🤔 So you want to never run out of ideas…

Hey folks 👋🏾 

It’s official — the jingle bells are rocking, the partridges and pear trees are selling out, and Mariah Carey is fully defrosted. Welcome to December🎄!

As we collectively start wrapping up 2022, I’m curious — what has been your biggest win on social media this year? Let us know here, and you could be featured on our social media!

💌 In today’s email:

• 💭 What do you need to ensure you’re never out of ideas? (+the newest addition to Buffer)
• ⏩ Introducing Ideas — it can save you 84 hours (!) a year
• 📱 Mitra recommends supporting small businesses
• 🤳🏾 What’s happening in social: Experts say Hive Social is a flash in the pan, Pinterest is sunsetting its Creator Rewards, and LinkedIn is all about the companies with their new updates.
• + All the best content from the blog.

And before we get into it, I want to recommend this great article by Lia Haberman about what 2023 might look like for the creator economy.

Hope you have a lovely start to the week, and we’ll see you next Friday!

Warmly, 

Tami & the Buffer team

P.S. Buffer’s birthday was on November 30th, and the team put together a special video to celebrate. Check it out! 

🏊🏼 Deep dive: How to never run out of ideas

If you’ve ever been stuck staring at a blinking cursor, you’re not alone. Generating ideas, especially for content, can be simultaneously super easy and the most difficult thing in the world. But you don’t have to wait until it’s time to execute to create a list of ideas. Here are four tips for generating ideas consistently:

• Idea generation doesn’t happen in a bubble — it’s a continuous process that involves consuming a lot of content. Feed your mind with multiple sources, and then document what ideas come to you (EVERY. SINGLE. ONE) in one place you can revisit when you need inspiration.
• Set aside your notes and documentation to work on something else and clear your mind. Go out with your friends, clean your desk, and come back with a clear goal towards execution.
• Share your ideas with others to contribute, corroborate and confirm your thesis.
• Only some things will be doable in the moment, but they might work in the future. Keep ruminating and revisiting your ideas while you test and do more research into the topic at hand.

The greatest misconception about idea generation is that it happens all at once. Truthfully, the best creations are a combination of time and effort — something that most people aren’t willing to put in. If you have a thought at 3 AM about a great podcast idea but don’t execute it and someone else does, the credit goes to them. So whenever you have an idea, put pen (or cursor) to page. You never know where it might lead!

⏩ Speaking of Ideas…

We noticed that many of our users would plan out all their content in a separate place and painstakingly copy & paste it into Buffer. Tallied up, all this copy & pasting takes our average users 84 hours every year (you could take a two-week holiday away from work with that time!).

To help, we’ve built Ideas.

With Ideas, you can capture and store your great ideas whenever they come to you. By saving all your best ideas in one place, you’ll have a gallery of curated content that will inspire you even more. Turning an idea into a post requires just a click, with no copying & pasting, saving you hours every month.

👇🏽 The latest from the blog

• I Couldn’t Afford My First Employee, But Hiring Her Helped Me Grow a Million-Dollar Business: Even though hiring her first full-time employee felt like a financial stretch, Emily Grey did it anyway—which paid off in spades. Learn why bringing on the right help supported business growth and how she now thinks about investing her time and money.
• Buffer turned 12!: November 30 marked Buffer’s 12th anniversary. For the occasion, teammates shared their favorite memories, stories, and lessons from working at Buffer over the last twelve years.
• How This Peruvian Small Business Creates Ethical Dog Apparel: By taking inspiration from her hometown, Patricia Queirolo has created a small business that uplifts and gives back to her community.

🎙️ Listen to our popular podcast for small business owners

Small Business, Big Lessons is a podcast from Buffer that goes behind the scenes with inspirational small businesses to explore how they are questioning the best ways to build a business and uncover the big lessons we can learn from their journeys (so far).

📱 Social Tip of The Week from Mitra, Buffer’s Social Media Manager 

“❤️ Supporting small businesses”

This is your chance to say thank you to all of those who have supported your small business. This one is really easy to put together because you have the freedom to do what you want with it - use one clip or multiple clips if you’d like. Use this as an opportunity to show your small business! Check out this example from @mahaba.brand!

🤳 What's Happening in Social

• 💭 Matt Navarra shares his thoughts about Hive Social with the Drum. TL;DR is that the hype is short-lived and will slow down in coming weeks.
• 👀 Pinterest is no longer offering its Creator Rewards for their Idea Pins. The program was popular among creators as a way to monetize their content on the app. Note that this is separate from Pinterest’s $500k Creator Fund — another program that encourages creators to keep posting to the app.
• 🤝 LinkedIn has been adding a lot of new features for companies — I’m particularly curious about the new feature to subscribe to a company’s newsletter from the search results.

Thanks for reading! 💟

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