Overspray blues

I've previously posted how happy I was on how my basement floor turned out with epoxy paint. But my wife and I after the fact decided the window wells would look better if the galvanized steel were painted white, so I opted to spray paint them with just spray cans instead of brushing them white and little did I realize how much overspray a can of spray paint can cause, fading my flooring a little bit instead of having that nice darker gray slate with clear coating over it, so the overspary gave it a little faded look with the thin coat as I saw the difference when I moved a box. So I scrubbed as much as I could with simply dishwasher soap and water, but is there any better way to remove overspray without removing the layer of clearcoat and therefore restoring the original finish I had prior to overspray? For the second window well, I learned my lesson and put tarp all over the place and had a fan blowing the over spray up through the window well, which helped immensely but unfortunately the first time I got a thin layer of over spray all over the place including my new leather furniture :(

No simple answers when it comes to Toronto’s biggest problems: James

Why do we trick ourselves into thinking that Candidate A has solutions to decades-old challenges, asks Royson James.

10 New Marketing Tactics to Try Today (They’re All In Your Buffer Account!)

Social media evolves every day.

We’re constantly learning more about how to connect better, empathize more deeply and create more lasting relationships.

At Buffer, we’re so grateful to be part of social media’s rapid evolution, and we’re so inspired by all the tactics and strategies we hear from you, our audience, on your social media journey.

As a result, we’re able to grow Buffer’s product and make it even more useful for you. Here are 10 new elements you can find in your Buffer account right now that we hope will move your social media marketing forward.

Note: If you’ve got a change—big or small—that would improve your Buffer experience, we’d love to hear about it. See what other customers are sharing and add your vote or new idea. You can also email us or reach us on Twitter anytime at all!

1. Perfect timing: Try our Optimal Scheduling tool

Have you ever wondered what the perfect time to schedule your updates is? The Buffer Optimal Scheduling tool can help you find out!

What it does: Just choose the profile you’d like to optimize, and submit!

We look at the past 5,000 interactions (e.g. likes, favorites, clicks, etc.) you’ve had on your profile as well as similar profiles in the same timezone. We then plot these according to your timezone in a 24-hour period, to see when most interactions have happened.

Then you can choose to replace your existing schedule in one click, or use these times to make manual changes to your Buffer schedule.

Why you might use it: We’re constantly learning more about the methods and research to find the best times to post, but your own, individual data is likely to give your content its best chance for success.

Where to find it in Buffer: Anyone can find their optimal posting times using this tool, whether or not you have a Buffer account! Find this Buffer feature right here.

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2. Get more from your content: Share multiple times with the Power Scheduler

So you’ve got an awesome new piece of content. I bet you might want to share it to all your different social networks, maybe with different messaging and timing for each? Possibly even a few different times on the same network? Buffer’s Power Scheduler has got you covered!

What it does: The Power Scheduler allows you to take one piece of content and create your own custom schedule for it. Choose your networks, create your ideal schedule and optimize each post exactly the way you want it—all on one page. All your updates will go right into your Buffer queue!

Why you might use it: We’ve shared a lot of research about the power of sharing content more than once—it can help you hit multiple time zones and drastically increase your traffic. We hope the Power Scheduler makes it easy and fun!

Where to find it in Buffer: You can find the Power Scheduler through the Buffer extension—just locate a piece of content that you’d like to share and navigate over to the “Power Scheduler” tab. Here’s a video that explains more:

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3. Picture-perfect Facebook posts: Upload a custom thumbnail

We’re excited to add a feature that can make your Facebook posts even more customized: the ability to upload custom thumbnails when sharing links!

What it does: Now, whenever you’re sharing a link on Buffer (through the web dashboard or the extensions), in addition to selecting a thumbnail from the images found on the page, you’ll also be able to upload a custom one.

Why you might use it: Putting your best foot forward on Facebook can be a delicate process—especially with everything we know about the Facebook algorithm and what makes an idea Facebook post. We’ve had a lot of success experimenting with custom thumbnails that help your audience understand what to expect when they click!

Where to find it in Buffer: When you choose a link to share on Facebook, you’ll see a preview of your post. Hover over the center of the thumbnail preview, and click the upload button that appears!

Here’s how your custom thumbnail post will show up on Facebook:

Cool bonus: This feature works for LinkedIn, too!

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4. Share your commentary: Retweet with comment

Ever since Twitter announced the ability to say more in your retweets with “Retweet with comment,” we knew it would be a great feature to have in Buffer.

What it does: This feature allows you to add an up to 140-character comment in your retweet while still referencing the original tweet—no more character count frustration trying to squeeze your thoughts in before the retweet.

Why you might use it: Retweets are a great way to engage with your following, build community, and catch the eye of influencers in your field. And since retweet with comment gives you more room to share your thoughts, there’s even more opportunity with them now!

Where to find it in Buffer: First, make sure you have the Buffer extension installed on your browser—it’s the easiest way to share from anywhere. It will also a little Buffer button into every post in your Twitter feed. Use it to retweet or add your comment for a modified retweet:

Your retweet with comment will show up in the Twitter feed like this:

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5. Find the perfect GIF with the Buffer GIF Mood Board

One of my very favorite new projects is the Buffer GIF Mood Board. Who doesn’t love a good GIF?

What it does:  This very animated project collects upbeat, safe-for-work GIFs in one spot that makes it easy to share them to social media through Buffer.

Why you might use it: GIFs are a dynamic, fun way to engage with your audience, thank your fans, tell a story and more! They also look pretty compelling in a crowded social media feed.

Where to find it in Buffer: Find all the GIFs right here!

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6. Customize your content stream: Dismiss button for Feeds

Great content comes from many places, and the Buffer Awesome plan helps you organize it all in one place with Buffer Feeds—the ability to add RSS feeds to your Buffer social profiles and share directly from the dashboard.

What it does: Our most recent change adds a dismiss button to Feeds, so you can share great links directly from your favorite sites and dismiss the links that don’t fit your strategy. We wrote a lot more about the process of making this change here. 

Why you might use it: Content curation is a perfect way to establish thought leadership, show appreciation to content creators, and well, share great stuff! The dismiss button is a simple change that we hope will keep your Feeds area clean and uncluttered, plus give you a nice sense of completion when you’ve gone through all your posts for the day or week!

Where to find it in Buffer: Buffer Awesome plan and Business plan customers can find Feeds in the Content section. Add up to 15 feeds for a customized daily news source:

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7. Stand out on social media with videos and GIFs

Did you know you can  upload, share, and schedule videos and GIFs from Buffer to all your social media networks?

What it does: With Buffer for Video, you can upload a video once, on your schedule, and share it to multiple social media networks at the time that’s right for you and your audience.

Why you might use it: In 2015 we’ve seen the addition of video on Twitter and a giant push by Facebook to make video a major component of the News Feed. Check out some staggering social media video stats:

• The number of videos in Facebook feeds has grown by 360%
• 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter
• Globally, people are posting 75% more videos to Facebook
• 50% of Americans who use Facebook on a daily basis watch at least 1 video every day

Where to find it in Buffer: Buffer for Video is in all Buffer accounts! To get started, select a video file from your computer and drop it into the Buffer composer window. Follow along with this quick video to get all the details:

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8. Create lightning-fast social media images with Pablo

Ever since we launched Pablo, our friendly social media image-maker, we’ve gotten tons of great feedback from many of you on how we can make this tool even more useful for you.

And we’re happy to oblige! Now you can make 3 different types of images in Pablo—perfect for all social media networks.

You can also right-click an image or quote to quickly work with it in Pablo.

What it does: With Pablo, anyone can create engaging images. No sign-in, no design experience and no money needed. Type any text you’d like into the text box and choose an image as a background.

Pablo comes equipped with a ton of beautiful photos via our friends at UnSplash, or you can upload your own image to use. (Need a great source for images? We’ve got ya covered!)

You can make the text larger or smaller, change your font type or color, switch the photo to blurred or black-and-white, move things around, and add a secondary line of text or even an icon!

When you get your image looking the way you want it, you’re done! With one click, you can share to Twitter, Facebook, or add your creation to your Buffer queue. You can also download the image to use in a blog post, social media post or anywhere you like.

Why you might use it: We’ve found that oftentimes images are the hook that draws more clicks, shares, and favorites on social media. And a number of marketing studies report the same:

• Blog posts with images receive 94% more views than those without images
• Having at least one image in a post leads to more than double the shares on Facebook and Twitter
• Using an image on Twitter increases retweets by 28% and favorites by 36%

Where to find it in Buffer: Pablo is a standalone tool free for anyone to use—find it right here.

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9. Make analytics-driven decisions with Buffer for Business

If you’re working with a team, we believe Buffer for Business is the best way to drive traffic, increase fan engagement and save time on social media. And now we’re giving new users a month to explore all that it has to offer!

What it does: Buffer for Business builds on our simple sharing system with lots more power, including team management, deep analytics and more.

• Detailed analytics: With comparison features, sorting and aggregated stats
• Team collaboration: With approval features, admin rights and more team members
• Team collaboration: Add a new team member as either a Manager or a Contributor, with different privileges for each role
• Insights: See at a glance how you’re doing and where you’re headed
• Exporting: Grab all your data anytime and add them to your reports with the click of a button

Why you might use it: We all want success—and that means gauging our performance. Whether you’re benchmarking for yourself or creating a report for a client or boss, it’s vital to know which stats matter—and how to measure them so you can achieve your goals.

Where to find it in Buffer: If you’re new to Buffer, adding to your team, or interested in getting more insight into your performance, we’d love for you to give Buffer for Business a try!

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10. Optimize your Pinterest sharing with ideal images

This year, we were lucky enough to be able to add Pinterest sharing to our network offerings at Buffer. Since then we’ve gotten lots of great feedback and been able to make our Pinterest posting even more seamless for you.

What it does: Our most recent change pulls all Pin-able images from a page into a easy-to-choose gallery the moment you choose Pinterest as your network of choice for sharing. Now you can see exactly what your image will look like on Pinterest and choose the image mostly likely to resonate with your audience.

Why you might use it: There’s a specific art and science to the creation of a viral Pin. Everything from color to size to subject matter factors in to how far your Pin might spread. We’d love to help you increase the odds of success!

Where to find it in Buffer: Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can post and schedule to Pinterest, in addition to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Hooray for one-stop social media publishing!

Over to you!

Have you noticed any of these new elements in your Buffer account? We’d be keen to hear how your experience has been with them.

And if you’ve got a change—big or small—that would improve your Buffer experience, we’d love to hear about it. See what other customers are sharing and add your vote or new idea. You can also email us or reach us on Twitter anytime at all!

The post 10 New Marketing Tactics to Try Today (They’re All In Your Buffer Account!) appeared first on Social.

moving lineset- how fragile?

My AC lineset is rubbing some framing members in a few spots and the insulation is damaged. I will need to pull on it a bit to get it off the rubbing spots and to fix the insulation. I was concerned about the stress on it.

How fragile is an AC lineset? And any tips on how to isolate it from rubbing against stuff would be appreciated.

Toronto, province spat over property taxes

Mayor John Tory says the city may look to raise rents or other measures in response to the province trying to claw back property taxes.

The Advanced Guide to Mobile Social: Tools, Tactics and Inspiration

Ever since we wrote The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Social Media, we’ve been itching to dig deeper into mobile social strategies.

After all, the evidence that we’re only growing more addicted to our cell phones is undeniable:

• The average user looks at her or his mobile phone up to 221 times a day
• 90% of American adults have a mobile phone—and 64% own a smartphone
• 60% of social media time is spent on smartphones and tablets
• 75% of Twitter users are active on mobile
• 38% of Facebook users get there solely through mobile devices

So when our friends at bit.ly asked us to partner up for a webinar on the very topic of mobile social media, we were delighted to say yes. We’d love to invite you to join us Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 12:30 Eastern; 9:30 Pacific, when we’ll share lots of data about optimizing social for mobile and all the tactics you need to get started.

Here’s a preview of some of what we’ll be discussing. Hope to see you there!

Why Mobile Matters

Even knowing the above stats, it can be remarkably easy to underestimate the power our smartphones hold when it comes to marketing. I mean, I still work on a laptop for most of the day—maybe you do, too.

But beginning in early 2014, internet usage on mobile devices began to exceed desktop usage.

These days, more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the U.S.  And Goldman Sachs has predicted that the number of people making purchases on smartphones and tablets will grow to nearly half of all e-commerce by 2018.

Even better? The mobile web is super social! In a study of 2.4 million websites and more than 6 billion social signals, ShareThis determined that the mobile web is twice as social as desktop. (The numbers are even greater for iPhone users, who share at a three-times greater rate than desktop.)

Mobile users are ready—to share, to review, to chat, to shop. So the question is, how ready are you?

Is your content optimized? Are your social media posts mobile-ready?

I know I could use a little help in this area. Let’s see if we can find some tools and strategies to help out.

7 Tools to Optimize Your Site for Mobile

Before we can know if we’re ready, we might need to know what “mobile friendly” actually looks like.

Maybe Google can help. Early in 2015, the search giant rolled out a mobile-friendly algorithm update and offered some simple advice:

“Imagine a user looking at your site on a mobile device. Can the user easily read your page and find the necessary information or is too hard to use?”

Google defines “mobile friendly” with these characteristics:

• Readable text without zooming
• Content sized to the screen (no horizontal scrolling required)
• Easy use of links and buttons
• The absence of applications like Flash that can make mobile sites hard to use.

When Portent tested a giant batch of leading sites last year according to these characteristics, 40% of them failed Google’s ‘mobile-friendly’ test.

So how does your site stack up? Know how your content looks and loads on mobile and tablets with these tools:

Site viewing tools

1. Responsinator

A super simple way to test on the most popular phone and tablet devices. Just enter an URL to have a look:

2. Browserstack

A heavy duty tool, Browserstack lets you test in real browsers and has iOS, Android and Opera mobile and tablet emulators to help you test across a large range of devices.

3. Screenfly

Responsive screen testing on monitors, tablets, smart phones, and more. (Screenfly is part of a suite of neat tools that allow you to wireframe, build sitemaps and more.)

Other mobile tools

4. Google’s Mobile Friendly Tester

If you’d really like a simple “yes or no” answer to the mobile readiness question, Google has your tool (and a great resource of mobile information, too)!

5. W3C mobileOK Checker

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops standards for the Web, and their mobile checker offers a lot of great information as well as a score to see how well you’re faring.

6. mobiReady

A free visualization and testing tool, mobiReady not only shows you how your site looks on various devices but also gives you a score based on your mobile readiness and offers you lots of details on how exactly to improve:

7. Google Analytics

Google Analytics can tell you a lot about where your traffic is coming from. For example, 35% of the Buffer Social blog’s traffic comes from mobile and tablet users. That’s a big chunk!

Diving even deeper, we can see exactly which devices are most popular with our audience (Apple devices make up almost 60%!):

7 Tactics to Build Mobile-Optimized Content

1. Understand your audience and their mobile patterns

One great thing to know as you get started building a mobile social strategy is how your audience uses mobile devices. What types do they use to read your content, and when? Are they in bed? At work? In front of the TV?

Here’s some great info from IDG on some overall mobile and tablet patterns—the full infographic has even more helpful data about how customers use mobile and what for.

Once you know that, you can schedule your distribution accordingly. (Maybe Buffer’s Optimal Scheduling tool can help?)

2. Start small

We’re big fans of epic content here at Buffer. But when you’re optimizing for mobile, it might be better to think small.

Many mobile thinkers recommend a total overhaul of the way we tell stories. When you plan your next major project for mobile platforms, you could try “chunkifying” your content by presenting it in mobile-friendly pieces: Start small with tweet-like messaging and grow into more in-depth pieces, rather than beginning with long-form articles and crunching them down.

You can add structure to each piece through facts, quotes, statistics, events or images.

3. Consider the mobile social experience

Lots of social media is already inherently pretty mobile. But there are a few small factors that, when given extra consideration, can make a big impact on your fans and followers. For example:

• Design a desktop header image for your social media sites that does double duty—make sure it will also look good with a mobile overlay.
• Check how your sites look on mobile periodically.
• Add images! An eye-grabbing image is a great way to transmit lots of information in a flash. Since they can appear in multiple aspect ratios, an image with info in the center will look best no matter how it’s viewed. (P.S. Buffer’s Pablo tool can help you create social media images fast!)
• Make it fun! Engage your mobile community by providing incentives for contributing photos or videos. Make it easy to contribute by using a unified hashtag for your campaign.

4. Expand your social media universe

You definitely don’t need to join every social network to be successful, but if you want to up your focus on mobile you could consider spending some time on emerging channels, many of which tend to have a mobile focus.

Create an Instagram presence; optimize your Foursquare account (be sure to check your reviews consistently!); experiment with Snapchat, Periscope, Blab, and even podcasts (most of which are listened to on mobile!). The social media universe is vast—and expanding rapidly!

5. Optimize share buttons and social logins

On mobile, things like signing in and sharing content can be a bit trickier. I know I’ve had the experience of being stuck trying to do both of those things on a mobile site.

A Gigya study found that 64% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 use social logins because they dislike spending the time to fill out registration forms.

So make it simple to sign in, buy and share—streamline the experience by optimizing your social logins and share buttons.

6. Add video

Video can be a great mobile strategy: Mobile users are 3 times as likely to view a video than desktop shoppers, and they watch video longer and share video more—92% of mobile video viewers say they share video. (Particularly if you can create a funny or unique clip–66% of respondents said they shared videos of this type.)

You don’t have to be a video professional to get going here—even a beginner with an iPhone can create an awesome, shareable video. (And with Buffer for Video, you can upload video once and share it everywhere!)

7. Try an SMS program

You probably don’t have time to read your entire Twitter timeline every day, but I bet you’re way more likely to read all your text messages! In fact, more than 90 percent of people read a text message within first three minutes.

So why not try an SMS program? Connect with your customers and offer customized content that takes advantage of their locations.

It might not be as dissimilar to social media as you might think. Similar to Twitter, you only have 160 characters to get your point across. Convince and Convert has a great guide for getting started.

3 Brands Leading The Way in Mobile Social

1. Buzzfeed: Mobile-first strategy

BuzzFeed is often on the forefront of social media trends, and mobile social is no exception.

A core element of their team is Buzzfeed Distributed, which focuses on making new original solely for mobile-forward platforms like Tumblr, Imgur, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and messaging apps.

They also focus heavily on making sure each piece of content looks great on mobile, with a special preview function in their content management system that allows for mobile previews.

The result? A mobile-first traffic pattern that’s markedly different than the rest of the web’s: In 2014, 58 percent of mobile time spent on BuzzFeed came from mobile web vs. 42 percent on apps, in stark contrast to the 84 percent/16 percent app vs. mobile web split seen across the web overall.

P.S. If you don’t quite have a content management system as mobile-prepared as Buzzfeed’s, no worries! You can also try right clicking any piece of content you’re working on and use the “Inspect Element” in your browser (both Chrome or Firefox should work great!).

Even if your site is responsive, you’ll want to check the size and load time of photos, embeds, infographics, etc.

2. Dominos: Personalized experience on any device

With a lovely responsive site and a personalized customer experience for each device,  Dominos is one of the leaders in the mobile social space.

Even beyond the basic mobile readiness, Dominos has embraced the idea that a craving for pizza can strike anywhere, and responded accordingly. With Dominos Anyware, you can order pizza from your Apple watch, your smart TV, or even by tweeting a pizza emoji. Pretty cool!

3. Zappos: Experimental customer connection

Zappos is among a handful of brands—including Sephora, Intuit, Starbucks, and others—that are exploring mobile not just as an element of an overall marketing strategy but as its own specific approach that caters to users along the entire journey.

For example, its Ask Zappos feature makes it easy to connect and ask a question from anywhere, so Zappos can be on a customer’s mind when they’re walking around town and see a great pair of shoes.

Over to you!

I hope this might have demystified mobile social a bit. I know this research has shown me some areas where Buffer can improve!

What cool stuff have you seen lately when it comes to mobile social? What strategies and tactics have been working well for you? What challenges have you discovered? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments!

And we’d love to see you Wednesday for our mobile social webinar!

The post The Advanced Guide to Mobile Social: Tools, Tactics and Inspiration appeared first on Social.

Toro Recycler 22" not starting

I have a Toro Recycler 22" model 20017.

Not sure what happened but it will not start.

What I see is the Bail-brake is very close to the end and there is not enough movement when I pull it in order to start.

it is connected via a cable to some kind of a switch at the front right side of the lawn Mower, but this switch in not pulled enough when I pull the Bail-brake.

Any help will be appreciated.

Riding mower sudden loud grinding noise

I have a John Deere L120 riding lawn mower. While cutting grass a sudden LOUD metal grinding noise started from under the hood. I immediately shut it off and checked the oil. It was low so filled it to the line. Retried one time and same sound.

It is a briggs and stratton i believe. It normally releases a small cloud of smoke from the front of the hood when i start it. Really worried my engine and lawn mower are done. Thoughts? Thank you.

Sink drain line and 90 degree turn

The sink drain/outlet comes out of the wall at an angle. I want to add a 60 degree turn, followed by a few inches of straight pipe, then a 90 degree sharp turn followed by more straight pipe that will go into the side of the cabinet to the p-trap/sink/disposal Here is a picture of how it would be. http://i.imgur.com/fRJzMHP.jpg?1

Attached Images

The Social Media Manager’s Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checklist

Hmm, I feel like I’m forgetting something. 

OK, where to begin?

These thoughts will sometimes race through my head when I’m sitting down to focus on social media time. I’ll fire up Twitter and Facebook and Buffer and want really bad to ensure that I’m covering all my bases and spending time in the best way possible.

And on the good days, I’m right into the groove where I know exactly what to do next and what are the most important tasks that need to get done.

The difference for me is with making a checklist for my social media activities.

I’m happy to share with you all of the tasks I have on my checklist at Buffer and also the ones that social media managers around the web have on their daily, weekly, monthly checklists. And if I’ve left out a favorite to-do item of yours, I’d be so grateful to hear from you in the comments!

 

A Daily, Weekly, Monthly Social Media Checklist

We’ve found before that social media managers have a full-time schedule getting all their many tasks accomplished. As you might see in the below checklists, there’s lots to do!

I’ve broken it down here into a daily checklist, a weekly checklist, and a monthly checklist as some of the activities vary in their frequency and need. Feel free to adapt any of this to suit your specific needs (here’s a free template that you can copy and edit).

Keep reading for lots more info and explanation on each of the checklist items you see here!

Download the checklist as a pdf! Free and direct download here.

Daily

• Reply to everyone
• Check your mentions
• Monitor social media for keywords and phrases
• Schedule your updates for the next day
• Check out other social media profiles
• Curate content to share
• Advocacy: Make it easy for your team to share
• Engage with MVPs
• Follow back those who follow you
• Connect with one new person

Weekly

• Check your stats
• Engage with influencers
• Engage with partners
• Weekly goals check-in
• Hold a strategy session
• Attend events—chats, hangouts, etc.
• Update your social media ads

Monthly

• Perform a social media audit
• Goal-setting
• Come up with new experiments
• Plan ahead for the next month or more

The Daily Social Media Checklist

1. Reply to everyone

If you can reply to everyone who engages with you on social media, you’re doing better than 75% of brands on social media.

Some reports, like this one from Sprout Social, have found that 5 in 6 messages that need responses are not answered by brands. The inverse, of course, is that only 1 in 6 messages get an answer—that’s just 17%!

So first and foremost—and on those days when there’s just tons going on, perhaps the most important to-do item of the day and the one we’d recommend for sure making time for—reply to everyone. Reply as quickly as you can, given all else you have happening.

I like this line from AdWeek:

Ignoring customers on social media is similar to ignoring the phone ringing when they call your help centers.

Here are some of our best tips for quick and thorough replies:

• Set up push notifications on your mobile device
• Set up email notifications (with an IFTTT recipe notification if you’d like)
• Use a desktop app like Tweetdeck or other
• Use software like SparkCentral (for Twitter, where response time is paramount)
• Filter customer service to customer service

2. Check your mentions

One layer deeper into replying to everyone (and quite closely related to it) is checking your mentions—any time someone reaches out directly to you on social media.

There are a few quick and easy spots to visit to find these:

• Here’s where to look on Twitter.
• Here’s where to look on Facebook—you can replace the “bufferapp” here with your page name: https://www.facebook.com/bufferapp/notifications/
• Here’s where to look on LinkedIn—you can replace “buffer” with your company name: https://www.linkedin.com/company/buffer/notifications
• Here’s where to look on Google+

As far as the best frequency here, I tend to check my mentions once per day, which I’ve found to be a good flow for my personal brand. The Buffer team, on the other hand, we check our mentions constantly throughout the day on Twitter, using SparkCentral, and in morning and afternoon drivebys of our other social media channels.

3. Monitor social media for keywords and phrases

First off: How do you monitor? There are some neat ways we’ve found to use things like saved Advanced Searches in Twitter, for instance. And we gain a lot of value out of tools like Mention, which feature really robust Google-Alerts-like options for tracking mentions everywhere.

Then as a followup to the how, here’s the what: This great list from Courtney’s post on social media monitoring covers many of the basics of what to monitor on social media.

Brand or company monitoring

• Your name or your brand’s name (e.g., Buffer)
• Any variations of your brand’s name (e.g., Buffer and bufferapp)
• Potential misspellings of your brand’s name (e.g., bffr, bufffer)
• Names of the most active/visible members of your company (e.g., Joel Gascoigne, Leo Widrich)
• Mentions of specific campaigns you’re running (e.g., #bufferchat, #bufferpodcast)
• Your catchphrase, slogan or tagline

Industry or topic monitoring

• Key words or phrases that describe your industry or interest (For example, at Buffer I might want to monitor for key phrases like “social media sharing,” “social media posting” and “social media automation” to start out)
• Key words or phrases related to or complementary to your industry or interest
• Frequently used industry hashtags

I quite like this idea from Sprout Social also, where you use social media monitoring to discover potential new customers for your product.

Monitor for mentions of keywords that indicate that someone is looking for a product similar to yours.

In our case at Buffer, this could be someone who’s searching for “scheduling social media” or “social media management” tools.

4. Schedule your updates for the next day

Schedule your updates ahead of time is perhaps our number one time-saving tip for social media. I’ve personally felt such great freedom and productivity from batching the creation of social media updates into one window of time each day.

When it comes to the amount of what to post, we’re grateful for the research and advice that others have put together on ideal frequency of all the social networks.

Here are some best practices. I’d highly encourage you to test and experiment with what works best for you!

• Post 3 or more times per day on Twitter
• Post 2x per day on Facebook
• Post 1x per day on LinkedIn
• Post 1 to 2 times per day on Instagram
• Post 5 or more times per day on Pinterest
• Post 2 or more times per day on Google+

The timing of publishing these posts is another great one we’ve enjoyed researching. I really enjoy this infographic from SumAll that does a nice job summarizing some of the best practices out there:

5. Check out other social media profiles

We’ve gained so much inspiration from the work of others that it’s become a regularly-scheduled part of the day to head out and see what folks are trying on social media.

This can be as straightforward as visiting a handful of favorite profiles—either some industry titans, some peers in your field, some influencers, or some members of your audience.

On Twitter, this can be done quite quickly with a daily visit to one or more Twitter lists. We’ve come up with lots of ideas on how to create these lists. My personal favorite—and one I try to visit every day—is the list of my Buffer teammates.

On Facebook, you can add other pages to your Insights reports. To do so:

1. When logged in as the page admin, click Insights from the top of your Facebook page.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the Insights page, and you’ll see the “Pages to Watch” section.
3. Click the blue button to Add Pages.

Here’s a sample of what our “Pages to Watch” looks like at Buffer:

6. Curate content to share

Part of a social media sharer’s day is likely to include finding fantastic content to share.

We’ve found this to be an area where we’re okay investing a good chunk of time in order to find truly helpful, high-quality content to pass along to our audience. Many sites excel in personalized recommendations and hand-picked stories, and we’re grateful to include many of these in our daily workflow.

Here’re a few favorites:

Nuzzel

Nuzzel is another one of the “news from your friends” apps, letting you connect your social profiles in order to surface the stories that your circles are sharing. A few neat features of Nuzzel include:

• Not only news from friends but also news from friends of friends
• A list of replies and tweets referring to the top content shared by friends
• A boomerang feature: stories that might have slipped your attention

Panda

The site collects the top stories and visuals from some of the best communities on the web and delivers the content in an easy-to-browse layout (or via email, if you’d prefer). You can cycle among a handful of different sites without ever leaving the Panda homepage.

• Hacker News
• Growth Hackers
• Designer News
• Sidebar.io
• Product Hunt
• Lobsters
• Dribbble
• Behance
• Awwwards

Plus here are some more content sources that we’ve found to be great options as well:

• ContentGems
• LinkedIn Pulse
• Medium
• News.me
• Prismatic
• SmartBrief
• Swayy

7. Advocacy: Making it easy for your team to share

Some of your biggest fans and promoters are likely the people you work with!

LinkedIn found that employees are 70 percent more likely to click, share, and comment on an update than a typical LinkedIn user.

This brings up the idea of advocacy: Encouraging your team to share your content and advocate for your brand.

In practice, this can be as simply as adding a daily checklist item of emailing the team with a new blog post of yours or recommending a tweet to RT or favorite. Further, we’ve made it possible to suggest content to your teammates from within Buffer, which make this level of advocacy even smoother.

Here’s more, if you’re at all interested:

https://buffer.wistia.com/medias/o3z7a8nls7

8. Engage with MVPs

Come up with a list of MVP fans or followers, or key people who regularly evangelize your brand. This could be a list of top users, influential people in your industry, folks you’d love to get to know, etc.

Focusing on brand advocates is a popular way to go here, as you can multiply yourself to a degree by encouraging others to share about you. MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut has a great way of explaining and showing this process of flipping the funnel upside down:

What this might look like in practice:

• Creating a spreadsheet of MVPs with a column for the last time you made contact
• Marking MVPs within your social media management tool (we have a VIP tag within SparkCentral)
• Setting up a tickler file so you’re reminded to followup with MVPs

9. Follow back those who follow you

On most all social networks, you have a chance to reciprocate a follow and to really make someone’s day!

I follow a bit haphazardly on my personal accounts, so I’ve found lots of inspiration from others in the disciplined way they go about adding this task to their daily to-dos. There are a couple different strategies I’ve noticed with this one:

1. Follow everyone!

Return the favor for all those who follow you on social media. This can be quite straightforward on sites like Twitter and Instagram. For other networks, you can add people to circles on Google+, accept all connections to your LinkedIn, and follow a user or an individual board on Pinterest. On Facebook, pages can “like” other pages.

2. Follow those who fit with your focus or niche

Some people and brands choose to follow a bit more strategically by connecting with those who share common interests. With this, you can browse through a new follower’s bio or timeline to see if their social presence meshes with yours and then decided whether or not to return the follow.

Crowdfire (Twitter/Instagram) and ManageFlitter (Twitter) are two really useful tools for finding people to follow back and for removing any followers who are no longer a fit.

10. Connect with a new person

Similar to some of the other daily to-dos here on the checklist, connecting with someone new can fall in quite smoothly with re-following, replying, and engaging.

The idea behind this item is to practice making one-to-one connections with the people in your audience, welcoming new followers with a personal message or reaching out to someone you appreciate or admire.

And there are some fun ways to do this quickly and easily: Say hi, share a GIF, or go the extra mile with some surprise and delight.

Great tip, @kevanlee! Learn how to master the animated #thankyou cc @buffer http://t.co/5OhsSP2Eoj pic.twitter.com/Dx6aOURASk

— Slater Katz (@slaterinnyc) August 18, 2015

The team at Social Rank wrote about the surprise and delight element, going as far as creating campaigns around the strategy (and highlighting some really cool examples).

The Weekly Social Media Checklist

1. Check your stats

Some people enjoy checking stats on the daily, which is great!

We’ve found for us personally at Buffer that stat-checking is something that fits a bit better on a weekly basis—we can focus on creating and engaging every day and then take a step back to analyze once the week is over.

(One way that’s been helpful for me to think about this is by numbering each week. So for instance, we’re in Week 35 right now. The website whatweekisit.com is really helpful for this.)

In terms of what to check when it comes to stats, there are so many, many options.

We’ve shared a bit about an introduction to social media stats, as well as a weekly social media report you can create for sharing with your boss, client, or team.

I also really like this tip from Finola Howard:

Measure what’s worked. Note your best-performing posts in a spreadsheet or other file so you can reference later as you hone your content.

What makes for a best-performing post? That can be totally up to you, depending on the stats that matter to you. I’ve found that “best-performing” can often be quite easily seen by checking into the stats in my Buffer dashboard and noting how many clicks and reshares an update got, plus how many people it reached.

2. Engage with influencers

Many of the daily checklist items involve engaging with your audience. This weekly to-do encourages you to reach out to those outside your circle, particularly any influencers in your industry or niche.

Influencers would typically be those with either a large following or a verified status or an important role at a significant company.

In the past, I’ve identified a few people who I was keen to connect with, added them to a Twitter list, then went about the weekly task of checking out their updates and engaging when appropriate. The goal, ultimately, is to build a relationship and connection—and in a lot of cases it works, if given time.

3. Engage with partners

Similar to the above, engaging with partners involves staying in frequent connection with your fellow brands and friends—in our case it might be some sister SaaS tools like Moz, Unbounce, Feedly, or Pocket.

It’s great to foster these good relationships with peers and partners so that you can continue to collaborate and help each other out as you grow.

4. Weekly goals check-in

How are you doing on your goals? (Much more on goal-setting in the Monthly section below.)

Often times, along with checking your stats on a weekly basis, you can quickly peek at how your stats fit with the goals you’ve set for social media. Here’re a couple of ways we do this at Buffer:

1. Per-post basis

I know that we’ve got a certain benchmark in mind for a successful post, so I’m able to quickly see if we’ve reached that goal by peeking at the per-post stats (for instance, one benchmark is 200 clicks per tweet).

2. Longer-term goals

At other times, we’ll set a bigger goal to aim for over time, and we’ll use what’s called a waterfall graph to chart our progress.

All credit to the team at HubSpot for turning us onto this cool idea. If you’re keen to make a waterfall graph for yourself, here are the instructions:

1. Make a copy of our waterfall template here.
2. Set a long-term goal for the month (or longer)
3. Divide that goal by how many days you have between now and the goal’s end (alternatively, we’ve also done this by weeks)
4. Fill out the spreadsheet with your goals and data—the built-in formulas to the bulk of the work here—and add your new traffic/numbers each week to see the graph grow!

5. Hold a strategy session

This one fits with our value of making time to reflect. I’ve found that I can quite easily get heads-down into the day-to-day tasks of social media, and it’s always so refreshing to take a step back and see our social media strategy from a higher level.

Some neat exercises here could be reviewing what went into your social media marketing plan in the first place, i.e. your goals and purpose behind social media. Or answering some of these questions:

1. What do we hope to achieve with social media?
2. Are we on the right networks to connect with our audience?
3. How does our voice/tone convey our brand?
4. In what ways can we be most helpful to those we serve?

At Buffer, we’re getting into the pattern of a weekly visioning sync on some of these higher-level ideas, and it’s felt great to be able to spend focused time making reflection a priority in this way.

6. Attend events – chats, hangouts, etc.

Often times, social media events will occur on a weekly basis—Twitter chats, Google Hangouts, and the like.

We run our weekly #bufferchat every Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. Pacific.

We enjoy participating in the weekly #CMGRHangout (for community managers) every Friday.

In terms of finding a chat like these to participate in, Nicole put together a great list of possible places to look:

• Chat Salad is a great place to find chats that are currently happening or taking place in the near future.
• Tweet Reports also has a great listing of Twitter chats.
• Twubs, a website where you can register a hashtag, has an easy-to-read and thorough listing of chats.
• This huge Google doc spreadsheet includes hundreds of Twitter chats.

7. Update your social media ads

Depending on the depth of your commitment and involvement in social media ads, this one could easily be a daily to-do item. If you’re running just a few ads, then weekly could be a good frequency to start with. Check and refresh your ads. Keep the ones that are working. Iterate on the ones that aren’t.

We covered some introductory ground with our social media ads experiments on Facebook, and the comments on the post—like the one below from Lucie—are super helpful in explaining how to know what’s working and what to check on a regular basis.

The Monthly Social Media Checklist

1. Perform a social media audit

With a monthly social media audit, you can look for

• Any updates needed to the profile picture, cover photo, description, or bio for your accounts
• The frequency with which you’ve been publishing to each place
• The growth in followers
• Referral traffic from a network back to your site
• Average clicks and reach for your updates

We’ve placed all this into a spreadsheet that we use to check in with things on a monthly basis. We’d be happy to share the template with you if that’d be helpful for your workflow!

Here’s the social media audit template that you can copy and use.

2. Goal-setting

There’re lots of different ways to go about goal-setting, as highlighted in this neat chat between Tim Ferriss (who enjoys setting goals) and Leo Babauta (who doesn’t).

I find that I fall somewhere a bit in the middle, where I really enjoy having production goals to aim for (publish four blog posts per week, launch a new thing every month) instead of end goals (get to 20,000 followers, have 1 million visits to the blog).

How does goal-setting look for you?

When it comes to social media goals, we wrote in the past about seven goal-setting strategies that could be helpful as you approach this monthly task of finding goals for the future. Here are the seven:

1. S.M.A.R.T
2. Locke and Latham’s
3. OKRs
4. BSQ
5. BHAG
6. Growth Hacker goal-setting
7. Intriguing metric

3. Come up with new experiments

In the list of goal-setting strategies above, the last one—intriguing metric—is one that we’ve found quite helpful for us here at Buffer as we think about coming up with new experiments for social media.

The process for doing so involves fitting our metrics into one of four buckets (HT to KISSmetrics cofounder Hiten Shah for his advice here!):

1. High traffic, low conversion
2. Low traffic, high conversion
3. High traffic, high conversion
4. Low traffic, low conversion

The first two buckets are the ones where you find the biggest opportunities for growth and experimentation. Bucket No. 3 isn’t half bad either. Bucket No. 4 is best to be left alone.

4. Plan ahead for the next month or more

This one fits nicely in with the “time to reflect” value and focus of the weekly strategy sessions. In fact, planning ahead on a monthly basis could happen alongside weekly visioning as well.

With planning, you can both brainstorm strategies for the coming months and get granular with setting up an editorial calendar and charting upcoming campaigns.

The editorial/content calendar idea in particular is one that seems to resonate with a lot of folks. This calendar mockup from the team at Twitter is one that gets me particularly excited about planning ahead and getting things on a calendar!

A few other beautiful and helpful social media checklists

In researching this article, I came across a pair of really great checklists that I thought could be quite useful here as well. The first is from The Whole Brain Group:

The next one comes from AdWeek’s Social Times and is based on a social media checklist that Sprout Social social media manager Darryl Villacorta uses.

Over to you

What tasks are included in your daily workflow?

Weekly?

Monthly?

It’d be wonderful to learn from you and to pick up any tips you might be open to sharing! I’d love to continue the conversation in the comments, and I’ll look forward to hanging out with you there!

Image sources: Unsplash, Pablo, IconFinder

The post The Social Media Manager’s Daily, Weekly, Monthly Checklist appeared first on Social.