would share and comment on one another one’s posts often. Since most social media algorithms tend to show posts with lots of engagement to more people, there is a higher chance for posts from groups to show up on people’s timeline more often. More organic reach.

(I have to admit that I can’t seem to find concrete studies on whether having Facebook Groups will lead to higher organic reach. If you know of any studies or have any anecdotal evidence, I would love to hear from you.)

While it isn’t certain that having a Facebook Group would increase your social media organic reach, there is good evidence that it would boost your social media engagement. When talking about one of their Facebook Groups, Vox reported that it became a place for members to share stories and interesting articles, ask questions, and support one another. The discussions in the group also went beyond the group itself. The results of a poll in the group became a story about its members on the Vox website, another poll led to a Facebook Live Q&A, and a few members were selected to join an interview with former US president Barack Obama.

If you are interested in starting a Facebook Group (or even a LinkedIn Group), we have written some guides which you might find helpful:

• The Complete Guide to Facebook Groups: How to Create a Group, Build a Community and Increase Your Organic Reach
• Why LinkedIn Groups Can Be Great for Businesses (and How to Create a Successful One)

P.s. Here’s another quick tip: Observe what news organization and publishers are doing on social media. Reach and referral traffic to their websites are key for their survival so they would likely figure out what works very quickly once things change. For example, Facebook Groups seem to be popular among publishers now.

5. Test new social media networks

Have you heard of Musically? Or Tik Tok?

If you have not, I’m just like you before I did my research. In fact, we are not alone. Musically, a social network for video creation and live broadcasting, was once described as “the most popular app you’ve probably never heard of” by Business Insider. (Musically has since been acquired and combined into Tik Tok.)

Beside the Big Six (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat), there are many up-and-coming social media networks that are garnering the attention of people around the world. And being on them early gives your brand a first-mover advantage before the networks become crowded with other brands.

For example, Coca-Cola launched a social media campaign on Musically in 2016, making them the first brand to engage on that platform. They challenged Musically users to create Musically videos with the songs found on their Coke bottles at that time. The campaign generated more than 900,000 Musically videos and 134 million views. #ShareaCoke also became the number one trending hashtag on the platform.

Over the last year, we also had a few successes sharing our blog posts to Flipboard. Flipboard drove between 1,000 to 3,000 visits for each of the blog posts! (Interestingly, we only have about 2,000 followers on Flipboard at the moment.)

All this isn’t to say that you should create an account for your brand on Tik Tok or Flipboard right away. But that you should keep an eye out for new (or less known) social media platforms and jump on them when it’s appropriate for your brand. Maybe that’s Tik Tok or Flipboard. Maybe it’s something else. Here are some that you might want to research into:

• Vero – an ad-free and reverse-chronological social media app
• Tik Tok (Douyin) – a music video platform and social network
• Amino Apps – a network of niche communities
• Anchor – a podcast and short audio social network
• Flipboard – a news and social network aggregator
• Medium – an online publishing network

How are you getting organic reach?

I believe that it is not the end of social media organic reach (and I also recognized that I might be biased!) Many brands and organizations, such as publishers, are closely watching the changes on major social media platforms and the rise of new social networks to adapt and grow their organic reach. Their successes are an encouragement that we can do the same if we pay attention to changes and test new ideas constantly.

It might be weird asking this since it’s such a competitive space on social media but I thought it might be worth a shot. How are you getting organic reach on social media? What tips and advice would you share with your fellow social media managers reading this blog post? I’m sure they will be grateful for your generosity.

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Image credit: Photo by Maja Petric on Unsplash

This blog post is an adaption of Kevan Lee’s presentation at DTDConf.

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Thank How Companies Like Bored Panda, REI, and Vox Are Growing Their Organic Reach on Social Media for first publishing this post.

Instagram’s Co-Founders Step Down, Vertical Video Gains Momentum, Facebook Launches Stories Ads, and More!

Looking to catch up on the latest social media news, but short on time? We have you covered! This week (episode #114) we’re chatting about all of this and more:

• Instagram’s co-founders are stepping down from their positions at Facebook, sending a shock through the industry. We’re covering what this critical change means for social behemoth.
• Vertical video is gaining momentum and now is the time for businesses to jump on board with this trend. Vertical video is quickly becoming the preferred method of content consumption online.
• Facebook launches a powerful new ad format – Stories Ads. Stories are a great way to reach your customers on social media and this ad format is an exciting opportunity for businesses everywhere.
• Facebook will now allow Facebook Pages to join Groups as a Page. This exciting announcement gives businesses a brand new way to connect with their community on Facebook in 2018 and beyond.

Join 20,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways.

Let’s dive in!

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram. Photo: Instagram Press

Instagram’s co-founders step down, vertical video gains momentum, Facebook launches Stories Ads, and more! [complete podcast transcript]

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation between Hailley Griffis and Brian Peters.

• • Part I: Instagram co-founders step down from positions at Facebook
  • Part II: Vertical video gains momentum and popularity with brands
  • Part III: Facebook launches powerful new Stories Ads format for Pages
  • Part IV: Facebook will now allow Pages to join Facebook Groups

Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Brian: Welcome to episode #114, I’m Brian Peters and this week we’re breaking down what is quite possibly the biggest social media news story of the year. Instagram’s co-founders are stepping down and we’ve got the inside scoop for you on what’s next for the social giant.

Hailley: We’re also taking a look at vertical video and how it continues to gain momentum on social networks (in both usage and effectiveness). Plus, two big announcements from Facebook, including Stories ads and Groups, and more.

Brian: As always, a warm welcome to the show. Let’s kick it off!

Part I: Instagram co-founders step down from Facebook

Hailley: I guess there’s no better place to start than with one of the biggest social media stories of the year.

The founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, are leaving Facebook.

Now there’s a bit of speculation around what actually happened, but according to Bloomberg, it’s at least partly due to growing tensions with CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the direction of where Instagram is heading.

Hailley: As many of you might remember, Systrom and Krieger, have been at the company since Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion.

That 1 billion turned out to be an incredible investment for Facebook with Instagram now valued at more than $100 billion.

Systrom said that they’re planning on taking some time off to explore their quote “curiosity and creativity” again. And that building new things requires that they step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs.

Hailley: Of course, Zuckerberg praised the Instagram founders in a statement and said that he wished them “all the best and I’m looking forward to seeing what they build next.”

However, it does raise some questions about what the true reason for the founders’ departures was and what the future holds for Instagram.

Facebook continues to face a ton of criticism. For much of the past two years, critics have accused Facebook of things like being careless with user data and for not preventing foreign interference.

Brian: Exactly and those issues have started taking a toll on Facebook’s business and stock. Facebook shares fell about 2.2 percent after the news broke on September 24th.

This news certainly raises some questions about what’s going on over there. Many publications like the New York Times and Bloomberg are speculating that the Instagram co-founders weren’t happy with the direction that Zuckerberg was taking Instagram.

Saying that it’s going in a direction that goes against their original vision for the company.

Hailley: I can totally see that.

As a public company, Facebook has their shareholders to take into account, which means that generating revenue is often a top priority when it comes to product decisions.

I think that Systrom and Kreiger leaned more towards the organic “community” side of things rather than the revenue generation side of things. Which isn’t necessarily good or bad either way, they might have just come to a natural end to their time at Facebook.

Brian: Agreed, Hailley. Sounds a bit like what we went through here at Buffer over the last few years, though we ended up on the organic community side of the spectrum.

But it’s worth noting there that from a product and business perspective, Instagram continues to be a major opportunity.

In fact, Instagram is on track to provide Facebook with $20 billion in revenue by 2020, about a quarter of Facebook’s total revenue.

Hailley: Instagram continues to attract a younger cohort of users who are critical to Facebook’s growth.

And they’re spending a ton of time on the platform as well – with users averaging about 53 minutes per day.

Plus, Instagram is rolling out lots of great shopping features in the feed, Stories, and explore making it a great platform to be on for ecommerce brands.

Brian: All-in-all, and I might be alone here, but I think that the departures of Systrom and Krieger create a unique opportunity for Instagram moving forward.

The decisions they make on who to hire to replace them and where to take the product over the next few months will be critical in determining the longterm viability and success of Instagram.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very excited about what’s in store.

Hailley: As always, we’ll keep you posted on all of the most important and breaking news here on the Science of Social Media.

Part II: Vertical video gains momentum and popularity with brands

Brian: If you do a quick search online for “vertical video” you’ll quickly uncover hundreds of blog posts — even whole websites — telling you to stop shooting video vertically.

It’s no secret that people love to hate on vertical video.

But for businesses, it’s time to reconsider because vertical is the new default.

Hailley: The reason vertical video isn’t going anywhere and why it’s the new default is because smartphones are driving the trend and as more content is both created and consumed on mobile devices we’ll see increasing amounts of vertical video.

It’s not hard to imagine a day where the majority of time spent online browsing, reading, and shopping is done on our phones.

Brian: For creators, vertical is a compelling new storytelling format that can help you connect with your audience in new ways and is yet to be embraced fully by marketers, leaving you a great opportunity to start today.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube all support vertical video and studies show that it produces more engagement and converts better than traditional landscape video.

Hailley: Just this year Instagram reported that more than 40 percent of its users said they’re more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in an Instagram Story.

But more important than vertical video converting customers and driving sales, which is obviously important, is that vertical video helps brands to look and feel authentic on social media in feeds filled with friends and family.

Brian: Great point Hailley.

And just to elaborate on that further. Think about what types of videos everyday people are creating. Are they creating highly-produced landscape videos or are they shooting with their phone in vertical mode?

I’d guess the latter. And so brands that can make their content look and feel like a real users’ content are the brands that are going to succeed.

Vertical video’s secret weapon is that it feels like it’s coming from a friend, even if it’s coming from a brand.

Hailley: The vertical-first stories format is incredibly versatile. For example, Netflix designed a mobile-exclusive stories format for movie trailers.

It looks just like the button you’d see on Instagram to launch a story, but offers a new way to breeze through movie trailers.

And by the way, if you want to see this Netflix example, or read about how your business can succeed with vertical video, we just launched a brand new 4-part email series. Check out our Blog for details.

Brian: The series is super good. Definitely go check that out.

Anyways, what can be intimidating for many of us is actually making the shift to creating vertical-first content, and adapting that across your social channels.

Despite being years into the video-first world, many businesses are afraid of the format: The skills required to produce or edit a video are difficult to find, and it requires a sizable investment.

Hailley: However, filming vertical is easier than you think, and it might even make it less scary to take your first video steps.

Because vertical video is native to mobile devices and the majority of vertical-first content is filmed on a smartphone already, the expectation of your audience is dramatically different than in the past.

In fact, The Guardian invested heavily in Instagram and found that “heavily produced” videos with scripts, studios, or professional editing weren’t worth the effort when analyzing the data.

Brian: Instead, they discovered that quick explainers and even static graphics were more popular and made it more likely that a viewer would stick around until the end.

News UK found similar results, saying that vertical video had “increased interactions sixfold,” and it plans to experiment with them for other intents, such as advertising items for purchase.

Hailley: The key, if you’re excited to jump on this vertical video trend, is to remember that watching vertical videos is almost synonymous with being on-the-go, meaning that your viewers are likely to be interrupted by their surrounding, notifications, or just their arms getting tired.

Attention spans are getting shorter, particularly as you grapple with being alongside the user’s friends, filling their screen

Brian: The arm getting tired is real!

But what that means for video is to get to the point quickly, and give the viewer the hook almost up front — bite-sized, instant content means that they’ll consider continuing into your feed and end up seeing more of your content than they would on a 5-minute explainer.

Mercedes Benz has some great examples of getting the balance between content and length right, where it successfully reached more than 2.6 million people with short ads that crammed in lots of information, quickly, by using the format in a new way

Hailley: Again, you can check all of this out and more on our blog now on our Blog!

Part III: Facebook launches new Stories Ads format for Pages

Alright a few quick, but important updates on the Facebook front before you go.

First is that Facebook has officially announced that it’s rolling out Facebook Stories Ads to advertisers globally.

More than 300 million people now use Facebook Stories every single day, and as is tradition with Facebook, they’re now offering businesses a way to tap into that massive audience base.

Brian: Ads everywhere!

But you know they are working.

A survey from Ipsos discovered that 62 percent of people said they became more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in a story.

And Facebook says that “brands testing Facebook Stories ads are already seeing results”.

Hailley: We’ve done a little experimenting with Stories ads as well, right?

Brian: We have for sure and I must admit they are working really well. Right now we’re driving traffic to lots of Buffer pages for less than $0.15 cents per click, which is pretty awesome.

Hailley: Lots of brands are seeing similar results, Digiday found that the flight-booking service Hopper has seen both Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories ads performing better than ads in Facebook’s news feed and in Instagram’s feed.

In fact, the results for Hopper have been so great that the businesses has been quote “prioritizing designing ads for the Stories format, then adapting them to the other formats”.

Brian: Facebook Stories ads have been rolled out globally as of the recording of this show.

To get started with Stories ads, head over to Facebook Ads Manager and create your ad, then when it comes to selecting ‘Placements’ you’ll see the option to include Facebook Stories.

We’re going to be running lots of tests over the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Part IV: Facebook will now allow Pages to join Facebook Groups

Hailley: Last but not least, and I thought this one was really cool, is that Facebook will now allow Pages to join Facebook Groups.

Image: Social Media Today

Supposedly a spokesperson at Facebook told social media today that they’ve heard from lots of businesses that a “more intimate setting” can be meaningful for brand building.

Facebook previously launched the ability for Pages to start Facebook Groups so they can engage with their communities, but now they are testing the ability for Pages to join existing Facebook Groups as well.

Brian: As usual the new option was spotted by Mari Smith and shared by Matt Navarra and it could be another way for businesses to offset some of their losses in Facebook organic reach as a result of platform’s algorithm shifts.

And so as of right now, the ‘Allow Pages to request to join as group members’ is active by default, so unless a group admin has chosen not to let Pages join, Pages included in the test pool should be able to join most groups.

Hailley: Of course, this isn’t necessarily a game-changing function, and it probably won’t bring back most of the referral traffic you’ve likely lost as a result of Facebook’s algorithm changes.

But it is another interesting consideration for businesses and marketers, and another learning opportunity to help generate more attention for your business on social media.

Brian: Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com

Hailley: A huge shoutout to you all – the more than 20,000 people that tune into our show every single week. You make this fun and are the entire reason we do what we do so thank you! And thanks for telling your friends, family and colleagues about us as well.

Lots of great shows coming your way in the next few weeks.

Until next Monday, everyone!

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 20,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank Instagram’s Co-Founders Step Down, Vertical Video Gains Momentum, Facebook Launches Stories Ads, and More! for first publishing this post.