Latest / Content, Briefly / Buffer: Hailley Griffis on the intersection of comms and content

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Buffer: Hailley Griffis on the intersection of comms and content · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Our CEO Joel wrote this really long blog post. I think it's a... I think it's, like, a 28-minute read. Oh, wow.
• 0:06
  It's, like, a long, like, a long one, um, about our salary system, and it is the top driver for page views right now, and it is very close to the top driver for signups. Like, it's on both sides.
• 0:21
  [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm very excited to share our conversation with Hailey Griffis. She's the head of communications and content at Buffer.
• 0:37
  There's so much to discuss here. We really should do a part two of this. First thing we get into is her background in public relations, how communications and content intersect at Buffer.
• 0:48
  We talk, as you might imagine, about the legacy of Buffer's content marketing program.
• 0:54
  She's working with a library of about 3,000 blog posts, so we get into how she thinks about managing that, optimizing that, refreshing, et cetera, versus net new.
• 1:05
  There's really a lot to be discussed there because there's so much high-performing content already. Anyway, so there's lots to think about there.
• 1:12
  Kind of a different challenge than so many companies that we chat with have just given the kind of massive size of their content library, but interesting regardless of whether you're just getting rolling or working with a similar massive library of content.
• 1:25
  In any case, Hailey was extremely generous with her wisdom. It was a great conversation. Lots of good stuff here. I will also just quickly plug her blog and podcast, which are linked in the show notes.
• 1:35
  She's a wealth of knowledge about work and productivity, and she shares a lot of that on her personal channel, so I'd encourage folks to go check that out as well.
• 1:44
  And as always, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do, too. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Shuffle, the all-in-one video editing and production tool.
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• 2:50
  To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes. Hey, everybody.
• 2:58
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. Very excited to have Hailey Griffis from Buffer. She's the head of communications and content, which is maybe the first thing we should talk about.
• 3:08
  But first, Hailey, would you mind introducing yourself to listeners of this podcast who may not already know you? Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, first of all, Jimmy. Very excited to be here.
• 3:16
  I've loved so many of your episodes. But yeah, so head of communications and content at Buffer.
• 3:22
  I have actually been at Buffer for eight years, which I think is a little bit unusual in the tech space, and I'm also not one of the people that is necessarily the longest tenured at Buffer eight years.
• 3:31
  It's just there's, like, a bunch of us, which is quite cool. And I have a background in PR originally, though I started out as Buffer's first PR hire, and I have a lot of content and social experience mixed in there.
• 3:43
  And then I also write outside of my role at Buffer, and I also run a podcast outside of work, too. Amazing, which is called Make Work Work, right? Yes. Make Work Work. Okay. We'll definitely link to that in the comments.
• 3:55
  As I was prepping for this podcast, was also reading some of the blog posts you have on your personal blog, and there's some really good stuff in there. Oh, thank you.
• 4:01
  And actually, one in particular that stood out to me was about deleting all of your emails while you were out on- [laughs]... maternity leave, which I thought was, like, such a bold move.
• 4:09
  I wish I had that thought before I took leave when I had my last kid 'cause- [laughs]... you end up just stressing about it the whole time, like, all this stuff accumulating that you feel like you have to respond to.
• 4:18
  Yeah. It's like declaring email bankruptcy. It's so funny to me because that deleting email thing is the thing that sticks in people's mind for me so often. Oh, it... Yeah.
• 4:26
  'Cause I did that in 2021 when I had my first kid, and people were just like, "That is nuts." And then I remember posting about it again, and people were like, "Oh yeah, I first learned about you when you did this."
• 4:36
  And I think it's so funny- [laughs]... that deleting emails feels so wild that that's how- It feels insane... some people are remembering me. [laughs] Yeah. That's so funny.
• 4:42
  But yeah, I delete all my emails when I go on break, and so I came back from four months off to inbox zero. That did not last long, but it was- Yeah, yeah... very beautiful while it happened. [laughs] Good for you.
• 4:51
  Uh, that is awesome. Let's talk about the PR thing, 'cause I'm imagining that will sort of lead us into the communications part of your role now.
• 4:58
  I think this is probably the 75th-ish episode we've done, and you're definitely the first person who came into content with a PR background. So I would just be curious- Oh, that's cool... what's the story there?
• 5:10
  How did you get into PR, and then how did that lead you into content? Yeah. Originally, I started out in social media. I loved social, loved Facebook, loved Twitter. Like, we're talking, like, 2011, 2012.
• 5:23
  I was working at a clothing store, and I, like, convinced the managers that I should be running their Facebook and their Twitter account, and that was what got me in the door with my social media experience, start managing accounts, and I sort of just started freelancing for local small businesses and stuff like that.
• 5:38
  That experience landed me an in-house PR job.
• 5:42
  And it's funny because I had people at the time telling me, "Yeah, you're definitely gonna wanna go this PR direction 'cause this social media thing, it's kind of new, and it's probably not going anywhere."
• 5:52
  [laughs] And it's just very funny [laughs] in hindsight since I work at Buffer now. But so I, you know, I then transitioned into in-house PR for tech startups, and I did that in several places before landing at Buffer.
• 6:04
  And I will say that my style of in-house PR is veryRelationship focused, very writing heavy, very like making sure that I'm tailoring writing, very social focused as well, like I'll do a lot of outreach on social media.
• 6:17
  So I think there's a lot of overlap between the way that I do PR and like sort of content, community, social media, which is sort of all ended up working into my role here at Buffer.
• 6:27
  So for Buffer, I was Buffer's first PR hire. I remember seeing them post the job and being like, "Yes, this is me."
• 6:33
  And I was one of those people that I had been following Buffer for years, and I had applied two times previously and never made it to an interview, and so I was very excited to kinda like get in, start working, doing PR.
• 6:45
  I moved into sort of a more senior PR position, and then I transitioned from doing PR as primarily media outreach and sort of like trying to get those earned mentions and like those mentions from the media to more of the communications side of things, like, okay, what is our messaging?
• 7:02
  What's our positioning here? Maybe like some crisis comms if ever we needed it. Like all, like ghostwriting, and it turned into a lot of content as well.
• 7:10
  Like I really do think the way that I've done PR has had a lot of content sort of tangents involved in there, like, you know, different layers of content in there. For example,
• 7:20
  one of the things I've done that started out as PR but now content people always quote this, and they're like, "It's so cool that you did this," like super smart content marketing move was Buffer's state of remote work.
• 7:31
  So I ran a survey to get data on remote workers, and I used that data to pitch it to media contacts to get us press mentions and to like essentially build relationships when we didn't have product announcements or when I didn't have anything else to say to them, I would just start, you know, combing for original data and pitching that.
• 7:49
  And it's funny because on the content side, the state of remote was a very smart move because we ended up getting a ton of high-quality backlinks that like drives a ton of traffic, like just like it's been really solid content as well.
• 8:03
  And so I think there was just a lot of overlap, and eventually we got to a point at Buffer where we had a very small team, and we needed someone to step in for content, and so it ended up being me, and at first we thought it might be temporary and we might hire out, but I really enjoyed the role, and you know, I really enjoyed it.
• 8:18
  We've managed to do some really cool things, and so it's just sort of stuck and landed that I'm doing both comms and content, and yeah, very much having a good time. That's incredible. That's so interesting.
• 8:28
  You know, one of the things I was gonna ask you is what exactly is communications?
• 8:31
  That sounds like such a dumb question, but I think about content so much, and I haven't actually, I don't know, just thinking back throughout the last 10 years, I don't know if I've ever, as a content marketer, had the opportunity to work alongside a communications team.
• 8:44
  So like I don't have any like practical experience there. But what you just- Yeah... described about the state of remote work, the, you know, doing the outreach, getting mentions, all makes total sense.
• 8:55
  I'm wondering if, you know, Buffer has this culture of transparency, which I would imagine actually probably opens it up to a lot of press opportunities. Yeah.
• 9:05
  Is that true, and has that been, is that as much of a thing now as it used to be? Like I'm imagining like 10 plus years ago, it's like, you know, salaries are transparent.
• 9:12
  They're kind of blogging about like how the business is going. Is it, you know, [chuckles] what's easy, what's hard, all that kind of stuff.
• 9:19
  Does that still make up a significant part of the PR and comms that you're doing today? It still makes up a good chunk.
• 9:25
  I will say that, you know, salaries, remote work, and then now the four-day work week, which is another thing that we do at Buffer, are all- Oh, I didn't know that... the things that I get a lot of outreach about.
• 9:35
  And so that's very cool. It's almost like that concept of inbound marketing. There's like inbound PR was something that I started- Mm... to talk about it.
• 9:42
  Like, okay, we're gonna write about what we're doing, so that when a reporter is writing about the same story and they Google it, we're gonna show up first, and then they can reach out to me or my blog post is so good that they just include my blog post and link back to it.
• 9:55
  And then we end up getting the press mention. So there's sort of like that cycle that I've used as well. But your question was on transparency specifically, right?
• 10:04
  Well, yeah, just, I'm just sort of curious, like what you described about inbound PR makes a ton of sense.
• 10:08
  Like Buffer has this unique personality that I think probably makes it very attractive to the press in a way that, you know, maybe other brands who it's just, you know, it's a name and a logo, you don't really know much about the people or what happens internally, probably struggle a little bit to do PR, I would guess.
• 10:25
  Yeah, I think so. I think there are definitely a lot of reporters who know us, like we show up in a lot of search results.
• 10:30
  We are very unusual as a company when people will look for us, and then you're right, like the salaries thing, I've had a lot of reporters, so I'll reach out to them, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I saw that you share your salaries online."
• 10:39
  I think it's less shocking now than it used to be, but there was sort of a more of a shock factor when I initially started at Buffer, and, you know, sort of in those pre 2020, I would say, like in those 2010s, it was very unusual for Buffer to be doing what we were doing.
• 10:53
  It's becoming a little bit more common. You know, there are TikTok accounts where they're asking people for what their salary is and stuff like that, and Salary Transparency Street is a really good one.
• 11:02
  And so it's become a little bit less maybe taboo, let's say, and so now I, I feel like I get fewer people reaching out about it.
• 11:09
  But it definitely still happens, and I definitely still have a lot of folks who know us solely by that. They're like, "Oh, you're the people who have your salary online." Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right.
• 11:17
  [chuckles] But it- Yeah, yeah, yeah... definitely made it easier for me in the early days.
• 11:21
  I remember sending our salary spreadsheet, which used to just be a Google sheet, and I've since like reworked, and it is like a proper page on the website that looks very nice.
• 11:29
  It's at buffer.com/salaries, if I can put that little plug in there. But it used to just be like a Google sheet, and I remember sending it to a reporter, and she was like, "Can I link to this in this story?
• 11:39
  Like, is that okay?" [chuckles] And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, this is public." But I think she just couldn't understand why we had it in that space. Yeah, I mean, it actually was shocking. You know- Yeah...
• 11:50
  like I remember looking at it for the first time 10, 12 years ago or whatever it was, and looking at Bell Beth Cooper's salary and being like, "I'm underpaid. [chuckles] I want a raise." You know?
• 11:59
  Um- [laughs] I think we all felt that way when we saw the Buffer salary sheet. Yeah. Yeah, they were good salaries. Same thing for me. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, does it get old?
• 12:05
  I mean, what I mean by that is like, do you ever have the feeling like, yes, there's salary and transparency and we share our MRR and all this stuff, but like, hey, we actually have this awesome product and we would love to talk about that too?I mean, I don't know.
• 12:17
  I still love talking about Buffer's transparency.
• 12:19
  I don't think it gets old in the fact that that level of transparency and that idea that, like, we wanna just be the most transparent company, it does go beyond only salaries and our MRR, right?
• 12:31
  So we also have Buffer suggestions, which is where anyone can say, "I want this new product feature." Like, we have a lot of folks who are saying, "Please connect to Reddit."
• 12:38
  You can up vote that, and then you can actually look at our roadmap and see, like, what is on our roadmap.
• 12:42
  We have a really huge group of folks who are excited about dark mode that's in the planned or, like, the working on category.
• 12:48
  I can't remember which one, but we are working on it, so it's probably in the working on category. And so we have this transparency on the product side, too.
• 12:54
  So I think what's cool about transparency, like, yeah, the salaries are, you know, maybe were the most shocking thing, but we've continued it throughout.
• 13:01
  Like, this is, 'cause it's a value, because it's something that's really ingrained in the way that we work and are building Buffer, it pops up in, in other ways.
• 13:09
  And so there are still opportunities to sort of surprise people with how transparent we are. I mean, I have had people be shocked that we share our roadmap.
• 13:17
  They're like, "Don't you think someone else is just gonna see what you're doing and steal it?" And you know, that's the same thing with salaries.
• 13:22
  We have people who are like, "Well, aren't you worried that someone's just gonna see how much your engineers are paid and then offer to pay them higher and then poach them?"
• 13:29
  You know, the same answer is like, "No, because we just believe the way that we're doing things is different enough that that isn't a risk, that actually it's a benefit to be transparent." Yeah. That's so interesting.
• 13:38
  You know, Buffer's done a lot of good for the SaaS world in its existence, you know? Glad to hear that. There's so little transparency. There's...
• 13:44
  And there's so much good that comes from learning how another company does it, even though I'm sure there's times when it's like, ah, it, like, exposes you a little bit or makes someone vulnerable, whatever, but...
• 13:54
  And overall it's been, really, I personally am so grateful, and I'm sure many, many other people are as well. Oh, love to hear it.
• 14:01
  Um, I wanna ask you one other question about kinda like legacy Buffer, and then I promise I'll leave all that alone- [laughs]... and we can talk about what's going on now. And it's just about the blog.
• 14:09
  Like, the Buffer blog was among the first that I think really broke through. Mm. You know, took this idea of content marketing and just took it to another level.
• 14:19
  You know, that was Bell Beth Cooper in the early days, the founders, you know, later Kevin Lee. Yeah. And there's been, you know, the alumni list is really impressive.
• 14:29
  There's been some really smart people that have worked on the Buffer blog over the years. So I guess my question for you is
• 14:35
  how does that shape the challenges and opportunities that you look at from a content perspective today, given that you have probably, I would imagine, a lot of organic traffic, a lot of existing content,
• 14:49
  a lot of old content. So I'm thinking, like, are there technical challenges? How do you think about net new verse refreshing?
• 14:55
  You know, do you have old posts that get lots of traffic that are almost problematic in that they maybe don't line up with the product today? Or, I mean, these are...
• 15:04
  I'm kind of just, like, brainstorming some, like, random things that come to mind as I think of, like, running a blog that's been around for as long as Buffer's has. Yeah. You know, it's been more than 10 years.
• 15:14
  We have, I think, around 3,000 posts on the blog, and so it is truly a beast. But you're right, there are so many opportunities that come with that, and there are also so many challenges that come with that.
• 15:27
  I think on the opportunity side, you know, we're so lucky almost that we started doing content marketing at the time that we did, that we built such strong backlinks at the time that we did, that we just became a domain authority at the time that we did, because we just still have that strength.
• 15:44
  That just builds over time. And so we're in this place where, you know, there have been a lot of Google algorithm changes, and we've managed to bounce back very fast.
• 15:52
  And I've been watching in the content community, and when I see those changes, and I've seen some folks, they have their, their traffic really struggles, and I think that because of our long history, I think that that is a benefit to us here.
• 16:03
  But then, of course, on the flip side, 3,000 posts- That's so many... who's keeping an eye on all of those? [laughs] You know, we are, and it's hard to do that. And so, yeah, it's so challenging.
• 16:12
  We'll find posts that are just completely out of date, and so we have to go ahead and, you know, we'll take posts down and do a redirect.
• 16:19
  And so we have an engineer that works with us on the marketing team, and I feel like I'm always asking him for, like, the, "Okay, redirect this one to this. Redirect this one to this one." Yeah, yeah.
• 16:26
  "We're taking this blog post off." And then the other thing that happened to us is cannibalization. We were not, like, necessarily... You know, we've gone through a lot of different content teams.
• 16:34
  We've had a lot of, lot of different writers, and so we had posts that were just, like, cannibalizing keywords and traffic from each other.
• 16:41
  Instead of just having one really strong post, we maybe had, like, four posts competing for the same keywords. And so we've been going through and fixing that. You know, that's ongoing.
• 16:50
  That's just something that we're constantly, like, working through and tweaking. I think that is a pretty big one.
• 16:54
  Refreshes, yes, that is major for us because we have these refreshes that we have these articles that, you know, are so important to us, and they, like, really have these important keywords, but then some of them are really old, and so we have to go ahead and, like, completely rewrite the content.
• 17:10
  So yeah, it's definitely a beast. I feel like it's slow moving.
• 17:14
  Like, we're not necessarily nimble if you look at the full picture of our blog, but our content strategy is very adaptable, and we have this team that is just ready to make shifts and make changes.
• 17:26
  And so we're not like, you know, the whole blog, it just sometimes it can feel a little bit, like, heavy and a little bit like, oh wow, this is so robust.
• 17:33
  But we as a team try to just be, like, really efficient, really adaptable with our strategy, and just really make sure that we're doing things that are, like, helping us grow our traffic, helping us grow our signups, which are two of the things that we're most focused on.
• 17:44
  And we have managed to do that, so I'm feeling great about that, even though it can be really challenging to do that. [laughs] You know, that's... I love the concept of an adaptable content strategy.
• 17:54
  I wonder if that's where some content strategies fall short, like if they're not adaptable, company priorities change, that thing's blown up. We're starting over again, you know? Mm.
• 18:02
  What is it, how does adaptability play out in real life?
• 18:07
  Is this stuff like, you know, how do we decide between putting our resources into net new verse refreshing verse fixing some site architecture or technical SEO problems?
• 18:18
  Or is it kind of adapting to, you know, stuff the product folks are working on and how we're gonna communicate that, et cetera, you know, or other things I would imagine, too?Yeah, I think it is totally a mixture.
• 18:29
  It is like adapting to whatever the greatest need is, and then whatever the greatest opportunity is, right? So sometimes the biggest need will be, oh, okay, we have these posts that used to drive a ton of signups.
• 18:40
  They're all tanking for some reason. We're gonna go all in.
• 18:43
  We're just gonna figure out these 10 posts or whatever it is, totally refresh them, totally redo them, just make sure that they are looking really great, try to drive results there, and that's what we're gonna focus on as a team this month.
• 18:53
  Or maybe the opportunity side, like that's more on the need side, and then maybe on the opportunity side, there's more of, oh, okay, like this was one that was on our mind.
• 19:00
  Buffer didn't use to support TikTok, like, I don't know, two years ago. Well, that's an older example, but it's the same thing with Threads.
• 19:05
  Like, we didn't have the Threads integration, but on the content team, what can we do?
• 19:09
  We can start writing content about Threads, and we can start ranking for that keyword so that when we do launch, we already have traffic going, and we can just add links to the new product feature in those blog posts and just assist that launch in like a really real way.
• 19:23
  And so it, it's both. We, we try to be adaptable, and then it just depends on the... depends on what's going on in the world.
• 19:29
  It depends on what's going on with our own content, with, you know, Google, with SEO in general. Yeah. Do you and your team have a document where this stuff lives?
• 19:38
  Like, how do you all kind of stay on the same page about what the current priorities are? Yeah. We have a couple different documents. So we do a couple of meetings every month that I think are really helpful to us.
• 19:48
  We do editorial planning as a group every two weeks, and we just sort of set up the notion content calendar that we have, and just, you know, we're dragging around posts. We're making sure that, that we're consistent.
• 19:58
  That's a really big one for us that we're publishing consistently. We're just making sure that the topics are enough of a variety that they will be of interest to people.
• 20:06
  And then we do content team meetings where we're checking in the first week of the month on how the previous month went, and we're kind of going over overall the results.
• 20:14
  I really like to look at top blog posts and top blog posts for traffic, and then the bottom blog posts for traffic to just see, like, what's going on here. Like, what's working? What's not working for us?
• 20:23
  And if you do that enough months in a row, which we have been, you start to, like, really pull out patterns and start to get to this place where you're in the editorial meetings, and you're remembering what is in your top performing, what's in your bottom performing, and you're making tweaks to it from that perspective of like, "Oh, no, I remember these."
• 20:38
  Whenever we write about, you know, whenever we write really basic posts about how to use a certain platform, those perform really well.
• 20:46
  Like, you know, people love that sort of like intro to content from us, and so, like, how can we frame that that way? It lives in a couple of documents. We talk about it just regularly in meetings as well.
• 20:56
  Are there any, if you're willing to share, any common traits of the lower performing content that you now have become aware of and can kind of steer away from for future stuff? Oh, yeah. That's a good question.
• 21:08
  I thought you were gonna ask about top performing. [laughs] I was like, you know, that always seems to be what people would want to know about.
• 21:14
  Yeah, lower performing content, I find if it isn't actionable enough, our audience doesn't like it. If it's too high level, it doesn't really resonate.
• 21:25
  Sometimes the newsworthy articles, like more of that, like we're sharing an update on something that's going on in social, those have fallen a little bit flat for us as well.
• 21:35
  People want to, from what I can tell of our audience, they want to read a Buffer blog post, and they're gonna like take something from it that they're going to immediately implement or start implementing either in their social strategy or their marketing strategy afterwards.
• 21:48
  And so I like to keep that top of mind whenever I'm working on editing and writing. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. No, that makes sense.
• 21:55
  You know, I'm assuming that you have total buy-in on content in a way that a lot of content marketers would love to have. Could you tell us a little bit about your reporting?
• 22:03
  Are there a couple numbers you really care about? Are you looking at Google Data Studio dashboards or a spreadsheet?
• 22:09
  Like, anything you could share about the way that the team goes about reporting would be really interesting. Yeah. Well, there are different layers of reporting.
• 22:15
  There's what we're reporting, like, ourselves just to check in on, like, what's working and, you know, what we wanna keep track of, so that's our top posts, bottom posts monthly that we look at is one for our team.
• 22:26
  Another one is I have this spreadsheet where we will... we just have a spreadsheet of every single post that we publish when we publish it.
• 22:31
  We have the URL to it, and I like to do first seven-day traffic, first 28-day traffic, and then first 84-day traffic. And so seven-day traffic is like how did it do initially? How was it initially received?
• 22:43
  Twenty-eight day traffic is like, okay, how did that hold up over the month, and then if you wanna compare this to another post on that same period, you know, 'cause months are so variable.
• 22:53
  And then 84 is like, did we nail it on SEO? Is this starting to pick up organic traffic, or is it dropping off? Love that.
• 22:58
  So that's, those are what we look at internally, and then like internally as in, like, on our team. And then on the wider marketing team and then within the company, what we report on are page views and signups.
• 23:10
  Like the marketing team is, our North Star is signups.
• 23:14
  You know, Buffer is free, so it's a little different than a sales-led organization because we really can have someone just come to the blog, read a couple blog posts, and then sign up, and they're in the product. Boom.
• 23:25
  Like the- Yeah. You know, they have converted into being a user, which is so cool, sort of like the power of freemium. And so as a marketing team, we're reporting on signups.
• 23:35
  You know, that layer down to the content team, what we're reporting on is page views, like that traffic, and blog-assisted signups, which is we're able to see, okay, if someone is on a bunch of different pages before they sign up, and a couple of those are different blog posts, that will count as a blog-assisted signup.
• 23:51
  So those are the main ones that we're reporting, you know, sort of on that higher level. That's really interesting.
• 23:56
  I really like the way that you segment out, you know, first seven day, just to understand how it's initially received and then what happens later.
• 24:04
  Like, it reminds me a little bit of a thing we used to talk about when I was at Animals, which we called the shape of content. Like there was- Mm.
• 24:11
  When you looked at Google Analytics, successful pieces of content all tended to have the same shape. It was like- Oh, cool.
• 24:17
  A little surge at the beginning, dies off, you know, gets some ground in SERPs, and then starts to go back up, and you could kind of mirror that shape in every piece, but we never I-I wish we had figured out what you figured out.
• 24:29
  That's a really nice way to analyze the data other than that we'd be like, "Eh, seems like it's going in the right direction," you know? [laughs] Shape looks good. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. That is also very cool.
• 24:39
  I have just found it incredibly helpful to see that first seven-day, because it, you know, it tells you a lot of things, how it was received, how did you do promoting it, you know, like a couple of different things that you can all put into this one metric, and so that is my favorite one to look at is that first seven-day page views.
• 24:53
  Yeah, yeah.
• 24:55
  If you had to guess, and I know you probably don't have a perfect answer for this, how much of the team's energy goes into net new content verse technical SEO, refreshing, repurposing, pruning, whatever, all the other stuff that could help produce more organic traffic for the site, like how much would you guesstimate goes into each of those things?
• 25:14
  Yeah. It has changed over time. We were in this period, if you look at... It's all on our website.
• 25:19
  If you look at the marketing metrics, the page metrics for our blog, you will see that we went through, like, a really big decline, we went through a leveling off period, and we're now in a period of growth.
• 25:33
  And so that, how much and where we're spending our time, has changed a lot, because we did go through a period where we were just trying to rebuild our content systems.
• 25:44
  We had kind of had content on pause for a little bit, and you know, this was years ago. Rebuilding, we were really starting to get new, net new. We were really focused on net new and not very much focused on refreshes.
• 25:56
  We added in refreshes, started to see the power of what that was doing for us as well, and I think that right now we are probably maybe like 60/40, net new is 60, 40 is refreshes, but I think sometimes it's more 50/50.
• 26:12
  Because we have so much content and we have been around for so long, sometimes we'll have ideas and we will find an old post. Like, you know, if...
• 26:21
  Our brainstorming sessions are like, you know, we've got like Notion open, we have like a brainstorming doc open, we have the Buffer blog open, and we're searching to make sure that we haven't written about this before.
• 26:30
  [laughs] That's funny. Because, you know, when you have thousands of blog posts, you just have to make sure. And so if someone has a better system for this, please let me know, reach out.
• 26:36
  But yeah, they, we're always searching to make sure, and then maybe it's, okay, this old piece of content is not working, so we're gonna just write net new and then do a URL redirect, or maybe it's actually this is pretty good, but it's not relevant anymore.
• 26:48
  Let me swap out the examples. Let's like spice this up and like change the publish date to whenever we wanna launch this one. Right. That's so interesting.
• 26:57
  I've only personally ever worked at one company where this was ever even a question.
• 27:00
  Like, for most of my career, it's just been like net new was really our only lever to grow, and then I had a brief stint at QuickBooks and we were constantly having this discussion of like, well, what if a developer spent like two hours fixing this thing on the site?
• 27:14
  Like- Yeah... does that unlock like 5% more traffic? 'Cause- Yes. [laughs]... 5% more traffic through net new would be really hard, and it might- Yeah... be kind of easy.
• 27:22
  You know, it's like it's always this balancing act, so it's interesting that that sort of changes over time, too. Um- Yeah, it has. And let me say that we do have like a phenomenal support team for us.
• 27:30
  Like, you know, I, when I'm talking about content, I'm talking about these two content writers that I work with who are wonderful.
• 27:36
  You know, we also work with a freelancer, but we've had more than one engineer on our team supporting us over time. We have like a fractional SEO person who assists us as well.
• 27:45
  So we do have like really good just support across the company, where I feel like these technical side, which is definitely not my strength, it's not my area of expertise, we have had people come in and go through like our Lighthouse score or, you know, one of the engineers at one point was like, "Hey, we're rewriting the blog to be in Next.js," and I was like, "Those sound like fantastic words.
• 28:04
  Thank you so much." Like- Yeah. [laughs]... let's do this. But you know, it was...
• 28:06
  We've had a lot of help from folks who are more focused on the technical side, and so I know that that has definitely given us great results, too. Very cool.
• 28:14
  And you know, one other thing I wanna ask you about on the, speaking of net new content, was podcasts. Where does multimedia fit into your content strategy? Yeah. We've had podcasts at Buffer before.
• 28:27
  We don't currently run any podcasts.
• 28:29
  We have just been very heavily focused on blog content, partially because it was in decline and we were like, "Let's turn this around," and partially because it is so much easier to attribute those signups, right? Yeah.
• 28:40
  There's like a direct tracking to those.
• 28:43
  But I will say that we have seen a lot of promise and success in video as well, and so one of the areas that we're trying to invest more time and energy are areas like YouTube and TikTok, and YouTube I would consider like the, you know, second largest search engine, TikTok the third largest search engine, and they're both video based, and so that's just something that's definitely on our mind, definitely an area that we're investing in a little bit more.
• 29:06
  Yeah. Does that all fall under you? And the reason I ask that is I feel like s- a lot of SAS companies are still figuring out, like, okay, we should probably have a podcast. We should probably have a video motion.
• 29:16
  Is that content marketing? I mean, it is, but like does our content team have the right skill set for it? Do we need a separate team? Like, I feel like some of those things are sort of up in the air.
• 29:26
  I mean, I guess it depends on the size of the team, the size of the company. I feel like there's a brand aspect, too, so it also depends on- For sure... like who owns brand or who are the key stakeholders in brand.
• 29:35
  And you know, I am one at Buffer, but we have a couple people who are maybe like more focused on brand as well.
• 29:41
  But yeah, I would say, I would say podcasts and video for us fall under content marketing, but we are quite a small team compared to some of these larger teams where they can bring on maybe an agency or people who are really, like really deeply skilled in one thing.
• 29:54
  Yeah, makes sense.
• 29:55
  Okay, so since the blog has been around for 12 years or so, I would imagine that there's probably a couple pieces that are, quote unquote, whales, that are just, like have driven insane amounts of traffic.
• 30:07
  You may not have Google Analytics pulled up right now, but are there a couple that come to mind when you think of Buffer's kinda like all-time hall of fame type of articles? Oh, there definitely are.
• 30:17
  There definitely are articles that have been just like, over time, you're looking at it and you're like, "Oh, wow, that article is still the top for page views this week? Okay, that's cool. That's really good to see."
• 30:27
  Back in, you know, you mentioned a lot of names. You mentioned Belle Beth Cooper, Kevin Lee. There was also Courtney Seiter, sort of like that- Yep...
• 30:33
  trio of folks.I feel like they wrote some really solid content that was... it just like continues to perform really well. Things like, like how to be happy. Like, you know, that- Yeah...
• 30:44
  so like on that scale of content, or how to take good notes. Like, just the really basic pieces, and those have over time performed extremely well for us. It's interesting. Are we talking like millions of page views?
• 30:58
  Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. So it's very cool to see that from a couple of small pieces.
• 31:04
  I was going to say, I also was thinking through, and, you know, I looked into the data recently for like what has been our top performing post this year, and this year I think we've published just over 150 articles so far maybe.
• 31:17
  And it's really interesting because, you know, we're talking Buffer's a social media tool, you know, we're talking about marketing, and I mentioned that these big whale pieces are more like happiness and like how to take notes, and it's so interesting to me that, you know, one of our top pieces this year was actually from our CEO, and it was about how we're adjusting our salary system as a company.
• 31:36
  And so, like, you know, we mentioned that salaries are transparent at Buffer, so is the formula or the system for how we come to determine someone's salary.
• 31:45
  And our CEO, Joel, wrote this really long blog post, I think it's like a 28-minute read. Oh, wow.
• 31:51
  It's like a long, like a long one about our salary system, and it is the top driver for page views right now, and it is very close to the top driver for signups.
• 32:02
  Like, it's on both sides, which is surprising, because I think you would see a post like that, it's like we're talking about our salary system, we're not talking about our product at all, and you would think that's probably not driving signups.
• 32:13
  And that's not true. In this case it is, which is so fascinating to me.
• 32:17
  And so that was one that I was really interested in, and I, I do think that we have an audience that has a bit more of an appetite for more than just content marketing or social media knowledge from us, and so I think we're quite lucky in that regard.
• 32:27
  Yeah. That's fascinating, actually. I wonder, you know, Buffer has awareness in the space for sure.
• 32:35
  You know, I wonder if there's some element of, like, people wanna use the tools that are built by companies that they align with, you know? Like- Mm...
• 32:43
  I think Buffer's done a really good job of that, like kind of expressing the values of the company and giving people the opportunity to align with those by being a customer, right?
• 32:50
  'Cause you could use Hootsuite, I guess, but, you know, if it doesn't feel as good to use a different tool than Buffer, then you would probably opt for Buffer. I don't...
• 32:59
  That's, like, very, like, amateur psychology, but- No, we hear that a lot... that's, that's so fascinating. We do hear...
• 33:04
  We hear from people who are like, "Yeah, I've decided to stay with you because of this," and it's because of something that we're doing with transparency or something that we're, we're, you know, sharing externally about the company.
• 33:14
  And so, and, you know, I'm hiring right now, and I have people are saying, "I've wanted to work at Buffer for 10 years," which is so cool. Yeah.
• 33:20
  And so I do think we just sort of have that community and have that group of people around us, and we're always trying to make sure that we do best by, our best by them because they're phenomenal people. Yeah. So cool.
• 33:30
  Really such an interesting conversation, Hailey. Thank you so much for making the time. Oh.
• 33:34
  You know, it's just interesting that, like, you stand on the shoulders of giants, but, you know, you're making your own mark on the content at Buffer, and really, like, SaaS at large.
• 33:43
  I really feel like Buffer plays an instrumental role in kind of helping other companies get a sense for how they're doing, you know, not just from a content perspective, but in, in other ways as well. So really cool.
• 33:54
  Thank you. And also, I wanna make sure we point people to your stuff, too. So you write a personal blog, which- I do... is awesome.
• 34:00
  As I was checking it out, I was like, "God, this just feels so much better than, like, LinkedIn posts," you know? These are like- [laughs]... thoughtful, longer form, you know- Thank you... very interesting stuff.
• 34:08
  So we will, we'll link to that. And then your podcast too, can you tell us about that? Yeah. Yeah. I have a podcast with a friend of mine.
• 34:14
  It's called Make Work Work, and we are sort of the kind of people who we just don't wanna spend our time on things that don't help us work. And we, we call it, uh, chaos is a time thief.
• 34:24
  And so we try to be really organized, we try to be really intentional about our workflows, and so we're sort of creating these purposeful workflows for, for how we work to get work done.
• 34:33
  And so that's what we talk about on Make Work Work. Amazing. Link to that, your personal website, LinkedIn if that's the best place to find you also. Yes. Cool.
• 34:41
  LinkedIn is the best social network to find me on right now, and then, yeah, my blog, and I send a newsletter. Used to be weekly, but I've had a, a baby since then, so it's more so every couple weeks right now.
• 34:51
  [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, totally. I sent a newsletter for like seven straight years every week, and then I had a kid, and I have sent it once [laughs] in three years. So. Children do that to you. They really do.
• 35:01
  [laughs] They really do. [laughs] Um, cool. Awesome. Links to everything will be in the show notes. Hailey, thank you so much for your time.
• 35:06
  Thank you so much for, you know, very generously sharing your experience at Buffer, and, uh, hopefully we can do a round two sometime, check in on how things are going down the road. I'd love that.
• 35:14
  Thank you for having me, Jimmy. Honored to be here. Awesome. Take care. [outro music]