Tools for Marketing and Content Creation

Threads doesn’t just reward replies — it was built for them. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has said this more than once, and he hasn’t minced words on it, either: "The sum of all your replies is about as valuable as the sum of all the value of all your posts," he told Platformer. Turns out, he wasn't exaggerating. We have data to back up just how powerful responding on Threads can be. Replying to comments on your Threads posts can boost engagement by around 42% — the highest lift we've seen across any platform — according to Buffer data scientist Julian Winternheimer's analysis of over 128,000 Threads posts. Julian found that when creators and brands engage back in the…

My mom taught me a neat trick when I went to college: Take the leftover veggies from dinner, chop some fine onion, add some hot sauce, and use it as your sandwich spread. I used the hack all the time — sometimes for breakfast on busy mornings and other times for snacking in late evenings. I was always surprised at how different yet familiar the sandwich tasted. That's content repurposing in a nutshell: You take existing content and adapt it into new formats for different platforms. But what most of us struggle with is practicing repurposing content regularly. It doesn’t become a part of workflows so easily, and it’s often more difficult than it looks. In this article, I’…

Here's something worth knowing upfront: You don't need millions of followers or superstar status to make money on Instagram. Micro and even nano-influencers on Instagram are supplementing — or even replacing — their income with content creation. I now have over 15,000 followers on Instagram, but when I started experimenting with monetization, I had no idea what would actually work. And I tried everything. Affiliate links that made me a few bucks, brand partnerships that weren't really sustainable, and eventually a few income streams that started stacking up month after month. One of the most important things I've learned is that there no ‘easy money’ switch here — turning…

On March 21, 2006, founder Jack Dorsey set up his “twttr”: Since then, some of the most important, world-changing moments have unfolded on Twitter in real-time for all to see, react to, and engage with. A lot has changed since those early days, including the platform’s name. When Elon Musk officially acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022, for $44 billion, he renamed it X. Almost four years later, people are still calling the platform Twitter, so, in this article, we’ll jump around between the two names or use both. just setting up my twttr — jack (@jack) March 21, 2006 If you’re new to X, or feel like you’re no longer sure how to use Twitter after all the changes, this a…

For a word that determines so much of how social media and the creator economy operate, engagement can be pretty hard to pin down. So, we looked at the data. This report documents how engagement works across social media in 2026. Not how we wish it worked or not how platforms market it — but what the data shows. To understand what's actually happening across feeds right now, we dug into tens of millions of posts published through Buffer — looking at engagement baselines, reply behavior, posting frequency, and how different formats perform across platforms. The short version: If you're spending more energy looking for the perfect time to post than you are replying to the p…

If you use Buffer, then you’re familiar with our Composer. It’s where every post begins. Where you draft, tweak, preview, and hit publish. It’s the most-used surface in the entire product, and it’s the core of our value. For a while now, though, the composer has been showing its age. Not necessarily to users (it worked!), but under the hood, it was built on legacy code that made it increasingly difficult to maintain, improve, and extend. Every small change carried risk. Every new feature required navigating layers of complexity that slowed us down. So we decided it was finally time to do something about it. Over the past few months, a small team at Buffer has been moder…

If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, it’s easy to believe that video is the be-all and end-all. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikToks, LinkedIn’s video feed: it’s everywhere, and it feels like every platform is building for it. If you’re looking to build an audience, “more video” is often touted as the answer. But is that true? It turns out — as is often the case with social media — it depends. Video certainly performs best on some platforms, but it’s not quite as cut-and-dried on others. This data comes from our 2026 State of Social Media Engagement report, which analyzed millions of posts across all major platforms. And, at the risk of sounding like a cli…

We recently started a small project to clean up how parts of our systems communicate behind the scenes at Buffer. Some quick context: we use something called SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service. These queues act like waiting rooms for tasks. One part of our system drops off a message, and another picks it up later. Think of it like leaving a note for a coworker: "Hey, when you get a chance, process this data." The system that sends the note doesn't have to wait around for a response. Our project was to perform routine maintenance: update the tools we use to test queues locally and clean up their configuration. But while we were mapping out what queues we actually use, we fou…

For years, Alexandrea Browman's team had two options when it came to responding to client comments and messages on social media: log in with the client's credentials (a security risk), or navigate Meta Business Suite (time-consuming and clunky). Neither was great. And community management wasn't a nice-to-have for her boutique agency, Sapphire Social — it's their specialty. So when she found a tool that solved it, it was a no-brainer." With Buffer, it's just all in one place," she says. "It's so easy." Alexandrea has been working in social media for over a decade. For the last three years, she's been running Sapphire Social, an agency based in Oregon. She manages around …

Today, we're introducing our refreshed design across Buffer. Our new navigation, and updated visual language give creators and businesses more flexibility as social media continues to evolve. Our goal has been to make Buffer feel calmer, clearer, and easier to work in every day. A few weeks ago, we wrote about our aim to offer a smarter, more insightful Buffer: a toolset that helps more creators and businesses make smarter decisions around their social media strategies. But that’s only one part the story of Buffer in 2026. As creators ourselves, we at Buffer believe we can do more to help build momentum when working on social media. And momentum is not created by forcing …

Your tools can make or break productivity (especially when you’re on a fully remote team!). At Buffer, we're fully distributed across multiple time zones, so our collaboration tools are ✨ essential ✨ for staying on track. Put simply, a social media collaboration tool is software that lets everyone on your team plan, create, review, approve, and publish posts together — all in one shared workspace. Our suite of tools is extensive, especially on the Marketing team, and our curated selection helps us fill our queues, manage social channels, create graphics, and generally stay organized. In this article, I’ve listed some of the tools we use that make collaboration on social…

Facebook is a new frontier for me. I've been having loads of fun over the past few months experimenting with the shiny new features Facebook has launched to woo creators. Facebook itself may not be all that shiny, but there’s no denying that it's enormous. And for a lot of creators, small business owners, and marketers, it's a great place to find new audiences. I'll be honest, though: even Facebook has over three billion monthly active users, and I'm... not reaching even a teeny tiny fraction of them. My content performance has been hit and miss. So when Buffer's senior data scientist, Julian Winternheimer, dug into over a million Facebook posts as part of his cross-platf…

Facebook wasn't really on my radar as a place to make money. Instagram, sure. TikTok, absolutely. But Facebook felt like the platform I used to keep up with my high school friends, rather than the one I'd turn to for creator income. But things are changing! Facebook has been making a lot of effort to lure over creators from other platforms — especially when it comes to monetization. As a nano creator, I’ve been keeping a close eye on this for several months now. Brand partnerships make up a small part of my income, but most platforms’ native monetization features are woefully out of reach for me as a small creator. So Facebook piqued my interest. The idea that I could ear…

I've wanted to be a social media creator for years. Six months ago, I finally started — and almost quit before I posted a single thing. I had plenty of ideas — the problem was that every piece of advice I found was written for a brain that works very differently from mine. I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2019 and level one autism in 2020 — and not one article I read addressed what it takes to stay consistent when your brain fights you on it. So I stopped following everyone else's advice and built a system that works for my brain instead. My brain doesn't naturally see the steps between "start a social media account" and "become a successful creator." I see the end goal, but …