Substack is still relatively new in the grand scheme of social media. But there are people on it who clearly already understand it, and I am not one of them. I think I thought it would be easy to step into this world and its algorithm and hit the ground running, and it hasn’t quite happened that way.

So I’m doing the thing I do best when a platform won’t click, which is to go all in. I’ll be posting notes every day for a month to build some consistency, get more eyes on The Weekly Scroll, and hopefully figure Substack out along the way.

And of course, I’ll be writing about it here as well. Welcome to 30 Days of Notes!

Before I start, I wanted to understand why Substack hasn’t clicked yet

There are a few reasons, as far as I can tell.

1. The algorithm isn’t quite what I’ve seen elsewhere. It’s probably closest to Threads, but the feed seems to prioritize newsletter posts over anything that only lives in the feed.

2. Having a subscriber base doesn’t guarantee traction. The Scroll goes out to 92K+ people, but my notes still only get a couple of likes here and there. Those two numbers seem to have very little to do with each other.

3. I’d been treating Substack Notes the same way I treat LinkedIn and Instagram (which is to say, I was overthinking more than posting). Low volume and high consistency can work there, but everything I’ve seen about Substack so far tells me I need to be posting more than once a day.

After some time observing the posts in my feed, plus an inspired swing with Claude, I think I have some direction.

What I had Claude look at

Rather than keep guessing at what might work for TWS on Notes, I wanted some actual data. So I had Claude scroll my For You feed for about 12 minutes and log everything it saw: format, timestamp, likes, replies, restacks, and whatever label Substack attached to the card (”[Person] liked,” “From the archives,” and so on).

It came back with 167 posts, plus 46 from the Following tab for comparison, and then, for good measure, opened the eight best-performing ones and read through the replies.

Caveat: this is not real data analysis by any means. It’s one account, one session, 12 minutes. But I think it found some gems.

Some findings

A few of these I expected, but most I did not.

• The feed is surfacing older posts the most. The median post in my feed was about 15 days old, and 38% were posts from two to four weeks ago. Notes from early August were still showing up and (perhaps more importantly) still getting replies. Only 22% were posts under a day old, and that slice was almost all people I already follow, sitting at zero or single-digit likes (my own notes were in there, which was a bit humbling 😅).

• Some of what this tells me is that followers see posts first, and then Substack waits to see who reacts. The Following tab was 70% under 24 hours old, so we can guess that new notes go to your followers and then sit until they pick up steam. Nearly 40% of the posts in my feed had a “[Person] liked” or “[Person] restacked” label, and those had a median of 651 and 2,800 likes. The ones with no label sat at 16. Restacks were the strongest predictor of reach in the whole sample. It’s not news that engagement matters, but it does explain why 92K subscribers haven’t done anything for my notes. Those people get the email, but the algo only cares who reacted on the platform.

• Substack really wants you reading newsletters. Newsletter link cards were the biggest slot of posts in the feed at 31%, and 11 of those were labeled “From the archives”. These posts are anywhere from three months to a year old, with a median of 3,200 likes, and they're re-run because they already worked.

• The notes that get traction are short and opinionated. Carousels had the highest median likes (187 vs. 29 for text), but the biggest non-archive posts in the feed were all text posts. And a lot of them were about Substack itself. This makes sense as the audience here is mostly writers. I’m just not sure how much I want to lean into writing about writing, but it’s hard to argue against it.

• There was zero video in the video; not one in all 167 posts. Either Substack isn’t weighting it yet, or nobody I follow posts it. Either way, the format I’ve spent the past year getting better at is not what works here 😅.

So… what now?

Here’s what I’m doing with the rest of September based on all this info.

1. I’m posting at least two notes a day (aiming for more), with a mix of plain text and image posts across as many topics and formats as I can think of within reason. I know the findings point to short, opinionated text one-liners, and I’ll be doing plenty of those, but I want to see what else works before I narrow things down. I won’t be posting video in Notes for now, though (this one hurts a little).

2. I’ll keep sharing every Scroll issue as a note, since link cards make up over a third of the feed and the good ones get re-surfaced for months after. Hopefully the same will happen for us 🤞🏾

3. I’m replying to every reply in the first hour and asking one follow-up question per thread. Every author on the top posts was doing this, and reply volume looks like a signal.

4. And I’m not judging a note after 48 hours anymore. I’ll check in at day 14 or day 28 instead to see if time has given my posts some wings.

The other thing I’ve noticed after a few days of actually posting is that my main finding so far is a bit obvious: consistency matters. I know, I know. It’s true on every platform, and it’s somehow always a new discovery when it happens to me. But I think the version of it here is a little different.

Posting more often doesn’t seem to earn reach in the feed on its own. But it gives me more chances to get in front of my followers, who will, in turn, hopefully get my posts in front of their followers. And on and on.

I’ll report back in two weeks!

💬 If you’re on Substack too, what’s actually gotten a note of yours in front of new people? I want to compare notes (sorry). Tell me in the comments.

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I’M GOING TO NEED SOMEWHERE TO PUT ALL THESE NOTES

Thirty notes is a LOT. I’ve been dropping every one-liner that might become one into Buffer’s Ideas as it happens, so my daily post never has to start from a blank box.

Try Buffer Ideas→

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL

I’m in a very artistic time in my life. I just bought some new vinyls, I’ve been printing out my photos as zines, and now I want to experiment with mixed media! And this is me, Ms. Chronically Online. Who is she???

Some of my favorite creators so far are:

• On the mixed media front, kota.does.things is the 19-year-old (!!) creator behind Mixd, a website that allows you to create mixed media more easily. I’m already buzzing with ideas based on his tutorials.

• On the photography → zine front, I was inspired by hansonfok to print out some of my photos via Dirty Little Zine, a free website that makes it super easy (courtesy of filmrick.photo)

• On the art in physical form front, I’m back with Linh Truong again as they explore building a mail club. It’s been a fascinating journey to witness.

In social media news, TikTok introduced a fascinating new update that lets you share voice notes and carousels (!) in comments.

That’s all for now!

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Hailley Griffis is Director of Communications and Content at Buffer, and writes a newsletter about systems she uses for work and life. She’s also a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You'll find her on LinkedIn and Threads.

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So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• PostHog (Blog): This was a fun read from the PostHog team and got me thinking about what weird (or weirdish) things we could be doing on Buffer’s Marketing team. Weird isn’t quite our brand, but warm is, and warm could look like surprising our customers more often, a more Buffery take on swag, or an event more focused on connection. Even if we don’t go with weird exactly, this was a really thought-provoking piece for me, and I’d love to see more Marketing teams getting creative in the same way.

• WritingClasses (Website): How does anyone find their voice in writing? This is a question I’ve been grappling with as I’ve been encouraging more Buffer teammates away from using AI in their writing and towards a voice that really reflects their personality, and that definition has been much easier to explain than some of the vague concepts about writing voice. Josh Sippie said it really well in this article, “Voice is not sentence structure. Voice is not word choice. It isn’t even really the style. The writing voice is the writer’s personality.”

• Tree.fm: If you haven’t yet been delighted by these tree sounds, click on this one right now and enjoy the relaxation of someone’s forest recording from around the world. I leave this tab pinned and play these sounds fairly often; I find them so relaxing throughout the day.

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

Beatrice Jin is one of the top Brazilian Black Belt competitors in the world, and she’s growing an engaged audience as a creator on Instagram, while also running a small business. It’s all massively impressive.

I was fortunate to learn from Beatrice recently, but I had been following her on social media before meeting her because her videos have done such a good job of spreading throughout the jiu-jitsu community. For creators in sports, I find it important to talk about topics outside their wins to build a closer relationship with their audience and grow beyond sports, so they attract an audience interested in them long-term, beyond their sports career. Beatrice does this incredibly well.

She’s creating interesting content that isn’t about her success but about jiu-jitsu more broadly; she’s also differentiated herself from the usual path for people in the sport, which is primarily tutorial videos. She leaned into one of her strengths, which is that she’s hilarious, and her sense of humor has led to multiple reels reaching over 1M people. She’s now known as a creator in her own right in addition to being known for success in the sport, an amazing accomplishment.

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

A book I loved reading recently was The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

The main character’s decision to correspond and write thoughtful letters to those in her life has really stuck with me as a way we can all make an impact in the world. Our writing can be rather long-lasting, whether it is from letters, on social media, or on a website. It had me reflecting on what I publish and also inspired me to send off several postcards to friends. I’ve already received one back, which was such a delightful moment.

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

Sharing my newsletter and simultaneously growing it. My audience on LinkedIn has grown exponentially, but I haven’t managed to bring people over to my newsletter, where I share deeper thoughts. There’s some part of my strategy I need to adjust, and I’m thinking through several options, including sharing my newsletters as LinkedIn newsletters, promoting them differently, or possibly changing up the format.

If you write newsletters, leave me a comment with what has worked for you!

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Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

Alongside many folks, the news that LinkedIn had added a “This seems like AI slop” button was a surprise to me, though I hope it ends up being a good thing.

The platform has said it’s using the button to train its LLM to detect AI slop, and I am optimistic their efforts will lead to higher-quality posts across LinkedIn.

Revisit your back catalogue

Buffer’s Insights sorts your top posts by any date range. Pull up something from 18 months ago, find the one that worked, and remake it. You might be surprised at what you find.

Give Buffer a try

What’s in the scroll?

Tami popping in here 👋🏾

I’ve been in a creative flow state for a few weeks now, and a lot of that energy has gone into producing my second-ever YouTube video for the Buffer channel! A lot of love and effort went into this, and I hope it’s truly helpful to whoever comes across it.

In social news: Instagram is launching a feature called First Draft for reels that will help you edit down your clips after your initial upload. I can see this being a massive time-saver if you just want to edit in-app and go!

YouTube announced some changes to its monetization policies that will activate in February 2027. That is to say: if you’ve ever wanted to start creating on YouTube, there’s no better time than now.

Also, Twitter might be coming back? BUT not in the way you might think.

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

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“I don’t give a [bleep] if it’s been painted, cooked, danced, filmed, photographed, built, sung, sculpted, or written about. It’s been done before, it’s been done before, it’s been done before: but not by you.”

That’s the opening to a video Nneka Julia posted a couple of weeks ago that immediately struck me right from the title.

Nneka makes film-like videos about very relatable topics, and they look and sound like a diary entry. This video was just five minutes long, but it rearranged something in my brain. Stay with me.

The idea that your perspective is what makes something unique isn’t new, but just because something has been said a million times doesn’t mean you’re ready to hear it.

It got me thinking about how many times I’ve had an idea and even gotten all the way to making the content, then getting the feeling that I’m not saying anything new, so why even bother?

Even though I’ve been making content for years and years now, I keep falling into the same mental trap. Even though people come up to me all the time saying, “I just saw [new thing I made from an old, overdone idea] and I loved it”. Even though I know for a fact that I could copy-paste an existing piece of content and no one would care.

It’s like I keep trying to predict the future, the potential response to a piece of content, and failing every time.

There’s a quote (which is more of a meme at this point) by actress Jemima Kirke that goes, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

And hard as I try, I do think about myself too much. No one keeps the receipts of my back catalog and past wins or failures as much as I do.

The things I’m creating may not be the most amazing versions out there. And there are often analytics to prove me right. But even if mine or yours isn’t the best, it’s still yours. It’s your hands, brain, mind, perspective, and experiences working together to put something out into the world. And it’s a muscle you get to strengthen so that with time, yours can truly become the best.

I won’t pretend like it’s easy. I’m saying this from outside the club of confident creators. But what I have put into effect is a daily practice. Something that I talked about in a recent interview with Amy Watts is that a creative practice is a non-negotiable for anyone who wants to be a creator.

If you can get into the habit of making something — anything — every day, you’ll get in your exercise anyway. The metaphor I apply is this: if you skipped for 30 minutes or walked 10,000 steps, would you not still burn the same number of calories?

Even if it’s not social content, the time I spend taking photographs or sticking things into my journal is part of my creative practice and keeps the muscles moving. Someone else’s workout (or creative practice) doesn’t do that for me.

So keep making your things, and keep sharing them. And you never know, one day, you might just be at the top of the pyramid of all the versions of that thing that have been done for.

REVISIT YOUR BACK CATALOGUE

Buffer’s Insights sorts your top posts by any date range. Pull up something from 18 months ago, find the one that worked, and remake it. You might be surprised at what happens

Get started →

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL

Of course, I have to start with the video that kicked off this week’s Deep Thoughts TM.

Beyond the message, Nneka’s dedication to making these mini-films is so inspiring. And as someone who’s still not super confident about taking my camera outside to film, I’m equal parts jealous and encouraged.

I’ve been loving all the content this creator, Sebin, makes, especially on YouTube. I remember way back when she did her Obsidian video that got me (and a lot of other people) hooked on the app, and watching her content makes me feel like I’m leaving smarter than when I started. Which is the genre of creator I gravitate toward most.

@deathstatequilibriumfor my thought daughters:) how i use obsidian to support my creative flow! Youtube video soon:) #obsidian #digitaljournal #selfimprovement #creativeprocess #journaling

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If you’ve been trying to monetize on YouTube or are thinking about starting, the recent updates to monetization standards might light a fire under you. I still say: go for it. The update doesn’t take effect till February 1, 2027. Is this my sign to start that YouTube channel?

Also, did y’all see the new Instagram wordmark?

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Sabreen Haziq is a brand marketer at Buffer and an avid LinkedIn creator on the side. You'll find her on LinkedIn. She gives us a refreshed look at her tabs: check out her previous Open Tabs issue here.

So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• Ruben Hassid (Substack): I’ve been really enjoying all of Ruben Hassid’s AI education content on Substack

• Life of Riza (YouTube): I am completely mesmerized by the YouTube channel Life Of Riza, specifically underscoring creative ways of filming

• This is how you’ll become a content creator in 2026 (YouTube): I was blown away by Modern Millie’s 3-hour video on how to become a content creator in 2026

• Brain.fm: I’ve been really enjoying my Brain.fm subscription. It helps me get into a deeper creative flow, and I love their functional music, especially on ADHD mode.

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

I’ve been really enjoying Jade Sheng’s content on Instagram, where she goes by @jade.got.curious. She’s a creative director by trade, based in Chicago, and she uses content creation as a form of self-discovery. She started the account only a couple of months ago and is already at 112,000 followers, which completely blew my mind.

The first thing I noticed is that she only puts out about one video a week, and each one is a banger. There’s enormous pressure on creators in this attention economy to post constantly, so watching someone choose continuity and quality over frequency has been refreshing. Her storytelling is super layered, and she brings a lot of nuance to her scripts. She takes something intricate and explains it simply, often through metaphor, using the everyday objects lying around her like a craft mat or Lego. She’s also very good at finding an unexpected angle into a familiar topic, and she builds hook loops that carry you through the whole video. Parts of her videos are shot in her living room, and parts are shot outdoors, so my sense is that she isn’t filming in one sitting. She collects these breadcrumbs across the week and then edits them into one really strong video.

Her approach and her pacing took a lot of pressure off me. I move fast by default, because in my mind more output means more data on myself, and that data is how I pin down my own patterns and improve on them. Jade is proof that volume isn’t the only path to that, and that a small number of well-made pieces can teach you just as much. She’s also the reason I’m starting a new Instagram account. My current handle skews heavily South Asian in audience, and I want to build something for a US audience from scratch. Wish me luck!

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

I’ve been listening to “Vienna” by Billy Joel a lot lately, and one line in particular keeps resounding in my head: “Slow down, you’re doing fine, you can’t be everything you want to be before your time.”

I’m someone who constantly needs to expend creative calories, and I’m fortunate that my role gives me plenty of avenues for it. The cost of that wiring is that I often end up in a whirlpool of wanting to work on several pieces at once, and I’ve started to notice that the urge to make more things and the urge to make better things are not the same urge. Speed had been standing in for judgment. So I’ve been putting an intentional delay into my creative process, and what surprised me is that the delay is where I spend the most time thinking. The ideas that survive the week are not the same ideas I had on day one. This isn’t an instinct that comes naturally to me, so I’m practicing it deliberately, and I’ve been seeking out other creators in my industry who already work this way.

This also connects to the feedback I’ve been getting in my role at Buffer. We do monthly reflections with our managers, and pace keeps coming up as an area of growth for me. Pace is my superpower, but I’ve had to sit with the fact that moving fast and finding alignment pull against each other, and that when I lead with speed I’m usually solving for my own output rather than for the team’s clarity. What I didn’t expect is that slowing down would make the work more enjoyable too. When everything feels urgent, you never really get to sit with the thing you’re making. So, I’m taking more breaks without the guilt, and I come back with more energy and a clearer sense of what’s next.

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

Oof! The biggest thing I’m working through in my creator journey is scale, which I recognize is a fortunate problem to have. I’ve worked with more than 25 brands over the last year and a half, and a lot of those relationships have turned into long-term partnerships. It’s continuous, and that brings a predictability I didn’t have at the start. The hard part is that predictability takes up the same room that new opportunities used to fill! Hah!

When you’re early, saying yes to most things is the right strategy, because every yes teaches you something about what you’re building and what you’re worth. But at some point this flips, and the same instinct that got you here becomes the bottleneck. I’m learning to make tough calls about which projects to take, and to weigh a new brand against the long-term relationships I’ve already built.

On the practical side, I’ve been reworking my pricing and repackaging my offerings, and that has turned out to be a decision-making tool as much as a revenue one. It filters out a lot of brands automatically unless they come back with a scope that reflects what the (hard) work involves. The honest part is that I’m sitting on the cusp of joy and overwhelm! I don’t do creator work during the week, so most of my production happens over weekends, which is the same time that’s meant to be rest. I’m trying to build myself something close to a rubric, so that “is this worth it” becomes a question I answer with criteria rather than with instinct at 11 p.m. on a Thursday. Protecting rest is the real constraint I’m facing, and I’m learning that a decision about one brand deal is also a decision about how present I get to be for everything else.

Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

The LinkedIn AI slop button caught my attention immediately! It started out as a joke, and then a lot of us noticed the option was really there. That’s a power move on LinkedIn’s part, and it’s also the part that worries me.

The premise is that AI slop is recognizable. If you write for a living, or if you’re AI-native, you can usually suss it out within a couple of lines. The complication is that AI writing and human writing are converging. Models keep getting better at natural language, and in the meantime a handful of ordinary words have been reclassified as tells. If you write “momentum” or “genuinely,” or leave in one extra dash, someone can read a sentence you wrote yourself as AI output. The judgment is intuitive, which is what makes it unreliable at scale.

What LinkedIn has built is a crowdsourced taste judgment wired into a moderation signal, and taste is one of the least stable inputs you can hand a distribution system. I hope people use it responsibly instead of flagging each other rampantly. A lot of creators are already exhausted from constantly workshopping hooks and trying to stay inventive, and one of those attempts will occasionally read as synthetic even when it isn’t. Give people grace and be selective about it, because none of us know what sits on the other side of the flag.

That’s what I’d want clarity on. How many reports does it take before LinkedIn treats a creator as a repeat offender? Does reach get suppressed, and for how long? I don’t take this lightly, because a flag I place on someone’s post could carry consequences for the revenue they make that month.

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WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO TALK ABOUT BREADCRUMBS

Sabreen’s line about Jade collecting breadcrumbs across the week and editing them into one video reminded me of one of the ways I use the Ideas space in Buffer. And you can use it too: to create, store, and refine your half-formed thoughts into fleshed-out content.

Try it out in Buffer →

What’s in the scroll?

Tami popping in here 👋🏾

I’m inspired by a lot of things outside of social media, particularly other forms of media (TV, music, movies).

And I’ve watched a LOT of good stuff recently, but nothing has gotten my wheels turning more than Charli XCX’s latest album, Music, Fashion, Film.

This might be a bit of a random pull, but I consider Charli to be one of the most considered creatives alive today and the interviews she’s been doing on the press circuit for the album have been an illuminating insight into her mind and creative process.

I’m also reading On Photography by Susan Sontag in a bid to use an old hobby to get more insight into my new hobby. But really, nothing beats getting in practice reps with a camera, so I’m making time for that most days. It’s also a hack for cutting down on my screen time haha.

Alright, that’s it from me.

If you’d like to contribute to an issue of Open Tabs, fill out this form. I look forward to featuring more readers!

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

My YouTube era has begun. Again!

I spent all of last Friday (and then part of yesterday) recording…and re-recording…my first long-form video since 2024.

A lot has changed since I made my first and only video for Buffer’s channel. I have a new location, new equipment, and a different mindset about content creation.

At the time I recorded that video, I struggled with consistency. I was more interested in making my ideas efficient and organized than in being as creative as possible. I believed my creativity only really counted when it produced something polished.

I wanted the finished video, post, or system to justify the time I had spent making it. The process was mostly something to get through on the way to an outcome I could point to.

That made content creation feel much more consequential than it needed to be. When something didn’t meet the standard I had imagined, I would scrap it.

The problem is that creative work rarely develops that neatly. Can you see where I’m going with this?

That video took me 3 months to make. I had a script. I had already written the article it was based on, so I had the context. But from recording to editing to publishing, every step felt like pulling teeth.

I could always find something wrong: the quality of my camera, my lighting setup, my editing choices.

Making that video felt like wearing a skin that wasn’t mine. I was obsessed with perfection at every stage, even though the result was never going to be perfect.

You can’t be a beginner and a perfectionist.

Recording this time came with its own problems. We have new systems. I have new equipment to figure out. And I expect even more from myself now than I did before.

But it only took two attempts this time.

Partly because I was less concerned with perfection but also because I could rely on the hard-won skills I had developed through making dozens of short-form videos since my first attempt at YouTube. I’m no longer a beginner at content creation, so I could focus on adapting those skills to a different medium.

More importantly, I approached the work as a student of the process rather than someone searching for perfection.

Sometimes you need to record the same introduction several times before you understand what you are actually trying to say. Sometimes a shot looks better in your head than it does on camera. Sometimes you spend an afternoon making something that will never leave your hard drive.

I used to see those moments as evidence that the process was going badly.

Now, I just see them as the process.

The biggest difference between making that first video and making this one isn’t the equipment or the location. It’s that I’m less concerned with proving I can produce a polished outcome and more interested in becoming someone who stays engaged with the process long enough to improve.

I’m learning to treat recording, editing, experimenting, and occasionally getting things wrong as parts of the creative practice rather than obstacles standing in front of it.

Of course the polished outcome still matters. It’s just not the only part that matters.

YOU’LL LOVE THE CREATE SPACE

Watch out for my video where I’ll walk through my content batching system, which I set up in Buffer’s Create space. But you don’t have to wait for me! Tap in ahead of time by visiting buffer.com/create.

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

Speaking of YouTube…

It’s Sabreen’s turn at YouTube this week, with a detailed breakdown of the Instagram algorithm.

LinkedIn seems to have rolled out Collaborative Posts beyond beta. If you’re in line to try this, stay in line!

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

I took film and photography classes at university and hated almost every minute of the process. Each new professor brought with them only complications to my safe graduation and didn’t necessarily inspire a love of participating in the making of a piece of art. In the midst of all that, I fell in love with the end product but not the making of it.

But I reached the limits of consumption without creation pretty quickly. My work increasingly expanded to include content creation, and so grew the need to make my content look better. As I started studying again and realized I knew the theory, I found that my practice was very (very) rusty.

And it wasn’t helping that I was just using my phone.

I went back and forth a lot. My phone was enough. My phone wasn’t enough. I wanted to upgrade my gear but couldn’t justify it.

The lack of friction had turned my phone into a creative crutch. Sure, I could have learned the technicalities using the tools I already had. But I wasn’t building knowledge about the filmmaking process. I wasn’t dealing with the challenges that would make me stronger at my work.

That is, until last summer, when a friend put his camera in my hand while we were on vacation. I was heading out on a walk, and he told me to take pictures. So I did — for an hour, badly, with no idea what I was doing.

There were a lot of thumbs-in-frame, off-center images and overexposed shots. But it was love at first shutter click. I sometimes feel uncomfortable using my phone to capture a moment, but a camera in my hand made me leap over that and gain a new habit.

I bought that camera off him and took it on another trip, this time solo, with far more photo walks. That led me to buy one camera, and another and another, with accompanying gear, until I acquired a mini studio. And there’s still so much camera out there to marvel at.

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I’m still learning — I call myself a “baby gearhead” because photographer or video creator don’t sit comfortably. And who knows, I might have reached this level of creativity if I stuck with my phone and made the most out of it.

But I do know I’ve never wanted to create more than I do now. The lack of gear was never really about the gear. It was more about permission. Owning a camera made me someone who’s “allowed” to take pictures. As silly as that makes me feel now on the other side, it forced a mindset shift that unlocked my craving to make stuff.

Your barrier likely isn’t gear. Modern phones are incredibly powerful, and what you have can do a lot. Whole movies get shot on them, and they’re easy to carry, so they lower the barrier to entry for anyone inclined to start making things. But if you observe yourself long enough (or maybe you already know), you might find out what’s stopping you, be it real or imagined.

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

As you can probably tell, I’m in my video era at the moment. So all my feeds feature lighting breakdowns, camera reviews, and editing tips.

I don’t have singular pieces of content to recommend, but rather a list of creators that always put something interesting in my feed.

1. Vanessa Lau

2. Jared Thomas Tapy

3. Ethan Uncurated

4. Valeriiatuu

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And finally, I’m eagerly awaiting access to Instagram’s new Series feature and can’t wait to try it out. I’ve been loving seeing how Alyssa of @inspiredmediaco is using it to repackage existing content.

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Isabelle Hasslund is a freelance social media marketer who spends her days across LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for her clients. You’ll find her on LinkedIn.

So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• Inside the Artemis II social media strategy (Link in Bio) — The Artemis II launch is the first time in a long time I actually felt something on social… so reading about the social strategy behind it is a must. It’s literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity years in the making!

• Healing affirmations: Louise Hay (YouTube) — I found this video via a Reddit thread about manifestation. We doomscroll all day as SMMs, and this really keeps me grounded. I play it every morning before digesting any other kind of content, to turn inward.

• Lovable — LinkedIn just announced a one-year free trial of Lovable Pro with LinkedIn Premium. I’m experimenting with it right now to try and build an app that would help me gamify an employee advocacy program I’m helping a client build!

• Evergreen tabs open: Canva + my Notes app — because I never know when creativity will strike.

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

Carmen Vicente on LinkedIn is incredible. Her posts are around social, marketing, and AI, and they are really thought-out. She’s extremely analytical, provides sources, and creates videos that are extremely engaging. LinkedIn can become somewhat of an echo chamber, with everyone giving the same advice and insights, but every post she offers a different POV on hot topics in marketing. That’s very rare to find on the platform these days.

Editor’s Note: Carmen was recently featured in Open Tabs — check out her tabs below.

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

My fitness journey, for sure. On the leg press, it clicked for me the other day how much fitness and organic social are alike. You set goals and benchmarks for yourself, show up every day, and work toward your goals little by little. Some days it feels like there’s no progress. Sometimes you get injured (I tore my glute medius the other week and got very frustrated). Progress isn’t linear, but what matters is you show up and do your best. The small steps don’t seem like much, but when you stop and turn around and look at where you started, you realize how much progress you actually made! As an impatient person and as a freelancer who often feels pressured to get results ASAP for clients, this was an eye-opening realization.

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

I am not someone who likes being put into boxes, but a lot of the advice for content creation is to “niche down.” I like posting about all things social strategy and campaigns, employee advocacy, AI, and occasionally health and wellness. I try my best to create a “look” to my content and establish a voice to make that the cohesive factor, but a voice in my head wonders if I should niche down even further. Or maybe niche down for the time being, watch my content grow, and then expand? At the end of the day, my content reads best when I’m excited about what I write and it doesn’t feel forced.

Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

LinkedIn’s new carousel update! I think the point of making carousels a bit smaller is to encourage video content on LinkedIn. As we do as social media marketers, we need to pivot and make our LinkedIn carousels bolder and with bigger fonts to keep them readable.

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO GIVE YOU: A TRMNL GIVEAWAY

One of our engineers built something great with the Buffer API on a TRMNL e-ink display, and we’re giving away four devices (plus Buffer swag for two runners-up).

To participate, head to LinkedIn for the terms and conditions. The giveaway will run through June 20 — good luck!

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

Tami here 👋🏾

We launched Insights! That’s it, that’s the scroll.

Watch this video to spot a familiar face (me).

You want more? Okay: Insights is Buffer’s new home for your analytics.

All your channels in one view? Check ✅

Takeaways that read your numbers and tell you what actually worked? Check ✅

A Share as Post button that turns your metrics into a graphic you can post straight from the composer? Check ✅

Even more features for you to discover? Check, check, checkity check ✅

Discover more features in our latest YouTube video

If you can’t tell, I love this feature, especially as I’ve spent most of 2026 laser-focused on Instagram.

The combo that’s been working for me: going back to my best-performing posts to build a theory for why they landed, and replicating + repurposing them. Also using Takeaways as my cheat code when I’m feeling stuck on what to do next.

Try out Insights for yourself — it’ll be waiting for you in your Buffer account. And if you’re not signed up, let this be your sign.

Try out Insights in Buffer

Alright, that’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

In the wake of completing my sprint to 5,000 followers on Instagram, which didn’t have the results I wanted but was a worthwhile pursuit nonetheless, I came to quite a few realizations.

The past week has been like waking up out of a long sleep with a clear head about what I want my content to look like and where I want it to go.

Part of this journey is revisiting my content pillars. I started this exercise earlier in the year, around March, but never got around to honing in on

For me, content pillars are direction. Much-needed direction.

I have a lot of interests, and without something prompting my push for social media growth beyond personal desire and topics for the Buffer blog, I often find myself adrift when it comes to content.

I can go long stretches without feeling like I have anything to post, and then suddenly wake up with a fire underneath me and tons of content ideas.

As a relatively experienced creator, however, I just don’t find this sustainable. And content pillars have historically been my preferred solution. So here’s what I’m doing to rebuild mine for this era.

1/ Clearing the board

I’m not starting from my old pillars. They’re not the problem and would probably still perform, but every time I’ve tried to “revisit” them, I end up feeling stuck.

Back in March, I drafted four themes and wanted to use them as pillars:

1. “The life you build is only as interesting as the things you let in.”

2. “Your output can only be as interesting as what you’re feeding it.”

3. “Design your attention.”

4. “Not everything that catches your eye deserves a place in your collection.”

I still agree with the sentiment behind each statement, but they feel pretty vague and airy to me now, which probably says a lot about how useful they would have been. I need pillars with good bones without leaning on more trusty terms like “content strategy” or “productivity”.

So this rebuild starts from a blank page, and anything from the old set has to earn its spot like a new idea would.

2/ Experimenting

Instead of picking pillars in a doc and hoping I stick to them, I’m trying out different topics this month and noting what I keep wanting to make and what my audience keeps responding to.

While I still have a lot of work to do, the early results are already surprising me. Two of the best-performing videos on my personal accounts lately are about the evolution of my taste in music and my deep dive into photography.

They’re not productivity- or career-focused content, but they don’t quite fit my more recent attempt at changing my pillars. I’m excited to figure out where they go.

3/ Finding the LinkedIn-crossover

Whatever comes out of this exercise has to have decent crossover with LinkedIn, where I have my largest audience and my content skews more serious. A theme that only works in a 15-second reel is an Instagram bit, not a pillar.

But I’m running the test in reverse too: I’ve started posting some of my more lifestyle-leaning content on LinkedIn to see how it performs. If my photography content can find footing on LinkedIn, the crossover problem gets a lot smaller. If it can’t, better to find out now, mid-experiment, than after I’ve written a pillar into the doc.

Either way, the new set of pillars has to leave room for work and play equally.

ORGANIZE YOUR IDEAS IN BUFFER USING TAGS

Whenever I make my final decision on pillars, I’ll add them to Buffer as tags, as I always do. It’s a simple but fulfilling way to keep your ideas organized. I’ve always used this method, and I can’t recommend it enough. Get started with Buffer and set up tags of your own.

Get started with Buffer

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM TO GIVE YOU: A TRMNL GIVEAWAY

On Monday, July 13, we’re kicking off a giveaway with TRMNL over on Buffer’s LinkedIn.

One of our engineers built something great with the Buffer API on a TRMNL e-ink display, and we’re giving away four devices (plus Buffer swag for two runners-up).

Entry happens right on the post: tell us what you’d want to see on your TRMNL at a glance, or what you’d build with the API. It will run through July 20, and I’d love to see subscribers get on it! Keep an eye on our LinkedIn for the post on July 13.

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

The movies have never been better, and I’m all in at the moment (I’m especially excited to see The Odyssey and Dune 3!). Maybe that’s why I have video and video editing on the brain.

I’m really trying to up the quality of my visual content this year between looking into hiring an editor, practicing myself and investing in gear. So. Much. Gear.

I’ve been watching lots of “how I edit” videos and I especially love this one from Linh Truong.

And then, I’m fascinated by The Kumar Method, an account that’s been going super, mega viral. I’ve been watching the videos religiously to try to figure out what on earth is going on.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s one video to get you started and scrolling through the weekend.

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

It’s me again (did you miss me?) I’m back from a quick vacation, and I handed off to Hailley, who took a brilliant turn on the newsletter.

I had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad June for a number of reasons, and every time there was a bright spot, it would be overshadowed by something else happening.

So when I looked at my numbers and realized that, without a miracle, I wouldn’t hit my goal of 5,000 followers by the end of June/Q2 as I’d been hoping and planning for, I wasn’t surprised. It tracked with the way the month had been going.

Now I could’ve let myself spiral, but perhaps because so many other things were going so badly, I was able to shift my perspective immediately.

And with that shift came some hard-won reflections about my sprint, which I wanted to share today.

1. Life will have peaks and valleys

One thing about life that always holds true: it will have peaks and valleys. It’s as sure as the laws of motion or the sun rising in the east. June was a valley, and no amount of planning was going to change that. I went into the month with a sprint plan I believed in, and I still think it was a good one. It just wasn’t the right plan for the month I got. You can’t outplan a bad season; you can only get through it with your systems intact.

2. Content creation is a game of rock, paper, scissors

The playable hands are life, plans, and content, and some games go better than others.
Life beats plans. A bad enough month will crush the smartest sprint plan anyone has ever written, and June crushed mine.

Plans beat content. On any given day, a decent system will outperform waiting for inspiration. Templates, batching, scheduled slots: that’s how the work gets made when you have nothing to give.

And content, sort of miraculously, beats life. The posts I’d already published kept working the entire time I was struggling, getting discovered by new people and playing rounds on my behalf. More on that in lesson six.

No hand wins every round. I threw plans all month, and June kept throwing life. The comfort, if you want to call it that, is that the game is played in rounds, and losing one tells you nothing about the next. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed for good games in H2.

3. My consistency has become an instinct

Even in a rough month, I kept making things. Off-the-cuff posts, planned content, all of it felt like something I can just do now rather than something I have to force. That’s very new. A year ago, a June like this one would’ve meant total silence. The sprint didn’t get me to 5,000, but it proved the effort I’ve put in building up my consistency muscle isn’t in vain.

4. Templates are goated

I didn’t always have the energy or mental wherewithal to create at the level my goal demanded, so I leaned on templated carousels and formats I could execute half-asleep. Nobody scrolling past a good carousel knows (or cares) whether it took me half a day or 40 minutes. If you don’t have go-to formats you can pull off on a bad day, build them before the bad day arrives.

5. I should’ve preplanned the tactical stuff

The content side of my sprint was solid, but the technical, tactical side wasn’t. Things like DM automation and having resources ready to share with people would’ve really helped if I did them more, but I just didn’t have the capacity for it. I’ll be investing in brainstorming to make super valuable things that people will want, so I have something to lean on for future content.

6. Repetition is fine

I made too much net-new content. Meanwhile, new people keep discovering my heaviest hitters, which tells me those posts could’ve popped off all over again with slightly different framing.

7. I should’ve made more short videos

Instagram doesn’t punish you for posting multiple times a day, and I didn’t take advantage of that. Short videos would’ve let me have more chances in the feed without burning more energy than my carousels or longer videos do.

So no, I didn’t hit 5,000 by the end of Q2. As of writing this post, I’m sitting at 3,190. But my goal isn’t going anywhere. I plan to hit and even surpass it in July and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

💬 Have you ever missed a goal and come away better for it? I’d love to hear in the comments!

Leave a comment

TEMPLATES TO BUILD THE HABIT

If you’re early in your consistency journey or could just use some help coming up with ideas, we’ve got you covered! With over 100 templates in our library, you’ll never run out of ideas for content to post.

Check out Templates

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

I’ve been trying to intellectualize my guilty pleasure of binging vertical short dramas, specifically the ones from China. So this interview from Colin and Samir about the phenomenon was a welcome sight in my feed.

Did you know it’s a $6.9 billion industry? I wonder how many of those dollars are from me downloading 5 of the apps.

Then, as someone who missed Cannes Lions and was living vicariously through the creators who went, I loved this two-part essay (1, 2) from Eugene Healey about his observations of the festival.

Also, speaking of the short dramas, TikTok is apparently launching branded ones that you can watch on the platform. This is no surprise, especially as just last May, Issa Rae’s HOORAE Media produced and shared a viral series called Screen Time for free on TikTok.

Finally, LinkedIn is testing suggested feeds, so look out for your version of the For You page. I wonder what’ll be on mine.

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Hi folks! It’s been a minute since I’ve been in our newsletter, and it’s wonderful to be back.

We’re going to → grab all of the context about your recent posts → analyze it to look for patterns and gaps → set up a workflow so that you are checking your social posts against your social goals and staying on track.

I’ve been tracking my LinkedIn metrics for a while, and I have specific goals, but I’d never connected the context I could gather from my own posts to having AI coach me toward the output I actually want.

So here’s the system I built and the exact prompts I used, so you can do the same (if you’d like).

1. Pull all of your recent social posts

This is easier than you might think, and very important. Successful systems work because they are tailored to you, so we need the context.

I grabbed all my posts by connecting my Buffer account to my Claude account and asking Claude to grab them for me. (Possible on all Buffer plans, even free.)

→ Here’s a full guide to Buffer’s AI integrations and how to connect them.

If you’re in Buffer’s beta, you can also export all of this from the new Insights tab.

Here’s what I asked Claude (you can use any AI tool; Claude is just my preference):

Via Buffer, pull all of my posts on [social network] from the last [time period] — the caption, the date posted, and all of the associated analytics.

2. Build the analysis most useful to you

This is where it gets fun — and where you get to be specific. The focus here isn’t one perfect prompt; it’s deciding what you most want to understand about your own posting, then asking for exactly that. A few options for you:

• Content pillars: what you post about most, and how the mix breaks down

• Your voice: your real writing style, sentence patterns, the words and phrases you lean on

• What is performing: your most- and least-engaged posts, and what they have in common

• Formats: whether text, photo, video, or link posts perform differently for you

• Hooks: which opening lines you use most often, which are getting engagement, and which aren’t

• Timing: the days and times you post most and whether that aligns with the best time to post data

• Conversion: whether the posts meant to drive something (subscribers, sales, calls) are getting traction

Pick the few that matter most to you and drop them into the prompt:

Pull all my [social network] posts from [time frame] with their text, dates, and metrics (reactions, comments, impressions, reach). Build me an artifact analyzing [the 3–4 things you picked above]. Don’t generalize from social media best practices — only use my data.

Two things mine surfaced that I wouldn’t have guessed: my pillars were lopsided (I post about systems and marketing constantly, and about career far less — even though that’s something I’ve highlighted as a content pillar for myself), and my most personal posts do the most work (a quick one about taking my birthday off work pulled 104 reactions and 30 comments).

With all of this context, it’s time to reflect.

A simple Keep, Start, Stop is always effective. Based on what you found, what do you want to Keep doing, what do you want to Start doing, and what do you want to Stop doing.

A few more pointed questions you could reflect on:

• Is there a gap between what I want to post about and what I am posting about?

• Have I selected the right days and times to send my posts out to reach my audience?

• Are the formats I’m using performing well, or do I need to experiment?

3. Use this analysis + AI to have a social coach in your pocket

The analysis is a goldmine of context, and now we use it. If you have specific goals as a creator or as someone managing social profiles, you can use this analysis and your goals to get some really valuable coaching and advice on what to adjust in your strategy or what to post next.

Here’s what I said to Claude:

Here are my goals for [social network] this year: [your goals]. Use the analysis of what I’ve actually been posting that you’ve already conducted. Act as my content coach. Based on the analysis, what do I need to do differently to reach my goals?

To make the coaching sharper, I also handed Claude a few Buffer resources as context, so we know its advice comes from real guidance and not just vibes:

• How to Grow on Social Media in 2026: A Data-Backed Guide

• Your Complete Guide to Social Media Marketing: Platforms, Strategy, and Tips for Growth

• The Best Time to Post on Social Media in 2026: Times for Every Major Platform

• Algorithm information for: LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube Shorts, and Threads.

From there, you can access this coach as often as you’d like: I’d recommend at least monthly.

I set up a monthly Claude Cowork scheduled task to run this analysis fresh and compare it to my goals again to coach me on adjusting my content for the following month.

You could also set a reminder in your to-do list to check in as frequently as you need.

Fit this into your own existing workflows to have the highest chance of success here.

If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: you already have the best dataset for getting better on social media through your own content. Next up, it’s about using it.

If this is your kind of thing, I write a newsletter about building systems for work and life that keep me productive, calm, and organized, usually based on what I’m figuring out in real time. → You can subscribe here

WHAT’S IN THE SCROLL?

Hi, Tami here, popping back in to share what’s in my scroll this week! I spotted a post in my LinkedIn morning scroll from Austin Null recently — and it stopped me in my tracks because it had two names at the top instead of one.

That’s when I found out: soon, two or more people, plus LinkedIn Pages (!), can share one post together, with every collaborator listed at the top. It’s in beta with creators and brands now (I guess I missed my invite in the mail) and will roll out over the coming months.

As someone who has been using collab posts on Instagram forever and will get a lot of use out of this feature on LinkedIn, I figured I’d write up everything we know so far: so here’s everything we know about LinkedIn collab posts.

Something else I’ve been keeping a close eye on is our new Buffer Home. It’s a new landing page and hub for all your social activity and brings in elements of each area of Buffer (streaks, upcoming posts, more!) into a single view. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

And if you’d like to guest-write an issue of The Weekly Scroll, reply to this one with your idea, and I’ll reach out!

If you found your way here through Hailley — welcome. This is The Weekly Scroll, Buffer’s newsletter for creators and social media pros. We’d love to have you.

Subscribe now

Alright, that’s it — see you next Friday!

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Kamela Nizio is a Content Marketing Manager at Girlboss, where she spends her days thinking about how to reach ambitious women without all the toxic hustle-culture noise. You'll find her on LinkedIn and Instagram.

So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• What happens when we replace friends with AI? (Vox) — On all of us turning to chatbots for advice instead of the humans who actually know us. I catch myself doing this so I’m not “bugging” my friends with my problems. It was a great reminder to lean into friendships, not out of them.

• Why retirement stakes are higher for women (Morgan Stanley) — We’ll all need to retire one day, so what makes it harder for women? This article shone a light on exactly why.

• The Devil Wears Prada, feminism, and the girlboss (NYT Opinion) — The Girlboss never left! She just redefined herself, and for the better. It’s okay to want ambition and to love your career. It’s all the unrealistic noise around it that can be damaging.

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

Maggie Sellers Reum, founder of Hot Smart Rich. She has a brilliant podcast interviewing cool women doing cool things. Every conversation has a takeaway, and I love how Maggie is unapologetically herself in everything she does. She also repurposes her podcasts into a newsletter with even more exclusive content.

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

Taking my dog Lenny on long walks. Getting outside and out of my head has done wonders for my thinking habits. Sometimes I listen to a podcast or music, but a lot of the time I’m walking in silence, finding joy in watching my dog get his enrichment from sniffing and being curious about the world.

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

How to consume all the amazing content out there. I’m constantly saving, bookmarking, and leaving tabs open on really awesome articles and posts — but where does one find the time to read them all? And don’t get me started on trying to remember everything I read. I can’t be the only one feeling overwhelmed by how many books, Substacks, articles, and courses are out there in the world. Does anyone out there have a solution? 🥲

Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

Instagram’s bot purge. Some people lost thousands of followers overnight, and I think this is a good thing! Let’s keep engagement at a human-to-human level. Followers are just a vanity metric. What matters more is how many humans are stopping their scroll to engage with something you post.

What’s in the scroll?

Tami here 👋🏾 I come bearing great news: you can now give more visibility to your expertise on LinkedIn, including your proficiency as a Buffer user.

To use this feature, visit your LinkedIn profile and click Add section → Recommended → Add connected app → Buffer and follow the steps in your Buffer account.

Beehiiv (where I host my personal newsletter) and Wispr Flow (where I put my yapping skills to productive use) are also on the list, so I’ll be sure to also add them as skills. This is great for me because now everyone can see proof of how good I am at using my apps.

And more great news, Meta is bringing Edits to desktop. As someone who only edits on desktop in CapCut, stay tuned to see if I’ll finally be freed from the CapCut tower.

That’s it from me.

Try out Buffer

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

See, I’ve been self-reflecting a lot lately, trying to figure out the best mix of my personal and professional identity.

I started my creator growth on LinkedIn, which meant I was really focused on developing the professional parts of myself, the professional image of myself. And it’s not that I didn’t have interests outside of that. I have lots of interests that I’m always exploring, but I just wasn’t thinking about them the way I typically do with work, where I spend time thinking about why I’ve made a certain decision or chosen a specific approach.

My personal taste never got that level of care. I’ve been developing my taste, perspective, and interests, without really paying attention to what they were or why.

Now I’m paying attention, and here’s what I’ve found.

I love making art almost as much as I love consuming it. When I was younger, I loved to draw and paint. I was an avid reader and writer, so I constantly had a pen in hand. I wrote letters, stories, and poetry (adults loved this one). I sang in the church choir. I loved being in front of and behind a camera, using my dad’s camcorder to make what I thought were home videos. Quiet as I was, I was also deeply curious about the world and eager to share. My parents will have plenty of stories about me bringing them something I’d made because I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done.

Then the angst arrived, the teenage kind and the young adult kind after it, where you feel like conforming, then you want to rebel, then you don’t care, and then you come all the way back around to caring.

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It took becoming a creator to come back around

The same effort and attention I’d been putting into my professional self, making things, putting them out, paying attention to what resonates, turned out to be a door back into who I used to be (and perhaps who I’ve always been). The loves did come back, just not through the same mediums.

I’m not filling notebooks with poetry these days, but I think the throughline is the same. I love the rhythm of creating, I love the process, and I still have the itch to show someone the coolest thing I’ve ever made. The camcorder kid became an adult who films everything (my camera roll can confirm). The kid who thought Sharpay had the best numbers in High School Musical became the adult who admires great performers, and who’s slowly building up the confidence to perform on camera herself.

What I was actually drawn to in all of it, I can see now, was the pursuit of excellence: the development of skill, the focus on being the best at whatever it is you’ve decided to do. Now that I’m an adult, I can see I’m still sort of the same person with a lot of the same interests, even if they’ve morphed a bit.

The case for paying attention

So here’s the version of this that applies to you. Try giving your personal interests the same level of thought you give your work. What did you love at age nine? What keeps resurfacing in your saves, your rewatches, the things you send to friends unprompted?

If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: what you loved before anyone was watching is the least algorithm-influenced data you have about yourself. Your interests are unique to you, and the combination of them, how they all make up YOU, the person, is your thing, i.e., what nobody else can replicate.

The things you loved when you were younger will find their way back to you. Leave the door open so they can come in.

SAVE YOUR IDEAS IN BUFFER

The Create space holds everything from shower thoughts to fully fleshed-out brainwaves, and on a week like this one, that’s the difference between posting and ghosting.

Try out Buffer Ideas

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

Part of what sparked my thoughts around this week’s issue can be attributed to Anna Howard of Wild Geese’s video on navigating the confusion of her early 20s.

And then the YouTube algorithm, perhaps realizing that I had deep curiosity about the topic, gave me a few more recommendations like this video on developing a creative universe from inés blanche.

I’m still in study mode, but I’ll make sure to take notes and report back on my epiphanies.

In social news, the apps have been on a roll lately, with lots and lots of features being rolled out, to mixed reactions.

On the one hand, you have Instagram finally giving us the highly (highly) requested reorder-your-feed feature (I love this). Then you have LinkedIn reducing the size of the reaction, comment, and share buttons (I don’t like this). Guess we can’t have it all.

Speaking of LinkedIn, they invited several creators to their New York headquarters to announce a creator marketplace to boost creator discovery on the platform. Big news for LinkedIn creators (me!)

That’s it from me.

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Justina (Jeanie) Thompson is an Associate Marketer (Content + Creative) balancing big-tech work with contract projects, and someone figuring out personal brand in public honestly, and a little reluctantly. You’ll find her on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tumblr.

So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• Aerie’s “100% Real” campaign — I watched the full ad after catching snippets between commercial breaks on Amazon Prime. As a Gen Z marketer, it’s so refreshing to see a brand POV on AI that’s rooted in clarity, purpose, and intention.

• Perfectly Imperfect — From first-person celebrity interviews to niche experiences, it’s been my go-to platform for discovering new perspectives as a young person.

• Toni Bravo’s recent YouTube upload — In a digital world full of influencer noise, Toni’s content never feels overwhelming. Her slowness and ease remind me to practice the same in my everyday life as much as I can.

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

Toni Bravo. Toni is an LA-based, California-born writer, creator, and creative, and she is SO in her own lane — which is exactly why I cite her as someone who knows herself and her audience really well. She went from being dubbed “the Queen of Blush” for her beauty content to “the Tinned Fish Princess” by the internet (all thanks to her viral videos of trying out Fishwife’s vibrantly colored canned fish). Toni doesn’t amplify anything that isn’t already embedded in her everyday life. Whenever I come across her work, long- or short-form, her honesty and elegance are a breath of fresh air.

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

The conversations I’ve been having with my recently graduated friends. So many of our everyday chit-chats come back to finding comfort in this period of redirection and ambiguity. As young people in today’s climate, Gen Z is up against way more than people who entered the workforce even a year before us; the timing just hasn’t been favorable for us.

Nevertheless, where our perspectives and experiences always merge within these discussions — despite working different jobs and having disparate schedules — is our shared commitment to growth, to getting through the hard parts, and to finding community in/showing up for the moments that matter. It’s never weird to talk about getting rejected from a role, or feeling like we’re missing out on visibility because we’re working so much. We find peace in knowing we’re all grinding and that we’re there for each other through it.

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

Embracing inconsistency and growing privately. As a Gen Z, Black, femme marketer working at a big tech company while balancing contract work, I’ve found it hard to fully commit to showing up as a creator and personal brand across platforms, especially LinkedIn and Instagram. Algorithms, trends, and creator representation change rapidly. (Like… where did Instants come from? Hello? 🥲) It’s even harder when my feeds are full of other young people who look like me going to brand events, landing influencer management… all of it, really. It makes me feel like I’m not doing enough to stand out.

What I’m learning is that my circumstances are uniquely my own. I can’t use anyone I see on social media as a benchmark for success. So I’m trying to show up as best I can for myself, even if it’s one post a day,saying “yes” to opportunities even when I don’t feel ready for them, and working on projects privately, for my own gratification.

Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

Instagram letting you change the image order in carousels — so you can actually can actually control how a carousel looks in-feed after it goes live. Everything hallelujah for that. 😭

What’s in the scroll?

Hi, Tami popping in 👋🏾

I committed to sprinting to 5,000 followers on Instagram for the month of June, so I’ve been rallying my creativity to publish daily. Thankfully, the creative well seems to be overflowing, but I know that won’t last forever.

So in a bid to stay ahead of…myself, I’ve been aggressively documenting all my ideas, big, small, never-going-to-see-the-light-of-day. I’ve also been exploring big sessions of content batching (this is hard for me as someone whose approach to content is very spontaneous). The hope is that if or when the well runs dry, I can tap into my past self’s creative mindset.

My feed right now is full of fellow creators with advice and inspiration for this journey, especially @bylaurendudley and @nanadelrey on Instagram. I’ve also picked up templates from @xantheappleyard for carousels.

Keep an eye on the newsletter to see if I’ll hit my goal! Either way, there’ll be a story to tell at the end of my journey.

Speaking of Instagram (that’s all I’ve been doing lately tbh), there’ve been a few fun updates to the Edits app. I’ve also just seen this exciting update teasing connected ‘series reels’ and I’m eager to try that as I grow my presence. Hopefully they release it to the general audience soon!

That’s it from me.

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Until next time,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

For the last six weeks, I’ve been working on articles for the Automations cohort of our Guest Post Program — a way to get people who are doing interesting things with Buffer onto our blog, in their own words.

Every article in this cohort is from someone who built something specifically with the new Buffer API. And since we’ve just launched the API, I thought I’d share some of the patterns I’ve been noticing across the people building with it.

Before we get into it, here’s what the cohort has built (so far):

• Anthony turned an outdated Zapier setup into a custom job-board pipeline

• Angie surfaces content ideas from her community’s Slack questions

• Brandon’s product database now generates 21 posts a week across three platforms.

• Joe’s Mac app turns a stack of Pokémon cards into eBay listings and Threads posts in one drag-and-drop.

• Ben built a workflow layer between his idea capture and Buffer’s queue.

• Violeta finds AEO gaps on LinkedIn and turns them into a week of posts.

• Shivani turned her old LinkedIn posts into a searchable, repurposable library.

• Fahad built an engine that stages trending topics inside Buffer. His piece is already live on the blog.

• Miguel’s SwiftUI app turns his reading highlights into LinkedIn posts.

• Martín wrote a script that auto-schedules daily posts for his word game, and the daily cadence accidentally sparked a community around it.

Some of them are engineers. Some have never written a line of code. Both groups built the same kind of thing. Now let’s get into how.

1. They built bridges, not new platforms

Every one of them connected two systems they were already using. Anthony’s CMS to social. Angie’s Slack to her content calendar. Joe’s eBay to his social following. Brandon’s product database to Instagram. Nobody was trying to build a new platform from scratch. They spotted a gap between two tools they already used, and built the small piece that connected them.

The thing that makes this newly possible for non-engineers is the tools that build the bridges. Angie’s runs on Gumloop. Shivani’s runs on Lovable. Neither of them wrote a custom backend — they described what they wanted and let an AI assemble the plumbing.

2. The trigger was always the same question

Every guest poster in the cohort started with a version of the same question: “I want this to behave slightly differently. How can I do that?”

When you’re asking that question every other day, that’s usually the sign you need something custom. The off-the-shelf tool worked but had a gap that kept tripping them up. So instead of waiting for a setting that might not be coming, they built the missing piece.

🛠 If you’re new to this, here’s the no-code stack the non-engineers used

If the word “API” still feels out of reach, this is the toolkit half the cohort actually used to build with the Buffer API without writing code:

• Gumloop — drag-and-drop AI workflows on a canvas. (

• Lovable — describe an app in plain English, get a working app back.

• n8n / Zapier — the classic connect-anything tools, now with MCP support, so they speak to AI agents too.

• Claude (with MCP) — talk to the Buffer API from your chat window. No code, just describe what you want.

• Cursor — an AI pair-programmer that handles the actual code part for you while you stay in plain English.

The skill these tools ask of you isn’t code. It’s describing what you want clearly enough for an AI to execute.

3. AI did the assembly, but it was all driven by humans

None of these workflows is “full automation.” Every one has a deliberate human checkpoint. Anthony approves each job manually before the pipeline queues it. Angie reviews drafts inside Buffer before anything goes out. Joe sets the price himself on every card. Brandon spot-checks the week’s posts in iA Writer.

What that tells me is the question isn’t “how much can I automate?” It’s “which part of this work do I want to keep doing?” Everyone in the cohort answered that question for themselves before they shipped.

4. Voice was the part they obsessed over

Angie has an entire section in her piece titled “How I trained the AI to sound like me.” Brandon keeps a voice-and-tone Markdown file and spends more time on it than the code powering his automation.

Most of them spent more time tuning the voice than they did building the workflow itself. Every cohort writer eventually arrived at the same conclusion: the mechanics were (relatively) easy to build, but the voice couldn’t be perfectly replicated.

5. The most valuable output was time back, plus consistency

If you’re running something on top of a day job, a kid, a side project, or a volunteer role, this might be the outcome that matters most.

Nobody in this cohort got 10x more output from automating their stack. Brandon’s engagement didn’t skyrocket. But he went from impulse posting to daily posts across three platforms without losing his dev time. Angie got valuable time back. Anthony got five hours a week back and put them into the community he runs. Joe walks away from a stack of listings on a Sunday evening.

What these builds give you is time back, and a way to keep showing up without burning yourself down to do it.

What caught my eye most was how small the steps were to getting something functional. Each builder had something specific they kept tripping over, and they took a few hours to fix it.

“I built it with the Buffer API”, might sound intimidating, but the context of how little time it took and how little technical proficiency you actually need to get something working makes it seem far less daunting.

So, something to think about: where can you plug a gap in your current workflow?

API ALL THE WAY DOWN

You’ve heard from the builders. Now it’s your turn.

Buffer’s API is now live for everyone. And you don’t have to write any code to start.

The fastest way in for non-developers is to connect it to Claude or ChatGPT via MCP, then describe what you want in plain English and let the model handle the API calls.

Wire it up and get to testing and building. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Get started with the Buffer API

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

It’s been an API-heavy week, so most of this is API-adjacent.

First up a double feature, from the Buffer team:

• How to use Buffer with Claude — the entry point for anyone who wants to wire up Buffer without writing code. Start here if “API” still sounds intimidating.

• How to build with Buffer’s API — for when you’re past the chat-window stage and want to see what the API actually does under the hood.

Together, the two videos walk you through the full learning curve in about 20 minutes.

We also have case studies from different people who’ve built some very impressive things with the Buffer API to inspire your next build:

1. Ben Campbell on PostIQ

2. Shivani Shah on her LinkedIn Command Center

3. Writestack’s founder Orel Zilberman on cross-platform scheduling for Substack (!) creators

4. Marin Nedelev on managing 77 social channels in ten languages

That’s already a lot so I’ll sign off quickly with a request: if you’ve built anything interesting recently, share it in the comments! We’d love to champion more builders.

Leave a comment

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Carmen Vicente is the Content and Social Lead at Slate, and the writer behind Scroll Sick, a Substack delivering human-led recs every two weeks. You'll find her thinking out loud on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and Threads.

So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• Emily Segal’s recent piece on “Tasteslop” — she’s one of the few people writing about taste in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to sell me anything, and this one names a feeling I’ve been circling for months.

• Mishti Sharma’s deep dive into how Clay built their narrative function — an incredible look at what it actually takes to build a brand voice from scratch inside a startup. Bookmarking-and-re-reading territory.

• Etymology Nerd’s clip about “influencer accents” — a great little study into how social media platforms and algorithms shape the way we speak.

I could give you lots more — that’s just a taste. (I send out human-led recs every two weeks in my Substack, Scroll Sick.)

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

@itslittlemich is a modern-day internet artist. Her editing and cadence in videos is unmatched — the kind of stuff that makes you rewatch a 20-second clip three times to figure out how she did it. A true genius, and I mean that unironically.

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

Pierre Bourdieu. (I know that sounds like a line right out of “Thought Daughter Starter Kit” and yes, even I’m rolling my eyes a bit.)

He was a French sociologist who wrote foundational texts on taste —specifically, that it isn’t an innate, personal thing but a relational social construct shaped by class, exposure, and access.

His work informs a lot of how I think about modern-day tech bro taste anxiety: the obsession with the right newsletter, the right essay, the right podcast, the right gadget. I think we have an imperative to read about the systems that shape our tech-forward world (that were written in times long before the internet existed).

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

I need to focus on fewer platforms. Four to five is a grind, and I’d love not to have to be everywhere all at once.

The hard part is the FOMO — every platform feels like it has its own audience, its own logic, its own opportunity cost. Cutting back means picking a couple of bets and trusting that going deeper on those will outperform going wider on everything. I’m still figuring out which ones deserve focus and which I can let go without losing momentum.

Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

Instagram cracking down on meme/aggregate accounts is an interesting one. They really seem to want to encourage content creators as a body of individuals, and there might also be some pressure to show public-facing efforts to rally against bots. Either way, it’s a clear signal about who Instagram wants to reward going forward, and I think a lot of accounts that have built audiences off other people’s work are about to feel it.

Stay on top of your social media with Buffer

Carmen’s “four to five platforms is a grind” might hit a little close to home, but that’s the exact thing Buffer is built to take off your plate.

In Buffer, you have one space to plan, schedule, and publish to every platform you’re on — so you can stop copy-pasting the same caption across five apps and actually spend your time on the part of creating you like.

If you’ve been juggling tabs to keep your posting consistent, give Buffer a spin!

Signup to Buffer

What’s in the scroll?

Hi, Tami here, just squeezing in 👋🏾. I’ve been seeing videos about taste all year (some of them from Carmen as well as creator Rickie Ho!), learning how and why it forms. My interest in it has been purely driven by personal curiosity, but digging into some of Carmen’s recommendations has me thinking a bit more deeply about it. Especially who determines what’s tasteful and why “the culture” agrees with them.

A few other things from my scroll this week:

Kirsti’s new YouTube video covers ALL the best times to post across social media.

Instagram introduces some improvements to the Edits app, for creators like me who edit on mobile (I know this is sacrilege to some people, but it works for me).

I also want to share the app that’s arguably been the main driving force behind my exploration of hobbies beyond media consumption and work: Sublime. In the team’s own words, it lets you save anything that makes you go “whoa” and find connecting ideas. It’s been a great forcing function for me to revisit things I find interesting and sit with them a bit longer, instead of saving, scrolling, and forgetting.

Finally, Creator Camp is back! For the uninitiated, Creator Camp is a free 30-day challenge to post consistently on any social platform to grow your audience within a community of like-minded people. Sign up here →

Until next week,

Tami

Like any good creator, I had tons of content planned for the two weeks I’d be traveling. There was team content to contribute to, personal content outlined in my notes, and a whole plan for how I could squeeze the most out of the trip creatively.

And then, I couldn’t make it.

As the week went on, I realized I had a decision to make. I could mope around and wait for the bad feelings to pass before I dove back into content creation, or I could lean into my situation and make the most of it. I chose the second option, but only after spending a solid couple of days doing the first.

Your bad weeks might not look like mine — there are plenty of valid reasons to step away from content creation when life just isn’t playing fair. But in case you do want to take option 2 and make the most of it, I want to share what worked for me when:

Today, I hope to give you a playbook for the times when:

• it isn’t convenient to create

• your mind or body aren’t agreeing with you

• the timing of the thing you’d planned has fallen apart on you

Share what’s been going on

For me, leaning into the moment and being a little vulnerable about it resonated with way more people than I expected. I got comments and DMs from people who, for one reason or another, had been waiting on a visa for everything from family weddings to job offers to a vacation they’d been saving for. A few of them had been dealing with their situation quietly and were just grateful to see they weren’t alone.

That small moment of misery was soothed by the number of people who were willing to commiserate. I’m not saying you have to spill your whole life on the internet — but if something real is happening in your world, talking about it might land harder than pretending things are going exactly to plan.

Batch create when you have the capacity

I have never appreciated having b-roll saved in my phone more than I did over the past couple of weeks.

Ideas I’d been sitting on for weeks finally got their time in the spotlight. I pulled text posts from old notes I’d never fully fleshed out, repurposed clips I’d shot for one reason and used them for another, and whipped up a few simple videos that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been hoarding raw material in the first place. The version of me from three weeks prior, mindlessly filming a five-second clip on a walk, basically rescued my content week.

If you take one thing from this issue, let it be this: the boring archive work you do when you have capacity might be what saves you when you don’t.

The case for not posting at all

It’s perfectly OK to have seasons where you just can’t do it. The nature of social media might make it feel like not posting spells doom for your presence, but I don’t agree.

Prioritizing your health, be it physical, mental, emotional, whichever, is never the wrong call. The audience that’s actually built for the long haul will be there when you come back. And if you’d rather show up depleted than miss a posting day, that’s worth examining on its own.

A missed week isn’t the end of your creator career, but a year of burnout might be.

None of this is groundbreaking, but it’s all about the mindset.

On the other side of all this, some genuinely nice things have cropped up. A creator agency reached out based on one of my posts during the week-that-shall-not-be-named for a LinkedIn brand partnership that’s live now. I got permission to post it to Instagram, too, which technically makes it my first Instagram brand partnership. And I hit 2,500 followers on Instagram in the middle of all of it — halfway to my goal of 5,000 by the end of June (you can read more about that here).

And I still wish I had made it on the trip. I know the content would’ve been fire, and I missed all the people I didn’t get to see. But I also had the opportunity to bring people into the fold and create some great content.

SAVE YOUR IDEAS IN BUFFER

The reason I had an archive to pull from is that I keep all my random ideas in one place: Buffer. The Create space holds everything from shower thoughts to fully fleshed-out brainwaves, and on a week like this one, that’s the difference between posting and ghosting.

Give Buffer Ideas a try today

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

As you can probably imagine, I had a lot of time to spend scrolling while waiting and trying to cheer myself up. Luckily, the content in my feed was so good that it (almost) made up for, well, everything else.

One of the top-tier things I saw this week was from Kirsti, fellow Senior Content Creator here at Buffer, on YouTube: the best time to post on, you guessed it, YouTube.

We also have a couple more ‘best time to post’ updates for Instagram and TikTok up on the blog.

Instagram launched Instants globally, an app to share candid moments. Something about this seems familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is — can you 👀 ? IG is also testing the option to set different captions for each slide of a carousel. Can you imagine the potential for photo dumps? And also other serious business scenarios? But mostly photo dumps?

LinkedIn is testing a feature that lets consultants take appointments directly in the platform. Who wants a 30-minute chat with me?

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Ben Campbell is a creative problem solver, social strategist, and vibe coder. He's currently job-hunting in the social space, building tools on the side just because he can, and posting through it all on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.

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So, what’s in your tabs?

Share 3-5 things that are genuinely in your tabs, bookmarks, or saved folder right now.

• The Buffer API Docs, as I am actively building two very cool projects with the API.

• Social Media Today is, without question, one of the best social media marketing industry news sites on the planet. It helps me stay in the know and also gives me content ideas to talk about.

• MTV’s The Challenge Subreddit is a guilty pleasure show I have loved watching since its inception.

• My GitHub: I was updating a website that serves as a marketing plan/application for a role I was going after.

• Grilling subreddit: I don’t know if it’s a genuinely new and growing interest of mine or if it’s because I am a dad now, haha.

Is there a creator or account you’ve been obsessed with lately?

There are two of them!

With WrestleMania this past weekend, I have to shout out first — SantiZap. He’s a wrestling content creator, and what keeps me tuning in is that he’s not ashamed to be a fan, which makes his content that much more genuine and fun to watch. He feels like a friend who you are just listening to talk about the industry you both love so much. He also embraces community well by incorporating hot takes, predictions, and more from his social media to fuel some of his content.

Next is Xtine Cardenas, a fitness content creator. The fitness content industry is not short of people. But she stands out as someone who is genuine and real, and who seems to really want to help people, even in her tagline on her reels and TikToks: “Follow me for a no BS approach to your health and fitness.”

Her content is honest, helpful, and genuinely fun to watch as someone who is alwyas looking for new fitness tips and health content. She’s definitely the purple cow (a concept anchored around being remarkable) of the fitness industry if you have ever read Seth Godin’s The Purple Cow.

What’s one thing that’s been shaping your thinking lately that has nothing to do with social media?

Probably parenthood. Having a toddler has completely rewired how I think about attention, energy, and connection. Kids are kind of ruthless truth tellers. They don’t care if something is strategic or polished. They respond to what feels real, what holds their attention, and what actually meets them where they are. A lot of good creative thinking comes from the same place: clarity, curiosity, and the understanding that just because something is louder doesn’t mean it’s better.

What’s one thing you’re working through or figuring out in your creator journey right now?

Something I’m figuring out right now is how to balance building with sharing.

The hard part is that when you’re making something new, it’s easy to stay in the cave too long. You want to refine it, improve it, make it smarter, make it cleaner, and make sure it’s ready. But if you wait to get it exactly right, you miss the feedback that would actually help shape it.

I’m working to share earlier, talk about the process while it’s still messy, and treat reactions as signals rather than judgments. That’s been uncomfortable, but helpful. What I’m learning is that people don’t just connect with finished work. They connect with honest work. Sometimes showing what you’re still figuring out is more valuable than showing something that looks complete.

Is there a piece of social media news or a platform update that caught your attention recently? What was it, and why did it stand out to you?

It was a while ago, but it was this one announcing that sharing your feed post to your story doesn’t boost engagement. I didn’t have the data to say it worked, but I thought the more you could repurpose your content within the same app, the better that post would perform. It was a common practice in many of the social roles I have been in, so it definitely caught my attention when IG announced that it doesn’t help.

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What’s in the scroll?

Hi, Tami here! We really have to stop meeting like this 😏

I’m kidding — how’ve you been? We’ve just rounded up our yearly retreat, and there’s a lot of renewed energy flowing throughout the team. And since feeling refreshed seems to be the vibe right now, I thought, “Why not refresh our Substack crew on how to use Buffer with our latest YouTube video?” Check it out 🔽

Like Ben, I get all my social news from SocialMediaToday, but I hadn’t checked it in a while, so these updates are as new to me as they are to you (probably).

The big one: accounts that curate content now have a lot more work to do, as Instagram will now be restricting content that’s been copied from other creators. Good news: as long as you’re pure of heart (doing it with good intentions and changing up enough of the content), you’re in the clear.

Threads now lets you play music in-feed and DM on desktop. Meta added more insights to Edits (big news for people who edit all their videos on their phone, aka me!)

Finally, Vine makes a comeback (?) through a new short-form app called Divine that hosts about 500,000 of the original Vines. Did someone say welcome back, 2016?

If this issue made you want to share what’s in your tabs, let us know!

Share your Open Tabs

Oh, and we’re (still) looking for a Senior Growth Engineer, so if you or anyone you know would be a good fit, check out the application!

Until next week,

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

I have a small confession.

A few weeks ago, when I told you I was growing on Instagram, I left a piece of the story out. While I was over there making videos and crossing 2,000 followers, I was also falling behind on another experiment.

Since November, I’ve been running a series called Proof of Concept on the Buffer blog. I pick a platform, set a goal, and try to grow from scratch in front of the thousands of blog (and now newsletter) readers. I started with Threads, aiming for 1,000 followers by December 15, 2025. I got to 815 824 as of writing this essay.

But my recent wins on Instagram made me realize two things: I had been avoiding Instagram for 10 years, and two, it was time to tap into my millennial side and pivot the platform I was running Proof of Concept on.

I’ll leave the tactical stuff for the article, but today, I want to talk about the psychology behind the pivot.

👉 I’m Growing on Instagram After 10 Years — Here’s What I‘m Doing Differently

The pivot (or lack thereof) was not about strategy

Here’s what I wrote in the article, kind of tucked in where I knew people might skim past it: I didn’t want the friends and family already following me on there to watch me try (and possibly fail) at something new.

That is a ridiculous reason to write off a platform for 10 years. I told myself, “Instagram’s just not the right place for me.” But what I was actually doing was running away from the platform I’d built the right kind of fluency in — 10 years of watching reels, saving photo dumps, noticing which sounds hit.

The funny thing is, the moment I actually posted, the people in my life were simply nice about it. Supportive, even. And the people who didn’t know me at all watched the video without judgment. The reasons I used to stay away were, in the end, a non-issue.

But I still needed something external to get me to this point. Which brings me to the first thing I think a good pivot requires.

Pivots need a deus ex machina

If you have no idea what that is, a deus ex machina is a trope in theatre where a god is lowered onto the stage by a crane to suddenly resolve an impossible situation. In my case, the god is usually an unexpected external event — a viral post, a flopped experiment, an opportunity that lands in my lap — that essentially makes the decision for me.

With Threads, the deus ex machina came from outside the experiment entirely. I’d been posting consistently for six months, getting close to my goal, and still wondering whether I was on the right platform. Then I crossposted a LinkedIn video to Instagram on a whim, watched it hit 110,000 views, and suddenly the decision made itself.

I think a lot of us do this, and there’s actually a psychological reason for it. Behavioral economists have a name for the particular flavor of stuck I was in: loss aversion. The pain of letting go of what you’ve already built — the 824 Threads followers, the six months of posting, the sunk cost of it all — tends to feel about twice as heavy as the excitement of what could come next. Which means we need an external signal big enough to tip the scales. For me, 110,000 views tipped it.

And this, it turns out, is not just a me thing. It’s a Silicon Valley thing, too. Instagram itself was a pivot — it started as a location check-in app called Burbn, until its founders noticed users only really engaged with the photo-sharing features and doubled down. Slack came out of a failed video game. Twitter came out of a podcast startup that got squeezed by iTunes. Eric Ries calls a pivot “a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis,” which is a pretty generous description of what actually happens most of the time. Most of the time, the hypothesis has been quietly brewing for years in the data, in your head, in your feed — and we’re just waiting for permission to stop ignoring it.

Which, as it turns out, is only the first thing a pivot asks of you.

Pivots need commitment

What surprised me most in the days after I made the call to switch to Instagram was the jump in the quality of my content. It was almost immediate, and just as a result of framing everything as “this is for Instagram” rather than thinking of it as just general video content.

For a while there, I’d been crossposting my LinkedIn videos and text posts to TikTok and Threads (never Instagram, though) just to fulfill a creator obligation. It never really worked because I wasn’t focused on fitting the content to the platform. What I was actually doing, I can see now, was half-pivoting. Not enough to get real results, just enough to let me tell myself I’d tried.

The moment I actually committed and started making things specifically for Instagram, it started working almost embarrassingly fast.

We talk about pivots like a moment of decision — a fork in the road where you pick a direction. But a pivot only really works when you fully commit to the new direction. A half-pivot is just hedging, and hedging is usually why things weren’t working in the first place.

Committing got me through the first few weeks of the new direction. But if I’ve learned anything from 10 years of watching other creators pivot, it’s that the real work is only just beginning.

Pivots need follow-through

It’s cute to narrate my journey through common storytelling terms like deus ex machina or the hero’s journey. But if my life really were a play, the viral video would just be the middle of Act One. Most of what happens from here is going to be less dramatic: showing up, making things, adjusting, making things again. This quote by Picasso comes to mind:

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. You must start drawing the line before you know where it goes. The action itself creates the idea.”

The deus ex machina got me to act. The commitment got me through the first few weeks. The follow-through is what matters now; it’ll be less dramatic and less narratable, but it's the only way to know whether I’ll achieve this goal.

I have a feeling it’ll be less linear than I’m imagining, but I’ll have fun with it regardless.

What’s something you’ve been putting off that you have a sneaky suspicion would go very well for you? Hit reply, or drop it in the comments — I’m genuinely curious.

Leave a comment

CROSSPOSTING WITH BUFFER

The video that started this whole pivot was a crosspost. I made it for LinkedIn, posted it to Instagram on a whim, and the rest is this week’s essay. Crossposting without a tool would have meant opening four apps and manually uploading four times — which is exactly the kind of friction that keeps people from experimenting.

Buffer lets me post to every channel from one place, which means I actually try things. If you want the same, scheduling is free for up to three channels. Give Buffer a try here!

WHAT’S IN MY SCROLL?

First, I invite you to follow us on Instagram so all the content we’ll be sharing over retreat week pops up in your scroll!

Speaking of Instagram, it’s all over my feed this week for the obvious reasons and then some. Discover Sabreen’s top tips for making money on Instagram in the latest blog post. Then, if you’ve been wanting to switch up your algorithm, we have a tutorial for that. And finally, steal the guide I’ve been using to lean into Instagram Stories a bit more in my own content.

In social news, it’s been a quiet week, but Threads caught my eye with live chats, which will function like Instagram Broadcast Channels. Plus, Instagram is introducing an app called Instants to share disappearing photos with friends a la BeReal (or stories???)

Anyway, that’s it from me — see you in two weeks!

—

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Our first edition features Phill Agnew, host of Nudge Podcast and former Bufferoo! If you’ve ever wondered why certain marketing tactics work so well, Phill is the creator for you. He’s one of the sharpest people I know when it comes to connecting academic research to the stuff we’re all actually doing on social media. I’ll let him take it from here.

Hey! I’m Phill.

I worked at Buffer back in 2023, created a chart-topping podcast, and know firsthand how hard it can be to grab attention in the feed.

Social media is super competitive. Your audience scrolls past hundreds of posts every day. If your writing doesn’t immediately grab attention, it disappears.

Luckily, on my podcast Nudge, marketing psychology researchers have shared a few reliable tricks.

Researchers have tested which types of words make people stop, read, and engage. I’ve applied these tips to my posts, and they’ve helped me gain 11k subscribers on TikTok and go viral on LinkedIn.

So, here are four science-backed ways to capture attention.

1. Be concrete

The science

Mike Treharne and Richard Shotton’s 2021 study found participants remembered 6.7% of concrete phrases, like “fast car”, but only 0.7% of abstract ones, like “innovative quality”.

That’s an eight-fold difference.

Concrete language significantly boosts memorability over abstract phrasing.

What this means for your social media

Vague posts disappear in the feed.

Instead of writing:

“Improve your marketing strategy.”

Write something concrete:

“Add one question to your headline. It increased my clicks by 15%.”

Concrete words help readers visualize your message instantly, which makes your post far more memorable. Something Huel applies in its social media visuals.

2. Show effort

The science

In Chinander and Schweitzer’s 2003 study, participants rated two presentations.

Regardless of content, the presentation described as taking 8 hours and 34 minutes to prepare was rated higher than the one described as taking 37 minutes.

The content was identical.

But simply knowing something took more effort increased its perceived value.

Those who thought the presentation took longer to prepare always rated it higher.

What this means for your social media

People value content more when they know work went into it.

Instead of posting:

“Here are some marketing lessons.”

Try:

“I spent 480 minutes listening to marketing experts. Here are the 6 best lessons.”

Highlighting effort makes readers assume the content is more valuable and worth their time. I tested this exact effect in two Reddit ads and found the “480 minute” version performed 45% better.

3. Use “You”

The science

A 2022 study found that using second-person pronouns (you, your, you’ll) increases engagement, involvement, and positive brand attitudes.

In experiments, blog titles and posts containing “you” made readers feel more personally involved.

The same effect appeared in brand Facebook posts.

Using “you”, “your”, and “you’ll” increased engagement.

Source: Second Person Pronouns Enhance Consumer Involvement and Brand Attitude (2022)

What this means for social media

People pay attention to content that feels personal.

Instead of writing:

“Marketers should test different headlines.”

Write:

“You should test different headlines.”

The word “you” pulls the reader into the post, making it feel like it was written specifically for them. To apply this, I typically start my posts with a question and then ask the reader: “Can you guess which?”

4. Be novel

The science

Research on the Von Restorff Effect shows that distinct items are more memorable than similar ones.

One study tested 11 Heineken slogans.

Most were generic:

“Heineken. Makes good times great.”

But one stood out:

“Heineken. The beer that makes Milwaukee jealous.”

That novel line was recalled by 85% of participants, far more than the others.

What this means for your social media

Posts that sound like everything else get ignored.

If everyone writes:

“5 marketing tips.”

Try something different:

“5 counterintuitive marketing tricks I wish someone told me 10 years ago.”

Novelty makes your post stand out in a crowded feed. Which is why one of my best-performing (and quite controversial!) posts started with this totally novel opener: “There’s a major problem with the infamous Ben’s Gutters leaflet.”

In summary:

If you want more attention on social media:

• Use concrete language

• Highlight effort

• Write directly to “you”

• Make your message distinct

These small wording tweaks can make the difference between a post people scroll past and one they actually read.

If you enjoyed this post, you might like my newsletter.

I spend 18 hours a week researching marketing science and condensing it into an easy-to-read Friday newsletter.

Join 11,060 marketers and sign up (for free) today →

WHAT’S IN THE SCROLL?

Hi, Tami here, peeking back in for a bit to share what’s in my scroll this week! I tested out 9 AI image generators with the same prompt for some interesting results. Also, bookmarked these trending sounds for Instagram and TikTok. Plus, discover Kirsti’s recommendations for the best time to post on LinkedIn in our latest YouTube video.

I also enjoyed this Substack from Pretty Little Marketer making a case for being more casual on LinkedIn. As a professional LinkedIner, I agree. And spotted in the news: you can now edit yuor your comments on Instagram!

Finally, if you’d like to guest-write an issue of The Weekly Scroll, reply to this issue with your idea, and I’ll reach out!

Alright, that’s it — see you next Friday

Tami

Sr. Content Creator

Sabreen Haziq is a Senior Brand and Community Manager at Buffer. She lives at the intersection of brand strategy and the creator economy. By day, she leads brand activations and community at Buffer. By night, she’s building her own audience across YouTube, Instagram, and beyond.

So, what’s in your tabs?

Definitely YouTube!

On a personal note, this is the first time I’m taking YouTube seriously, and the performance payout has been incredible. I’m able to say so much more in a long-form video that isn’t always possible on Instagram (my first love), and with YouTube introducing a Community space, I can talk to my subscribers more intimately. It’s been very motivating personally, and it feels like I’m setting the stage for a place I can meaningfully drive traffic to from other platforms.

What I didn’t expect was the numbers — my first video pulled in over 15,600 views on a brand new channel. In my heart, I know it’s because of the amount of work I’ve put in from the storytelling perspective. I have to be honest, though; scripting takes me hours because I agitate a problem, tell a story, share my learnings, and then give tips to my viewers. Thankfully, it’s working!

The biggest challenge has been scripting in an engaging way, so I’m not drowning my viewers in too much information. I have to make information flow well and in an intimate enough setting for people to stay engaged.

I’m being intentional about investing in YouTube because I know there’s a real monetization possibility, and that makes me feel like there’s even more reason to pour into that cup. Filming myself more has also opened another door of imagination for lighting, composition, and brand identity experiments.

Chloe Shih

I’ve been obsessed with the creator Chloe Shih and her video production style. She is super creative in how she approaches hooks and transitions, and creates very sticky moments to pull viewers in. It’s a form of art! ✨

A new Instagram update

I’m also loving the new update by Instagram that lets you rearrange carousel slides after the post is already live on Instagram. What a relief?!!

AI automations to reduce busywork

There’s a lot happening in the world of AI right now! It’s like a playground with all sorts of new swings, and everyone wants to try a new ride every day. But a crowded playground can get overstimulating fast, and that takes the joy out of experiencing new things.

So I’ve made a deliberate choice: focus on solving real problems that reduce my everyday busywork. Not everything I build will have immediate practical value, and that’s okay. A lot of that early energy is just adrenaline toward becoming an AI native.

What I’m also pushing myself toward is going beyond using AI as a creative partner, and into using it as a workflow builder, so I can execute on creative ideas at scale. Now I’ve built my own little playground now, and I’m having so much fun being a builder!

What’s in the scroll?

Hi, Tami here, and I’m stealing the spotlight back for a second to share the content we published this week. First, discover the best times to post in our latest YouTube video.

Then we had a lovely guest in Jillian Johnson who shared her neurodivergent’s guide to content creation. Plus, Kirsti Lang (another voice you can expect to see in the newsletter in the future) dug into the data on whether replying to your comments on Facebook actually boosts engagement. Spoiler: it does, leading to about 9.5% more reactions across the million+ posts that were analyzed. Wild, right?

In exciting social news, you can now schedule trial reels on Instagram! Guess who already started using this feature (it’s me 🙋🏾‍♀️).

If this issue made you want to share what’s in your tabs, let us know!

Share your Open Tabs

Oh, and we’re hiring! We’re looking for a Senior Design Engineer and a Senior Growth Engineer to join our team, so if you or anyone you know would be interested, take a look.

Alright, that’s it — see you next Friday!

Tami

Sr. Content Creator