Instagram Grid Preview Launched + New Signup Experiment Results

Feb 14, 2017 4 min readReports

Buffer Product Report

January 2017

Weekly active Awesome + Individual plan users

175,751 +13%

Weekly active
Buffer for Business users

4,905 +6.8%

Buffer for Business

Monthly Recurring Revenue

$534,828 +2.1%

Social updates sent by

Buffer for Business

users

4,247,699 +11.7%

Users starting

Buffer for Business

trials

7,581 +23%

Converted

Buffer for Business

trials

314 +6.4%

Users starting

Awesome trials

50,579 +36%

Converted

Awesome trials

1,591 +7%

Product: Instagram Grid Preview launched, composer improvements in the works

Update by Suprasanna Mishra

We kicked off January with a bang, launching Instagram Grid Preview for Buffer for Business customers!

If you visit an Instagram profile on the web, you will see a “Preview” button that lets you launch a window to see your past and upcoming Instagram posts all in one place. Then you can rearrange as you’d like in your queue until you get the look you want!

On the extension side, we completely redid our Firefox extension this month to be in line with changes from Firefox. It’s working great!

We also continued working on our new composer experience for the extension — improving our desktop experience for all users. We’ve added a few thousand more users to the current version and so far, so good! In January, we brought over the Power Scheduler to the new composer, started working on a feature to show image dimensions when you’re picking an image for your post and improved the initial loading experience. We’re getting really excited about the feedback and data we’re seeing and can’t wait to get this out there for everyone in the coming months!

We’ve kicked off our design work to bring this same new experience to the Buffer dashboard as well. Our vision is to eventually have all the new functionality everywhere you use Buffer.

Speaking of the Buffer web dashboard, we’ve now added support for uploading multiple images per post for Facebook. We also fixed up a few confusing flows around changing your password and added some clarity around timezone settings.

Buffer for Business: Rolling out Twitter Analytics

Update by Tom Redman

We’ve started rolling out new Twitter Overview Analytics, which is much more in-depth than our prior dashboard! As we’re using a new backend technology to collect and process the data for this new overview section, we’re only able to collect data going forward and thus leaving the older Analysis section available for the next several months for historical data.

Eventually, once we’ve collected several months worth of data in the new system, we’ll sunset the Analysis tab. We’ll be sure to give plenty of notice before that happens, and I’m confident that the Overview analytics will quickly become the solution of choice for most reports.

productjan2

While we continue to rollout these new Twitter Analytics, the talented James Morris and I are starting on product design for the Facebook Overview Analytics. We’re well underway and I’m excited to share more as we create it!

We’re realizing some really strong momentum with the new Collaboration Tool for larger teams to better work together for their social media posting. Two more engineers are pitching in to help us accelerate to the finish line. Steve and Harrison are joining forces with Melissa to help us deliver on the first half of the project we’re affectionately dubbing “Phase 1”. Part of what we’re doing now is setting ourselves up for success in the following phases of the project, which will rely heavily on the technical architecture that’s being developed as part of this phase. We’re getting to the point where we’ll be performing several product reviews in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more on this one!

Growth: New sign-up flow shows higher activation

Update by Maxime Berthelot

In an effort to improve our onboarding, we’re experimenting with asking every new customer to provide an email (it’s part of the new flow we put into place last month!)

This way, new customers will have uninterrupted access to their dashboard when they reach it for the first time (which works best with an email/password combination.)

productjan3
productjan4

After a month of this new flow, 30,000 users have been involved in this experiment, with roughly 14,500 users in our test group.

  • Control Group: 65% of newly signed-up users added their email (which was our goal!)
  • Test Group: 85% of newly signed–up users added their email

So how did these users’ experiences differ once they got into Buffer?

Generally, an activated user scheduled at least 3 posts in her first day. Our global activation metric is around 20%, so anything above that would mean we’ve made some great progress to give the user a better, more engaging experience.

  • Control group daily activation rate: : 19%
  • Test group daily activation rate: 24% ?
productjan5

As a next step, we’re keen to move onto the next experiment to improve the signup process! More to come!

Over to you

Is there anything you’d like to learn more about? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Check out other reports from January:

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