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> "Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets."

Tools like buffer would still exist even if every single social media network offered scheduling capabilities. The fact is, if you're a digital marketer, you're not going to waste your time jumping between networks and multiple accounts scheduling content manually.

Disagree. The very best digital/social marketers don't use these tools at all. Each channel has its own platform strengths, weaknesses, peculiarities, not to mention audience differences, trends, breaking news etc.

If you're scheduling social posts without doing your due diligence on each and every platform within 2-4 hours of a post going live (preferably within 30 minutes before), you're doing it wrong.

If you're using the same post across multiple channels, you're doing it wrong.

If you're re-using the same post multiple times within a few weeks, you're doing it wrong.

The only people I give a free pass too are solo marketers who really just don't have time to do things right and have to keep up a minimum level of noise on social.

Interesting, can you elaborate a bit more on this? Especially on the "due diligence" part: Do you mean depending on what happened on the network a few hours ago it's often wise to change stories or content?

The wisdom in the marketing world when it comes to social media is that if you treat it purely as a self-promotional channel it will fail. If you come across as fake, overly corporate or robotic it will also fail.

So due diligence in this scenario means if you are hoping to just load up a bunch of tweets for example, have them blast out are pre-defined intervals and think that is good enough you are in for a rude shock. You should instead be monitoring it to see what the reaction is and if there are any conversations that you should be a part of based on what you have shared. You need to come across as a real person who is sharing something that you genuinely feel people are going to find useful if you want to have any kind of real "success" with social.

By due diligence I mean not only understanding each platform and how its audience differs, but understanding what's happening around the time that you post. What's the mood?

There's a huge amount of value to be gained by participating in a larger conversation at any given moment (thinking mostly of Twitter here). It's not about just jumping on hashtags or Trends, though if relevant that's an opportunity. But if everyone is talking about a big topic, then customizing a post to add value to the conversation can have huge benefits.

Or just interacting on a human level. I've seen my best gains and actual new customers when participating in hashtag chats for my industry. Not selling my product, just trading ideas and opinions. That's how we met some great influencers who have ended up being major magnifiers of our messaging.

Also evaluating the overall tone on a social channel. Did your last post on FB a few hours ago result in a bunch of snarking by readers? Then maybe a humble tone is in order.

It's also about knowing when not to post. An earthquake kills 25,000 people in the Yucatan? Your fluffy happy emoji-laden post looks really out of touch.

Anyways, I just think it's very hard to pre-schedule content that's truly relevant. So instead, as someone mentioned above, people spray and pray with a mix of product/feature advertorials and rarely-clever memes. Noise.

Wendy's twitter I think is a funny, good example. I don't often eat there. I'm sure the exposure influences me in subtle ways.

Right. I agree with most of what you said. However, that doesn't mean you can't build a platform that does what you described. In fact, and I'm not trying to self-promote here, but we've already done that. We're currently in beta going live in a couple of months.

> "If you're scheduling social posts without doing your due diligence on each and every platform within 2-4 hours of a post going live (preferably within 30 minutes before), you're doing it wrong."

Can you elaborate on this? What type of due diligence do you need?

> "If you're using the same post across multiple channels, you're doing it wrong."

Some posts can be shared as they are across multiple networks, other posts need to be different. We address this by allowing the user to write the post once and customized it for each network before its published. This includes different images, different URLs, different OG tags, keywords, mentions, etc.

> "If you're re-using the same post multiple times within a few weeks, you're doing it wrong."

When you publish something, only a percentage of your audience sees it, which is why it is considered a good strategy to repost every now and then for higher exposure. Just don't do it every few weeks. The way we solved this problem is by allowing the user to create category-based schedules. Basically, we have a content library that organizes posts by categories, and each category can have one or multiple publishing schedules. You can choose to recycle content from specific categories or not, up to you. The more content you have in each recyclable category the less frequent your content will be reposted.

There are many other hard problems that SMM platforms can help you solve including social listening, which if done manually can be very time consuming and silly.

EDIT: typo

Would love to see what you're working on. I always repurpose my content for each social network. Its time consuming. Would love something that can make that easier.

> If you're not the very best, then you're doing it wrong

Well, more a paraphrase than a direct quote, but still. Most companies can't afford to hire the very best. Many companies take a bang-for-the-buck approach, and products like Buffer hit that measure for them better compared to paying much more for a world-class marketing team.

Doesn't mean it's a bad product. Just means you're not the customer.

This. Most people by definition are not the very best. Not everyone is a Gary Vaynerchuck.

Most mediocre people we would think suck. Really look at the 50 percentile. Ever interview people with long careers, making decent/good pay, at well known companies, and wonder how in the world they even have a job? That is a an extreme example, but most people treat it like a job, something to get done, provide for themselves and family. That's okay, but they're not that dedicated in being the very best.

The very best at what, though? If they have a family, perhaps they're a dad. If they're the best at social media, they're not the best at being a dad. In fact, they probably suck at being a dad. I think that to be the best, you have to choose one thing, and be okay with being shitty at all the other things you didn't choose. A lot of people who I respect decided that they wanted to be just be pretty good at everything.

This thread was about social media, but can apply to many things. The point of contention I have is the original assumption of why a product is near worthless because it doesn't matter to the best people in the field which the product is marketed towards.

Not sure how you're interpreting my comment. It isn't to knock people with other priorities like a family. In fact that's perfectly fine and expected. I used it as an example of why people might not be the best in their field. Your description of the trade off supports that claim, and it's a fine trade off to make as work isn't and arguably shouldn't be the center of ones life.

So I don't think we disagree on anything.

Mostly agree :). If you are a marketing team of three and you're trying to do SEM/SEO, email, vertical advertising, channel programs, comms and social, then these tools are a lifesaver.

But if your team is big enough to have even one dedicated social media person, then they should be doing their due diligence and maximizing the quality of their content and channels. That almost always means doing a lot of the work manually so you get the biggest bang.

Plus, in reality, we're talking about 3-4 channels. It really isn't that time consuming to manually handle a lot of what Buffer automates.

Don't get me wrong, as products go Buffer is certainly solid and our team uses it sparingly, but I really think too many people get lazy and overly rely on automation.

I'm far from the best social media marketer and maybe that explains what I'm about to say, but I can't figure out for the life of me how to effectively use tools like Buffer. I manage Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for my small brand, and the three places are so different, with different audiences and different methods of interaction, that trying to do it in one tool is crazy. I end up writing the same post three times in three different ways anyway, so opening the Facebook app or Twitter app is the least of my concerns.

If usernames and hashtags were the same across the different platforms, it might work. But what you should say on Facebook won't translate to Instagram or Twitter so what's the point?

I have been in the same boat for my baking website. Used Buffer and didn't see that many results. Then I abandoned Buffer and came up with a strategy that worked for me.

I realize that twitter was a place where I could get a lot of conversions to the website, but not the greatest for engagement. So I created twitter bot using the Wordpress REST API [1] to just pump out links to my recipes. Instagram, on the other hand, is all hand written and takes me some time. Although instagram barely gets anyone too my website, it has been the best tool for me to build a community around. So much so that I am thinking of abandoning the website.

I can't figure out Facebook for the life of me...

[1]: https://github.com/kylevalenzuela/python-wordpress-twitter-b...

I'm pretty similar. I let Wordpress push my new posts to Twitter and that's about it. No one engages, no one comments, they just click through to my site. Sometimes I use Twitter to talk to other related businesses, but real actual people don't interact with me there.

Instagram, I get real actual people reacting, but there's no good way to drive people directly to my site from Instagram. I use it more to engage with the audience and not to drive clicks.

I held off on using Facebook for the longest time, but I've had more engagement there than anywhere else. At this point, 90% of my clicks come from Facebook, and about that much of the social media engagement too. My secret? I have a $1/day ad sitting out there generating about 20 likes per week. Once I hit 500-600 likes from the ad, it because self-sustaining. Enough people would engage with posts that their friends would see it and like or follow as well. Sucks that I had to pay to see any benefit, but I paid Twitter and Instagram too and didn't get squat from it.

Thanks for the insight. I know I am losing out not engaging on the platform. Need to start getting serious about it.

I think you're giving too much credit to the majority of digital/social marketers. Yes, the best will follow similar strategies that you outlined but the vast majority will continue to spray and pray, with perhaps additional focus and time given to the one channel that performs the best.

More than half of all the businesses have no employees (i.e. It's just the founder) and most of the rest have less than 50 employees. For most companies is social one of many things that they need to do, setup a website, pay taxes, answer the phone, emails etc. because they're is no one else. Whilst for big companies, they perhaps have full time social media or at least communications staff, most companies do not.

Ultimately this is a tool that saves time for, mostly, small companies.

> More than half of all the businesses have no employees

That sounds very interesting. What do you mean by "the businesses"? Where are these stats from?

I used these stats http://www.npi.org.uk/visualisations/rise-companies-no-emplo.... Also, this backs it up for US businesses http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonnazar/2013/09/09/16-surpris...

What is the due diligence? Why are these things wrong? Are there sources you can point me to understand your point of view better and educate myself.

And that's what leads to the incredible amount of content spam from all these companies.

The logical exit for these smaller tools companies as growth slows is to get acqui-hired by the Twitters, Facebooks, and LinkedIns of the world.

However when your entire team is remote, that makes these companies steer clear of acquiring you since you won't fit into their culture. So they will go for your competitors with a crappier product, but a local team that they can quickly bring in onsite within a few months.

Acquihire? For a company that does $13M annual revenue?

Depends what that $13M costs them. CAC and burn are critical factors in an acquisition.

a company that offers as a primary feature its ability to post to _multiple_ networks, is unlikely to be able to sell to any of those networks. the acquirer would likely have to be some larger "tools" company.

Best bet would be to get someone who doesn't know what they're doing, will overpay, and bungle the post acquisition.

What's Yahoo's M&A department's phone number?

Or, given that they've now been profitable for 7 months, they could continue to exist without an exit strategy.

How does that work in the VC-funded world?

If a company's growth has dramatically slowed, but they are still profitable (even with a down year here or there), are VC's ok letting them chug along without an exit? My guess would be no and they'd push for some sort of private sale.

A company that accumulated enough cash could, in theory, buy out its investors. This would allow an impatient VC fund to return cash without involving any other party. Not sure if a VC-backed startup has ever done this.

Buffer flat-out admitted the existential concerns last June after layoffs: https://open.buffer.com/layoffs-and-moving-forward/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918553)

> We know that we have many untapped opportunities for growth. This time, however, we simply weren’t able to trigger growth fast enough.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but this is bothering me.

It's bothering me that a company has to constantly grow grow grow, or die. What happened to just making a profitable company and riding it for as long as possible while making the life of people around you better (employees, people you buy services and products from, customers, etc...)

I just got back to Lyon after a year in Chicago, and it's refreshing to see more of these companies here. Sure the salaries are way lower, and life is not as crazy, but people seem to have good intentions.

For example, a cafe I just stumbled upon: http://www.dunsiegealautre-lyon.fr/concept

> Nous avons fait le choix de rejoindre le mouvement coopératif en créant une Scop. Cela signifie que nous sommes sociétaires de notre structure, que nous adoptons une gouvernance démocratique et que la répartition des résultats est prioritairement affectée à la pérennité des emplois et du projet.

Which basically means that the goal of this place is to make employment and the place durable.

There's nothing wrong with slow growth--that's how most small to mid-size businesses operate, both in the US and abroad.

But as a Silicon Valley tech investor, you're not incentivized to fund companies that grow slowly over time. You're incentivized to fund moonshots that rapidly explode, take over the world, and get you the highest ROI in the shortest period of time.

So, if a company isn't growing exponentially every year--and as an investor--my salary/job-evaluations are dependent on successfully funding companies that grow exponentially, I'd have no incentive to invest.

And as a result, if the company needs a constant cash-infusion to stay alive--it needs to grow exponentially.

It's either: (A) get cash, grow fast; or (B) no need for new cash, grow slow.

(A) is the SV way.

(B) is more common in other industries/sectors, parts of the world.

Neither is inherently/morally better (my opinion only), but both are a functional result of the systems and incentives in their respective professional ecosystems.

> My guess at what happened: the natural hyper growth engine ran out, they tried a bunch of things to jump start it, none of them worked, so now they are on the slow growth path.

Sigh. No need to guess, the other co-founder wrote his own account on Medium [0].

The relevant part:

> Another reason emerged after Joel and I had a candid conversation on how we’re structured as CEO and COO over the last 6 months or so and recognized some challenges in it. Joel shared this article [1] with me, which I thought explains some of the struggles well of what’s been going on.

[0] https://hackernoon.com/after-6-incredible-years-at-buffer-im...

[1] http://organizationalphysics.com/2015/02/18/organizational-d...

> Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets.

Scheduled tweets was launched like 4 years back - https://blog.twitter.com/2013/now-available-scheduled-tweets

This is the first I've heard of them...

I just enabled this, you have to create a campaign on ads.twitter.com and then add a credit card to enable the compose button; it looks like you can then schedule standard tweets that i don't think incur any cost

Hrm? Scheduled tweets were launched in 2013. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/now-available-scheduled-tweets

Yup - reached the natural end of what they could get to organically, now they're faced with the realization that they likely have to move up market to focus on enterprise where companies like Oktopost live.

I've also seen that remote companies make acquisition more difficult - unless the company is being bought for the product and they plan on dumping the team.