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Day: December 17, 2019

The Best Instagram Stories of 2019


Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.

Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day.

I’m definitely among that group.

And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.

Not to mention, we had a ton of Stories podcast episodes in 2019, which you can find in our archives

So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose. 


The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.

Let’s get right to it then. 


1. Tastemade

Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade. 

Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories. 

In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch. 

That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next. 

Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome.
 
And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.

2. Brooklinen

Along with food content, music is another big theme for the year. You’ve probably seen your friends and colleagues sharing what they’re listening to on Spotify. You can share your songs straight to Instagram Stories from your Spotify mobile app

Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories. 

Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.

3. Burrow

Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow

They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.

Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!

4. Potluck 

For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters. 

Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo. 

Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights. 

Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.

I thought it was also really neat how Potluck did a Story educating people on where to find the filter. Worked great for getting the word out about it!

5. Pattern Brands

Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company. 

Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.

(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)

Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful. 

And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.

6. Allbirds

Allbirds does a great job of bridging the gap between product promotion and customer service. Allbirds uses some of its Stories to share answers to frequently asked questions about its products

This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person. 

7. Monica + Andy

Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories. 

Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.

What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.

8. Its Nice That

The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.

It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format. 

9. Instagram Story templates

And then one final Stories trend that we really loved seeing this year was the rise of Instagram Story templates. We referenced this a bit earlier with Burrow’s cool example of the Dream Sofa.  2019 introduced a whole cottage industry of Story templates for brands. 

A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib. 

The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes: 

  • Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
  • Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
  • and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today

How to say hello to us

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

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on TwitterBuffer 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!


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 27,000+ 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.

Ubersuggest 7.0: The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool

Believe it or not, I’ve been working on Ubersuggest for
almost 3 years now.

I bought it on February 13, 2017, for $120,000 dollars as a test to see if I could get more traffic from a tool than traditional content marketing or SEO.

Since then the tool has come a long way, in which I’ve added tons of features that competitors charge $100 a month or even more for.

But I’ve finally got Ubersuggest to a point where I can start releasing features that my competition don’t even have.

So before, you head on over to Ubersuggest to work on your SEO,
make sure you read everything below because I’ve just changed up how you are
going do keyword research (in a good way).

On top of that, I’ve also released a few other features as well related to link data and traffic estimations.

Here’s what’s new:

More keyword data

The biggest problem I had with keyword research was how to find the right keyword.

Sure, there are metrics like CPC data, SEO difficulty, or even search volume, but assuming you find keywords with a high CPC, low SEO difficulty, and high search volume, it still doesn’t mean it is a good keyword to go after.

And there are a few reasons why…

  • Mobile searches aren’t worth as much – first off, if the keyword mainly gets searched from on mobile devices the conversion rate will be lower. It doesn’t mean mobile traffic is useless, it just typically means the keyword won’t be as valuable.
  • High search volume doesn’t guarantee lots of organic clicks – what happens if the keyword gets a ton of searches but no clicks? This sounds crazy, but it actually happens a lot. For example, when people search for “weather” in the United States, roughly 60% of the people don’t click any results.
  • Not all searchers are worth the same – some keywords get searched heavily by teenagers. Some keywords get searched heavily by people who are in their 30s or 40s. If the majority of the searches for a given keyword happen by a really young audience, chances are they won’t have a credit card and they won’t convert into a customer.

Because of all of this, I decided to change how the industry
does keyword research.

Now when you type in a keyword like “marketing” into
Ubersuggest, you’ll see this:

If you have been using Ubersuggest for the last year or so you may notice some differences… but if you haven’t let me break down what’s new.

First off, for any given keyword you will see what percentage of the searches are taking place from mobile devices or desktop devices.

For example, with the term “marketing” you can see that the majority of the searches are coming from desktop devices.

On the flip side, if you use Ubersuggest to look at the term “weather” you’ll notice that the majority of the searches happen on mobile devices.

And with any given keyword you can also see what percentage of the people even click on the SEO or paid results.

I love this bar chart because it tells me if I should even go after a specific keyword. Just because a term has tons of searches doesn’t mean you are going to get tons of clicks, even if you rank at the number 1 spot.

If you leverage paid ads, this bar chart is also helpful because it will give you a sense of how many people click on the paid ads as well.

Another chart that I’ve added is one that breaks down the age range of each searcher.

As you can see from the above image, Ubersuggest now shows what percentage of the searches take place between each age range.

This is really important if you know the persona of your ideal customer, as you only want to target keywords that your ideal buyer is searching for.

What’s also cool is this data is available for all countries
within Ubersuggest and for almost all of the keywords within our database.

Now before you head off to Ubersuggest and test it out, there are a few more features that I’ve just released.

More backlink data

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten feedback that our link database isn’t as big as you would like, so we have been working on fixing this.

First off, whenever you do a backlink search in Ubersuggest, you’ll start seeing stats on historical backlink data.

This chart will quickly show you if a site is growing in
backlink and referring domain count over time or if they are declining.

On top of that, we are even showing the daily new and lost link count for a given site.

I know the new and lost link count chart looks a bit off,
but keep in mind we started having Ubersuggest crawl more pages around the web
faster and more frequently. Hence you are seeing a big spike in new and lost
links.

But over the next 4 weeks, it should normalize, and you’ll see an accurate representation of new and lost links.

This will help you identify new link opportunities more
easily. Especially because you can now clearly see where your competitors are
focusing their link building efforts.

Better traffic estimations

Lastly in Ubersuggest, you can also enter in a URL and get data on any given domain.

From its estimated monthly search traffic to the number of keywords a domain ranks for to even its top pages based on link and traffic count.

We haven’t fully finished creating our new algorithm when it comes to traffic estimations, but the chart you’ll see now is much more accurate than the older one.

Even though this is a big improvement from our older charts, give it another 3 months and it should be extremely accurate.

When you are using the traffic analyzer report in Ubersuggest, keep in mind that this will give you a directional guide on how you are doing versus your competition.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy the new changes to Ubersuggest.

I’ve made them in order to give you a leg up on your competition as the data in the tool is now something that most of you have never seen before.

And over the next two months, you’ll see some big launches in Ubersuggest. From a chrome extension to even more accurate traffic estimations to even an Alert system that will notify you when things are wrong with your site.

So, go to Ubersuggest and try out the new keyword features as well as traffic estimation and backlink features.

What do you think about the
new features?

The post Ubersuggest 7.0: The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool appeared first on Neil Patel.

The Best Instagram Stories of 2019


Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.

Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day.

I’m definitely among that group.

And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.

Not to mention, we had a ton of Stories podcast episodes in 2019, which you can find in our archives

So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose. 


The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.

Let’s get right to it then. 


1. Tastemade

Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade. 

Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories. 

In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch. 

That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next. 

Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome.
 
And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.

2. Brooklinen

Along with food content, music is another big theme for the year. You’ve probably seen your friends and colleagues sharing what they’re listening to on Spotify. You can share your songs straight to Instagram Stories from your Spotify mobile app

Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories. 

Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.

3. Burrow

Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow

They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.

Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!

4. Potluck 

For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters. 

Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo. 

Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights. 

Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.

I thought it was also really neat how Potluck did a Story educating people on where to find the filter. Worked great for getting the word out about it!

5. Pattern Brands

Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company. 

Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.

(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)

Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful. 

And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.

6. Allbirds

Allbirds does a great job of bridging the gap between product promotion and customer service. Allbirds uses some of its Stories to share answers to frequently asked questions about its products

This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person. 

7. Monica + Andy

Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories. 

Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.

What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.

8. Its Nice That

The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.

It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format. 

9. Instagram Story templates

And then one final Stories trend that we really loved seeing this year was the rise of Instagram Story templates. We referenced this a bit earlier with Burrow’s cool example of the Dream Sofa.  2019 introduced a whole cottage industry of Story templates for brands. 

A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib. 

The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes: 

  • Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
  • Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
  • and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today

How to say hello to us

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

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on TwitterBuffer 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!


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 27,000+ 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.

The Best Instagram Stories of 2019


Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.

Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day.

I’m definitely among that group.

And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.

Not to mention, we had a ton of Stories podcast episodes in 2019, which you can find in our archives

So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose. 


The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.

Let’s get right to it then. 


1. Tastemade

Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade. 

Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories. 

In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch. 

That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next. 

Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome.
 
And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.

2. Brooklinen

Along with food content, music is another big theme for the year. You’ve probably seen your friends and colleagues sharing what they’re listening to on Spotify. You can share your songs straight to Instagram Stories from your Spotify mobile app

Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories. 

Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.

3. Burrow

Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow

They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.

Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!

4. Potluck 

For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters. 

Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo. 

Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights. 

Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.

I thought it was also really neat how Potluck did a Story educating people on where to find the filter. Worked great for getting the word out about it!

5. Pattern Brands

Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company. 

Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.

(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)

Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful. 

And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.

6. Allbirds

Allbirds does a great job of bridging the gap between product promotion and customer service. Allbirds uses some of its Stories to share answers to frequently asked questions about its products

This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person. 

7. Monica + Andy

Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories. 

Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.

What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.

8. Its Nice That

The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.

It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format. 

9. Instagram Story templates

And then one final Stories trend that we really loved seeing this year was the rise of Instagram Story templates. We referenced this a bit earlier with Burrow’s cool example of the Dream Sofa.  2019 introduced a whole cottage industry of Story templates for brands. 

A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib. 

The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes: 

  • Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
  • Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
  • and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today

How to say hello to us

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

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on TwitterBuffer 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!


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 27,000+ 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.

AWeber Continues to Grow Its Support for AMP for Email!

AWeber AMP for Email Carousel

AWeber's Image Carousel powered by AMP for Email

Over the summer, AWeber announced that it was the first small business email service provider to support the new AMP for Email technology! Now, we’re excited to share the latest evolution in how we’re making it powerfully-simple for you to use AMP for Email inside AWeber.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. When paired with AWeber, the powerful technology has the ability to completely transform how you connect with your prospects and customers via email.

With AWeber and AMP for Email, your subscribers won’t have to leave the inbox or head to their browser to visit a web page. Instead, they can RSVP to an event, sign up for a newsletter, leave a product review, answer a survey, or view a live package shipping update — all inside your email!

Big news! AWeber has now added one of the most popular AMP for Email features — an image carousel — to our drag-and-drop email editor. The AWeber Image Carousel, powered by AMP for Email, is an interactive element that rotates through multiple slides of images. You can include photos, GIFs, blog posts, or products. As an AWeber customer, all you need to do is click the Carousel element in the tool box and drag it into your email. Then, add up to 6 images.

Previously, if you wanted to include multiple images, you had to stack them one on top of the other, taking up valuable space in your email. The AWeber Image Carousel is compact, interactive, and beautiful. Watch the video below to see how easy it is to use the Carousel inside AWeber.

AMP for Email turns static emails into interactive and dynamic content. By removing layers of friction and allowing people to directly engage with content faster, you’ll reduce the number of steps your audience has to take to respond to an offer or promotion, and ultimately drive more business.

That’s why AWeber is continuously evolving how powerfully-simple it is for you to send AMP for Email-powered messages inside our platform. We want you to see success faster than ever before.

The AWeber Image Carousel, powered by AMP for Email, is just the start. Through AWeber’s API, you can also create other powerfully-engaging interactive and dynamic content using AMP for Email components. (See how we’ve been experimenting with other AMP elements inside AWeber’s own weekly newsletter, FWD: Thinking.) If you send these AMP components through AWeber, they will display in Gmail, Outlook, and Mail.ru messages TODAY!

How to Get Started with AMP for Email in AWeber

There are a few simple steps you’ll need to take to get started with using AMP for Email and the Carousel inside AWeber.

You can receive a full rundown on how to use AMP for Email with AWeber. Sign up for our free webinar on January 17.

Questions? Contact our Customer Solutions team, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from our Pennsylvania HQ.

This article was updated on December 11, 2019.

The post AWeber Continues to Grow Its Support for AMP for Email! appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Ubersuggest 7.0: The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool

Believe it or not, I’ve been working on Ubersuggest for
almost 3 years now.

I bought it on February 13, 2017, for $120,000 dollars as a test to see if I could get more traffic from a tool than traditional content marketing or SEO.

Since then the tool has come a long way, in which I’ve added tons of features that competitors charge $100 a month or even more for.

But I’ve finally got Ubersuggest to a point where I can start releasing features that my competition don’t even have.

So before, you head on over to Ubersuggest to work on your SEO,
make sure you read everything below because I’ve just changed up how you are
going do keyword research (in a good way).

On top of that, I’ve also released a few other features as well related to link data and traffic estimations.

Here’s what’s new:

More keyword data

The biggest problem I had with keyword research was how to find the right keyword.

Sure, there are metrics like CPC data, SEO difficulty, or even search volume, but assuming you find keywords with a high CPC, low SEO difficulty, and high search volume, it still doesn’t mean it is a good keyword to go after.

And there are a few reasons why…

  • Mobile searches aren’t worth as much – first off, if the keyword mainly gets searched from on mobile devices the conversion rate will be lower. It doesn’t mean mobile traffic is useless, it just typically means the keyword won’t be as valuable.
  • High search volume doesn’t guarantee lots of organic clicks – what happens if the keyword gets a ton of searches but no clicks? This sounds crazy, but it actually happens a lot. For example, when people search for “weather” in the United States, roughly 60% of the people don’t click any results.
  • Not all searchers are worth the same – some keywords get searched heavily by teenagers. Some keywords get searched heavily by people who are in their 30s or 40s. If the majority of the searches for a given keyword happen by a really young audience, chances are they won’t have a credit card and they won’t convert into a customer.

Because of all of this, I decided to change how the industry
does keyword research.

Now when you type in a keyword like “marketing” into
Ubersuggest, you’ll see this:

If you have been using Ubersuggest for the last year or so you may notice some differences… but if you haven’t let me break down what’s new.

First off, for any given keyword you will see what percentage of the searches are taking place from mobile devices or desktop devices.

For example, with the term “marketing” you can see that the majority of the searches are coming from desktop devices.

On the flip side, if you use Ubersuggest to look at the term “weather” you’ll notice that the majority of the searches happen on mobile devices.

And with any given keyword you can also see what percentage of the people even click on the SEO or paid results.

I love this bar chart because it tells me if I should even go after a specific keyword. Just because a term has tons of searches doesn’t mean you are going to get tons of clicks, even if you rank at the number 1 spot.

If you leverage paid ads, this bar chart is also helpful because it will give you a sense of how many people click on the paid ads as well.

Another chart that I’ve added is one that breaks down the age range of each searcher.

As you can see from the above image, Ubersuggest now shows what percentage of the searches take place between each age range.

This is really important if you know the persona of your ideal customer, as you only want to target keywords that your ideal buyer is searching for.

What’s also cool is this data is available for all countries
within Ubersuggest and for almost all of the keywords within our database.

Now before you head off to Ubersuggest and test it out, there are a few more features that I’ve just released.

More backlink data

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten feedback that our link database isn’t as big as you would like, so we have been working on fixing this.

First off, whenever you do a backlink search in Ubersuggest, you’ll start seeing stats on historical backlink data.

This chart will quickly show you if a site is growing in
backlink and referring domain count over time or if they are declining.

On top of that, we are even showing the daily new and lost link count for a given site.

I know the new and lost link count chart looks a bit off,
but keep in mind we started having Ubersuggest crawl more pages around the web
faster and more frequently. Hence you are seeing a big spike in new and lost
links.

But over the next 4 weeks, it should normalize, and you’ll see an accurate representation of new and lost links.

This will help you identify new link opportunities more
easily. Especially because you can now clearly see where your competitors are
focusing their link building efforts.

Better traffic estimations

Lastly in Ubersuggest, you can also enter in a URL and get data on any given domain.

From its estimated monthly search traffic to the number of keywords a domain ranks for to even its top pages based on link and traffic count.

We haven’t fully finished creating our new algorithm when it comes to traffic estimations, but the chart you’ll see now is much more accurate than the older one.

Even though this is a big improvement from our older charts, give it another 3 months and it should be extremely accurate.

When you are using the traffic analyzer report in Ubersuggest, keep in mind that this will give you a directional guide on how you are doing versus your competition.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy the new changes to Ubersuggest.

I’ve made them in order to give you a leg up on your competition as the data in the tool is now something that most of you have never seen before.

And over the next two months, you’ll see some big launches in Ubersuggest. From a chrome extension to even more accurate traffic estimations to even an Alert system that will notify you when things are wrong with your site.

So, go to Ubersuggest and try out the new keyword features as well as traffic estimation and backlink features.

What do you think about the
new features?

The post Ubersuggest 7.0: The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool appeared first on Neil Patel.

AWeber Continues to Grow Its Support for AMP for Email!

AWeber AMP for Email Carousel

AWeber's Image Carousel powered by AMP for Email

Over the summer, AWeber announced that it was the first small business email service provider to support the new AMP for Email technology! Now, we’re excited to share the latest evolution in how we’re making it powerfully-simple for you to use AMP for Email inside AWeber.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. When paired with AWeber, the powerful technology has the ability to completely transform how you connect with your prospects and customers via email.

With AWeber and AMP for Email, your subscribers won’t have to leave the inbox or head to their browser to visit a web page. Instead, they can RSVP to an event, sign up for a newsletter, leave a product review, answer a survey, or view a live package shipping update — all inside your email!

Big news! AWeber has now added one of the most popular AMP for Email features — an image carousel — to our drag-and-drop email editor. The AWeber Image Carousel, powered by AMP for Email, is an interactive element that rotates through multiple slides of images. You can include photos, GIFs, blog posts, or products. As an AWeber customer, all you need to do is click the Carousel element in the tool box and drag it into your email. Then, add up to 6 images.

Previously, if you wanted to include multiple images, you had to stack them one on top of the other, taking up valuable space in your email. The AWeber Image Carousel is compact, interactive, and beautiful. Watch the video below to see how easy it is to use the Carousel inside AWeber.

AMP for Email turns static emails into interactive and dynamic content. By removing layers of friction and allowing people to directly engage with content faster, you’ll reduce the number of steps your audience has to take to respond to an offer or promotion, and ultimately drive more business.

That’s why AWeber is continuously evolving how powerfully-simple it is for you to send AMP for Email-powered messages inside our platform. We want you to see success faster than ever before.

The AWeber Image Carousel, powered by AMP for Email, is just the start. Through AWeber’s API, you can also create other powerfully-engaging interactive and dynamic content using AMP for Email components. (See how we’ve been experimenting with other AMP elements inside AWeber’s own weekly newsletter, FWD: Thinking.) If you send these AMP components through AWeber, they will display in Gmail, Outlook, and Mail.ru messages TODAY!

How to Get Started with AMP for Email in AWeber

There are a few simple steps you’ll need to take to get started with using AMP for Email and the Carousel inside AWeber.

You can receive a full rundown on how to use AMP for Email with AWeber. Sign up for our free webinar on January 17.

Questions? Contact our Customer Solutions team, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from our Pennsylvania HQ.

This article was updated on December 11, 2019.

The post AWeber Continues to Grow Its Support for AMP for Email! appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.