30,000+ Subscribers, 5 Times More Curation and a New Newsletter: Buffer’s June Content Marketing Report

June was a month of great content, curation and experiments at Buffer. We saw an amazing milestone for us Content Crafters as we made a big push toward growing our email subscriber numbers and rounded 30,000 subscribers, topping out at the end of this month with 30,289 folks on our Buffer Social mailing list! (For everyone who’s getting our emails, thanks! And let us know how we can make them even better for you in the comments!)

We also expanded our Crafter-curated content suggestions from a mere five per day to a whopping 25 per day in five different categories: marketing, business and startups, inspiration, lifehacking and design. It’s been a lot of fun to discover special content and recommend it widely—plus all that great content is also available anytime in our new iOS app Daily, for a truly unique sharing experience.

OK, let’s dive into the numbers.

June stats for Buffer Social

• 30,289 total email subscribers (+28.2% from last month)
• 626,453 unique visitors (-7.7%)
• 844, 373 total visits (-7%)
• 1,076,351 pageviews (-6.8%)
• 1,175  conversions (-37% )
• 18 total posts published (+2)
• • 16 in-house posts: 14 from Kevan, 2 from Nicole and 1 from me, Courtney
  • 2 guest posts: from Sabel Harris and Liz Staplefoote

Below is our traffic graph from June. 

June’s 10 most popular Buffer Social posts

Two out of our overall Top 10 this month are new for June (they’re marked with an asterisk): 6 Easy Places to Find Data For Infographics, Charts and Other Visual Content and 10 Surprising and Important Social Media Stats You Need To Know. Last month’s 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts stayed in our overall No. 1 slot. So: big numbers, handy stats and useful resources are crowd favorites. You’ll be seeing more of these on the blog!

1. Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post: The Data on Headlines, Length, Images and More

1. 6 Research-Backed Ways to Get More Followers on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and More
2. The 15-Minute Social Media Audit Everyone Can Do
3. * 6 Easy Places to Find Data For Infographics, Charts and Other Visual Content
4. * 10 Surprising and Important Social Media Stats You Need To Know
5. A Complete Guide to Visual Content: The Science, Tools and Strategy of Creating Killer Images
6. A Scientific Guide to Posting Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails, and Blog Posts at the Best Time

You can see how many views each of these top posts received by looking below at our Top Content page in Google Analytics.

Top referral sources

June stats for Buffer Open

• 41,701 unique visitors (-21.6% from last month)
• 57,188 total visits (- 19.6% from last month)
• 75,766 pageviews (-20.2% from last month)
• 23 total posts published (+4 from last month)
• 1,208 email subscribers (+15% from last month)

Here’s our traffic graph from June: 

June’s top five Open blog posts

1. Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries

2. Crowdsourced Productivity Tips: 13 Ways to Live Smarter, Not Harder

3. Warren Buffett’s Best Kept Secret to Success: The Art of Reading, Remembering, and Retaining More Books

4. The Power of Every Word: Why I Stopped Using “Actually” and “But” In My Customer Service Emails

5. The Power of Being Interested in Others

You can see how many views each of these top posts received by looking below at our Top Content page in Google Analytics.

Media syndication stats

• 28 total posts syndicated: (+3)
• Sources: Time, Entrepreneur, The Next Web, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Inc., Business Insider, Social Media Today, PR Daily/Ragan, Search Engine Journal, Visual.ly

Here’s a breakdown of how many visitors (and what percentage conversion) syndication efforts brought to the blog in June.

Social stats

While our followers grew on all social networks this month, our interactions were down for nearly every network except Pinterest. It feels like it’s time to take a comprehensive look at our strategies here and try some new experiments this month.

Followers

Interactions

Traffic

Thoughts and outlook

What’s up with this decline in visits?

Ah, June. The month when everyone (in the U.S., at least) gets outside for some summer fun and says, “Let’s worry about this whole social media thing later!”

At least that’s my hypothesis for what happened on Buffer’s blogs this month. :) We saw traffic and unique visit declines of about 7%.

OK, actually I have one more theory. Way back in March, we made the decision to split our two types of content—social media posts and lifehacking/productivity/creativity type posts—into two separate blogs. The Buffer blog became our social media blog and Open (the blog you’re on now) became our place for productivity, lifehacking and “inside Buffer” content.

Those productivity and lifehacking type posts had always done well at bringing in the visitors, but we didn’t think they fully showcased what Buffer did best: Make it super easy for you to share on social media. We were prepared for a bit of a metrics fallout as a result, but it didn’t come—at least, not immediately.

Back in March, our top 1o posts were exactly evenly split between these two types of content. Fast forward to today and our top 10 posts are 90% social media focused, with

the lone lifehacking post hanging in there.

Could this be the “new normal” for the Buffer blog while we begin the work of building a new blog from the ground up with Open? Is it just summer? I’d love to hear your theories.

Since the drop seems to at least correlate with a negative change in our social media interactions, visits and shares, we’ll be doing some new experiments there—and as always, we’ll report back and share our findings!

More lifehacking content on the Open blog

One element I’ve really missed since our switch to exclusively social media content on the Buffer Social blog is Buffer’s blockbuster lifehacking/productivity content. So I’m happy to announce that these make-your-life better posts and experiments will now be a staple of the Buffer Open blog.

We began this new push late in June with a topic on lots of minds lately: How to Create a Secure Password You Can Remember Later. You can expect a new productivity/lifehacking post each week on Buffer Open. We’d love to hear your suggestions for any topic we could tackle to make your life easier! If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of these posts, make sure you sign up for our email list.

Our cool new newsletter!

If you’re on our Buffer Social mailing list (did I mention we’d really love it if you were?), you might have had a chance to check out a new feature from Buffer’s Content Crafters—a list of the best stuff we’ve read each week, with interesting articles on marketing and productivity from all over the place (OK, and a few of our own posts, too…). Here’s a peek at it:

We love putting this one together and we’re super excited to hear how we can make this resource even better and more interesting for you. Let us know what you think in the comments!

New blog designs coming soon

By this time next month (maybe sooner than that!), this blog will look totally different. We’re working on a comprehensive redesign for all Buffer’s blogs—Social, Open and Overflow—that will give them a fresh and cohesive look.

I’ll just share a preliminary mockup here to give you a sneak peek:

What other marketing insights would you find helpful for me to share here? Are there any questions about our blogs, our team, or our social media marketing that we can answer? Share them in the comments, I’d love to keep the conversation going.