Inside Buffer’s Creator-Driven Culture: Sabreen Haziq on Content, Measurement, and Community Growth

Sabreen Haziq [00:00:00]:
Anyone can build a social tool, but almost no one can replace 70 people at a company creating in public consistently. And I think that is the philosophy. We don’t really look at this transactionally. And I think that that’s the biggest difference. Never cultivate an audience on a rented stage. Figure a way out to own that list and then figure out how to deliver value to the people on that list rather than looking at them from the lens of monetization. Only in order for your content to do well, it has to exist first. It can’t do well if it doesn’t exist.

Sabreen Haziq [00:00:33]:
The thought in thought leadership has to come from you.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:39]:
Welcome again to the business of marketing. I’m a. Lee Judge.

Rocio Osuna [00:00:43]:
And I’m Rocio Osuna. So, Lee, I’m seeing a lot of noise lately about community engagement. In the age of AI everything community suddenly comes up as the ultimate way to connect with others. Our guest today, you know, talks all about community and building communities across, you know, startup and unicorn brands. Before we get to our guests, let’s step back a moment, talk about a topic that’s near and dear to me. Community building.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:08]:
That’s a good one. What have you learned about it lately?

Rocio Osuna [00:01:11]:
So, according to Eventbrite’s 2026 Social Study, 89% of people say it’s important that an event helps them feel connected to their local community. And I think a recent Forbes piece broke this down as a direct backlash against isolation, loneliness and exhaustion. With everything that’s curated on social media. And I think social media is performative, right? You show them what you want to show them. Your audience is really just seeing a filtered part of you. And I feel like community in real life, communities is where you get the authentic you. And that’s why I founded Career Moms Connect. It’s where working mothers, career working mothers are getting very authentic about, you know, their experiences, the resource that they have for others and really about their goals.

Rocio Osuna [00:01:53]:
And, and I feel like this, you know, want and need for in real life experiences. Community building is something that is very prevalent in all the social media platforms I’m watching.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:03]:
Well, you know, especially marketing, when we look at it in those terms, every organization, even software platforms and people selling things are all trying to create communities. And how does that fit in there? Is it again, backlash, taking advantage of the backlash, people being by themselves, or is it just something that we know people are yearning for?

Rocio Osuna [00:02:27]:
Yeah, it’s, it’s definitely something that is everyone’s working on. I feel like I’ve seen articles and people talking about building Communities. But actually building community takes effort and you really have to put in the time and the space to really nurture that community.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:44]:
So you’re building one. Is it digital or in person or, or both?

Rocio Osuna [00:02:48]:
It’s in person. So I do once a month, we meet once a month for coffee. It’s open ended, it’s not monetized and it really just gives people space to really be themselves and really speak about their experiences, their wisdom and really where they want to take their career. Because then we’re over there talking about like, oh, I have this resource. You’re looking for an intern, here’s an intern. Oh, you’re looking for, you know, somewhere in software, someone in software, here’s this person I know. So it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a community that’s really built on empathy and wanting to help one another.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:21]:
And I’ll tell you from a business, as a business person myself, I tend to stay in the business or even inside too much and I’m trying to work more at getting myself out, getting into these real person, in person, real and both, both real people and in people, in person events. Because that community means so much more beyond just going to an event and standing around. It’s meeting new people and there are opportunities there. We all have things we could offer and then you won’t know what connections you can make that could be benefit both of you, both in a career, in a business. And you know, I guess it all ties into like word of mouth marketing. Right? That’s where the word of mouth has, has to happen. It could happen online, but I think it’s even more valuable when the word of mouth marketing happens in person. Talking to someone who you have something in common with and then you refer to a business, a brand, a collaboration.

A. Lee Judge [00:04:19]:
So I think that’s one of the biggest strengths of community is that opportunity for word of mouth marketing.

Rocio Osuna [00:04:26]:
So I’m a firm believer that if your brand is only occupying digital pixels, you’re missing the deepest layer of human connection. You know, you need to find the ways to get people in the room, keep it small and keep it intentional, nurture those relationships, even pass, you know, that in real life, event, you know, meet with people one on one, that’s really where the human connection thrives.

A. Lee Judge [00:04:46]:
Well, I know firsthand that creating communities is a tough thing to do and I’m glad that our guest today can give us some help and some insight into that. So tell us about our guest today.

Rocio Osuna [00:04:56]:
Yes. So she’s one of the first People I started following on LinkedIn when I came back in 2025 because of her authentic storytelling and, you know, she’s currently leading brand community and creator innovation at Buffer. She’s worked at industries like B2B, SaaS, consumer rewards, HR tech. She even has her own coffee. Check out the conversation with our guest, Sabrina Hazik. Sabrina, as a marketer, your brain is usually wired for digital strategies and campaigns, but you stepped completely outside of the typical sandbox and launched a physical consumer product, coffee. How did you come about and how do you personally define success for a venture like that compared to standard corporate marketing metrics?

Sabreen Haziq [00:05:36]:
I love that question. So I actually do think that it is very much part of the digital framework. I don’t necessarily see it as something super different. I think part of that was that I wanted to nourish my entrepreneurial side. But I am South Asian and we are actually trained to have a job with a 401k and a salary and all that stuff. So it’s not really part of your typical script. And I think that by having my own product, I’m able to apply a lot of creative ideas that may not be part of my natural trajectory at work and it just gives me a lot more Runway to ab test a lot of the creative side of that thinking. Another piece I would say is that I became a creator by pure accident, especially on LinkedIn.

Sabreen Haziq [00:06:23]:
And I was then approached by somebody in my network who introduced me to the founder of a brand called Coin Coffee. And they are a creator first Coffee collab platforms that partners with a lot of creators, you know, around bean drops and a portion of the proceeds kind of goes towards a cause of your choice, which was also really appealing. I don’t think, quite honestly that I entered it with a very, yeah, what’s the profit? Like, how, how are we going to make money out of it? I think for me the connection between building this brand was also with building a community that I can own. And I think it put a lot of my LinkedIn audience to the test because as soon as we launched the Coffee brand, I felt like a lot of the people who did hit subscribe were 90% people I’m connected with on LinkedIn. The other thing I want to say is that I work at a social media management tool company called Buffer. We are known for transparency. We have a very darling legacy around kind of our culture. And so as a company that is built for creators, the idea is, hey, put yourself out there, build your own projects.

Sabreen Haziq [00:07:30]:
And as a result of that, the experiential learning that happens in that journey, you learn a lot on your own and you bring a wealth of that knowledge back to Buffer. So I think that was sort of kind of where it all started and we’re still pretty much on their journey. And I’m sure that in terms of the success metrics, naturally, you know, there’s the sales piece of it. There’s also, hey, like, we’re noticing a spike this month. What, what did we do? Did we put more pieces of content out or did we mention this brand on a podcast or did I have an affiliate kind of plug in one of my YouTube videos? I mean, there are so many ways to ab test this and I think I’m still pretty much in that zone of figuring out the right way to market the coffee. But I don’t think that that was my mentality kind of going into it from the get go. I think it’s a very experimentation ground for me and I think I’m still learning on the go.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:19]:
Now. I want to follow up with that in terms of the measurement part though, because I’m developing a lot of my talks for the fall season and a few of them are on measurement. And I’m being pretty cold about talking about measurement in terms of how we used to do it and what we need to look forward to in the future because there’s so many measurement metrics. And actually, I’m probably being the harshest on the software companies. Buffer included all of them, because nobody, nobody will be spared in my talks this next few months. And what I mean by that is, you know, they’re software companies and they, they have to sell software and they have metric metrics built in, they have analytics built in. And to retool those analytics takes a lot of time and money. So if you’re selling marketers on, on, you know, impressions and likes and comments and all of a sudden those things don’t work, then you’re selling pipe dreams to your customers.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:21]:
And metrics have to change. So, you know, since you’ve been at several companies, you’ve been at Buffer, now you’ve been at Vista Social, and you know the space very well. What, how are these companies dealing with that? Like, how do they manage the fact that one, the platforms are always changing, you know, x is changing, LinkedIn’s changing. What works is always changing for every platform. I mean, you know, hashtags in, hashtags out, all those kind of things. From your viewpoint, how are these companies dealing with all these changes, with measurement changes and everything else?

Sabreen Haziq [00:09:54]:
Well, I think the business, quite honestly that we’re in, traditionally, if you look at it, it’s a very red ocean industry, which is there are so many different tools out there that you can use from a scheduling perspective, you know, so many different price points. And you’re right, anyone can in the world of software, especially if you’re a technical founder, you can build a social tool and that’s that. And we’re all subjected to the same API limitations. And so if LinkedIn changes a rule, it changes for all of us. Right. I think I kind of want to zoom out for a second, which is I think where Buffer in particular, what I would like to say is that we’re a 70 plus people company. Can somebody else out there build another social media scheduling tool company tomorrow? Absolutely. But I feel like almost no one can replicate having 70 people so dialed in on becoming creators themselves and posting in public consistently.

Sabreen Haziq [00:10:49]:
And the whole philosophy about, for example, we have this initiative at Buffer called Team of Creators and the whole idea is by becoming creators ourselves, we become better at building for the people we serve, which is now we’ve taken it beyond dogfooding, beyond product testing. So I think us, at least I can only speak for us as a company, Buffer, we have a lot more empathy for our customers because we’re already from the get go stepping into their shoes. From the moment someone is brought into Buffer, like as a team, that is our philosophy. And there’s actually a quote by Michael Porter that says that a company outperforms only when it can establish a difference that it can preserve. And I think that’s the bet that we’re personally making. The other thing I would say is I said something around us being in a very red ocean industry, which is super crowded. We are often juxtaposed against brands like later and Hootsuite and Sprout Socials of the world. When I zoom out, I kind of feel like they’re all on.

Sabreen Haziq [00:11:51]:
And this is not a bad thing. They’re all on a treadmill that is on incline. And this incline treadmill is basically about building more and more and more features. Oh, employee advocacy. This feature that features Buffett is actually very hyper focused on a down and wired strategy. And I think that is where we pull ourselves out of this red ocean industry and into a blue ocean industry. Right. So we market ourselves as we are built for creators and small businesses.

Sabreen Haziq [00:12:22]:
Now, are we diversifying our feature set to meet the needs of people who are a little bit more mid market now? Sure. But it’s not Our sole focus. Can we build an entire social listening engine? Sure, absolutely. We can do that, but I think we’re hyper prioritizing what the people in our specific audience set want from us. And I think we’re able to do that a lot more efficiently because it goes back to that philosophy of we’re being creators ourselves every single day. And if you actually look back at a lot of people who work on the Buffer team, they are now creators in the sense of, like, their follower brackets are pretty significant. They all also have side projects, which is something we really encourage. At Buffer, we in fact have a whole blog that is populated with all the side projects folks in our teams are working on.

Sabreen Haziq [00:13:14]:
So we embody the audience Persona through and through every single day. So for me, that is the biggest brand differentiator. Now, can I get into the minds of, like, what a hootsuite is doing and how they’re differentiating themselves? No, but most likely the answer is that they’re building more feature sets out because that seems like the most obvious thing to do. I hope that answers the question.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:36]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:14:24]:
Want to see how it works? Visit content monster.com today to learn more. I will say that for Buffer, I think Buffer is the only company, the only software company that I actually followed and listened to their podcast weekly. I mean, no other software, because it was, I would say, customer centric. I learned about social media and I learned what was coming next. And it wasn’t all about their product. That’s a hard thing for most companies to do. And so that speaks to what you said about it being more customer centric, more creator centric. I really can, I can vouch for that.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:59]:
And as a, as a listener, a consumer of the social content, it really helps the brand.

Sabreen Haziq [00:15:04]:
Yeah. And I can. Just to take it a step further, I will say that if you notice just even our plans, we have a free plan, which is extremely Generous. And our founder, CEO Joel, is actually very committed to not gating things. So even as we’re making content available to our community, you’ll never see a lead generation form. You’ll never see. In fact, we’re building a very public tier of our product where you don’t even have to sign up for the product. And I can’t say too much about it yet, even though we’re a very transparent company.

Sabreen Haziq [00:15:34]:
But I mostly do not want to share anything that’s not super close to what we’re actually building or close to the code. But the idea is you give and give and give value. And in the long run, if somebody eventually gets to a point where they do want a tool or they do want to really fully commit to a creator journey, then Buffer is top of mind. But I don’t think that we build things with the mentality of how can we pull as many people in. The flip side of that is how much value can we deliver? Which is why we never, ever got rid of our free tier. And actually, I don’t know if you saw this, but we also just launched the Buffer API, which allows for a lot of people to build on top of Buffer. So they could be working on their own projects, but they can build scheduling into their own existing workflows without leaving that ecosystem. So we very much embody that spirit of delivering value.

Rocio Osuna [00:16:32]:
So your team of creators really got me because that’s how I reapplied for a free Buffer account after years of not using it. You know, all the content that I kept seeing on LinkedIn from various people in your company. I was like, oh, my God, this is a wonderful small business doing big things. And everyone’s perspective really got to me. And I was like, I want to be part of this. I want to, you know, reuse Buffer again. So I signed up again. So it really got me.

Rocio Osuna [00:17:01]:
This goes back into a question that I had for you about the team of creator program you created. So with all of that, a lot of traditional corporate leaders are terrified that if their employees build strong personal brands, they’ll leave. How does Buffer flip that mindset on its head?

Sabreen Haziq [00:17:17]:
That is a good one. I think the way that we think about it is, again, and I’m probably going to repeat this like a thousand times because it’s so deeply embedded in the way we operate as a company is we don’t think about this initiative as, hey, everybody who works at Buffer post about us like, it’s not necessarily rooted in. It’s not a marketing tactic. Definitely like there are things that come out of it, like definitely when we have product launches and when we’re hiring for new roles, people do eventually talk about those things. And those posts actually perform really well for the people who work at Buffer as well. But I think it’s the lens you look at it from. You know, team of creators is a company wide initiative at Buffer where every single person on the team is supported and expected to show up as a creator on whichever platform feels natural to them and whichever niche they care about. And we put a lot of emphasis on that because the way that we talk about it is not that you have to become a creator and then talk about Buffer.

Sabreen Haziq [00:18:21]:
You could be passionate about DJing, or you could be someone who’s really, you know, a bird watcher. And you could talk about that is because it gets you into that threshold of being a creator. That’s what we care more about. It takes it a step beyond the dog fooding piece. Right? And then you’re able to experience the product in a way that our customers would. So it’s again, very driven towards delivering value to our customers. We’re not necessarily looking at it as something we get out of the people who work at Buffer. The other piece is, you know, brand equity is something that anybody who works at Buffer, you know, as they grow as creators, that brand equity is something they’ll carry with them beyond the Buffer chapter.

Sabreen Haziq [00:19:01]:
And that is something we take a lot of pride in. I think other than that we generally have this culture of having more side projects and working on businesses and, you know, having side gigs that, that teach us so much more about how we can be better practitioners. So I think the lens through which people look at this initiative is important and it usually comes from the top. Our founder CEO Joel has been incredibly intentional in saying that, you know, hey, dog fooding got us close to the product, but it didn’t really get us close to the customer’s experience of building an audience from scratch. So he, you know, last year in June, in one of our all hands, he said that this isn’t a marketing thing. You know, it’s a company thing. 100% participation, every role, every team. And you know, the deeper bet we’re making is on brand differentiation.

Sabreen Haziq [00:19:52]:
You know, again, like I said, anyone can build a social tool, but almost no one can replace 70 people at a company creating in public consistently. And I think that is the philosophy. We don’t really look at this transactionally. And I think that that’s the biggest difference. The other piece is if Your biggest fear is that people are going to build a following and then eventually leave. I don’t think that becoming a creator is the only reason people leave. I think that there are a lot of tie ins with culture as well. I’ve seen some really, like, high performers who’ve done extremely well at companies, but then something about the culture isn’t really pushing them in the right direction.

Sabreen Haziq [00:20:31]:
And they’re not creators. You know, people end up downshifting in many ways because mental peace is a lot more important to them. And I can say with a lot of confidence that Buffer is the opposite of that. I think to me, I look back at all the companies I’ve worked with, and I’ve been really lucky to work at some really incredible companies. But I do in some ways feel like my life was a lie, like this was. This is what I needed in my life to operate at my highest point potential. So there’s something about the culture and then the way that you make this ask. And I think that that insecurity can’t really play into the way that you treat the people who work at your company.

Sabreen Haziq [00:21:09]:
I think it’s a very values piece, and I don’t know if I can entirely speak to it with a lot of accuracy, but people move on from companies for very different reasons, and not all of them are creators. So I think we need to not use it as a reason to not encourage people to become creators. And I think we need to take a deeper look at the fabric of what’s really happening in the culture.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:38]:
Yeah, I’ll say, just for the record, to those listening, this episode is not sponsored by Buffer, but we welcome it. If there’s others at Buffer listening, we’d totally welcome a sponsorship. As to the rest of them, Vista or Metrical or Hootsuite or whoever. But the cool part is that, I mean, as content creators in my agency, we create tons of content for other businesses and we have to choose what platform to work with because we. We schedule a lot of content. And so that’s a very important part of our business. And so for me, hearing from someone inside one of those companies is. Is fascinating.

A. Lee Judge [00:22:17]:
Now, you mentioned culture a lot, though. Another question I have, and maybe this is if this is something you see, I want to know in terms of the content that businesses are creating and they’re pushing out. You know, they have some of these cheesy employee advocate programs where they say, hey, we’ve made some content. Everybody go like it. Which I think is a horrible practice in most cases. But in terms of companies creating content themselves, that is about the company. What advice do you have in today’s environment to companies who may be a little bit cautious to say anything that’s a little spiky or controversial, as opposed to those who play it so safe that they just totally blend in and aren’t seen?

Sabreen Haziq [00:23:01]:
Do you mean to stand out? Like, what is it that they can do by not playing safe?

A. Lee Judge [00:23:05]:
Yeah, because they want to be outstanding, but they don’t want to stand out.

Sabreen Haziq [00:23:09]:
Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:23:09]:
So what can a company do to stand out? Sure.

Sabreen Haziq [00:23:12]:
I think one thing that people need to good content doesn’t always mean that you have to add spice till the aroma spreads. And I don’t think that good content has to be sensationalized. I don’t think that it has to be clickbaity. In fact, if you look at any of the pieces of content that Buffer delivers, a lot of it is focused, again, on the value piece. So if you go to our blog, a lot of proprietary data. Right. We analyze 2 million posts to understand this specific trend line amongst people who schedule content to LinkedIn through Buffer. So it’s our own data set that we’ve studied in a very layered capacity and we’re not making any clickbaity claims.

Sabreen Haziq [00:23:51]:
And you know, even just in the way that we open our content pieces, not just across the blog, but even on YouTube, for example, very experiential led. So, for example, if we have a wonderful content creator on our team, her name is Tammy, she will run an experiment on Instagram for a whole month and then she writes the blog so it’s not outsourced from other places. And what a HubSpot said or what a different company said or this blog quoted Adam Mazari and something, something, it’s pretty much rooted in what you are doing. So I think that is a very inbound marketing mentality, which is, again, you build so much value around this piece of content that nobody else can replicate. And naturally, now we’ve built a legacy and the proof is kind of in the pudding, like in terms of just even the traffic our blog gets and the community we’ve cultivated on discord that has also come in through our blog or through our social channels. So I think you really need to establish, like, what does good content mean? And you don’t have to necessarily. You can brush against the line without crossing it. If that’s something you want to do.

Sabreen Haziq [00:24:57]:
At Buffer, you’ll never find us creating. For example, we’re not very much into this kind of meme content or like skits or like office drama or, you know, our content is very rooted in. Here’s the value. This is what we did, this is what we found out. Now we want to bring you into the fold, right. We also have a guest posting platform, sorry, a guest posting program on our blog. So a lot of people who are currently in our discord community, who’ve built substantial communities of their own or have built businesses or are like AI tinkerers and have built some really cool stuff with the Buffer MCP or the API or whatever else, right? We pull them in and we talk to them, we do an extensive interview with them. They walk us through their experience and then we take that, we help them translate this into a piece of content that’s going to live on the Buffer blog and beyond, and it becomes part of their portfolio as well.

Sabreen Haziq [00:25:48]:
So again, none of it is sensationalized. I think the very definition of what good content is has changed because of this attention economy. Now we’re trying to kind of the hook has to be really strong and this has to happen and then you have to jump from a cliff and then you have to hold a placard and then do a, you know, like those things don’t have to happen. Like, you know, we’ve had Joel, our CEO, who has written extensive, like 28 minute reads on the blog about transparency that just goes into so much detail and it’s still date one of our highest traffic pieces on the blog. Like none of it was gimmicky in any way. So I think you need to. Every brand has a lower and you need to tap into it. But I don’t think that you need to be super formulaic.

Sabreen Haziq [00:26:33]:
I think you need to do a lot of AB testing and then figure out what works for your brand. But I think you need to first establish what is it that you want. I think the trap we’re constantly falling into is this brand has 10 million views now because they’re creating office kits. Let’s pivot. But that’s not your brand. So even if it gets you tens and millions of views, it is very momentary and it’s not really driving traffic to a meaningful destination. So I think that there are a lot of wires that are connected here, but I think that you have to get the framework down and really be honest with yourself first.

Rocio Osuna [00:27:09]:
I love that.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:11]:
Rocia?

Sabreen Haziq [00:27:12]:
Yes.

Rocio Osuna [00:27:12]:
I know that you recently through your post that you started to concentrate on YouTube, like long form. You know, usually you do short form that I, I’ve seen through LinkedIn what really geared you towards going towards YouTube itself. I know that YouTube is its own little beast with its own little algorithm wants and needs. And I know that you hit a very good spike in the beginning, which I love to see. What made you decide to go specifically to YouTube?

Sabreen Haziq [00:27:39]:
Well, I think it was one. I’ll be very honest with you. I. I feel like it’s really nice and cute to create these short form pieces of content, and I’m so grateful that I’m getting brand deals and that happened by accident and whatnot. But I had a very personal side of my life that I wanted to tap into. And I am again looking for a way to expend my creative calories and find another surface to experiment in, which YouTube has always fascinated me. But I have never really had the confidence to just kind of go for it. And I recently upgraded my entire setup.

Sabreen Haziq [00:28:16]:
I figured out framing and lighting and I was like, you know, I went through a big life event a couple of years ago, which it seems like a lot of women especially will resonate with. And I just want to talk about this stuff. And I just went for it and I planned it like I use a tool called Vidiq. I did a lot of keyword research and all that stuff, but I didn’t. I don’t do keyword research from the perspective of only getting hits. I think resonance is the first piece. Like, is this relatable? Will this land? Am I being true or am I kind of saying something with a spin so that it’s clickbaity? Like, I’m very careful about that because again, it’s a value piece. So I just went in, I did some research and I said, okay, it looks like there is demand and hunger for this topic.

Sabreen Haziq [00:28:59]:
And I went for it. And my first video actually did get 16,000 views, which was very terrifying because then I’m like, oh my God, now I have to keep going. And then I made another one and another one. Did all of them get 16,000? 16,000 views? No, but they did get a few thousand views, which I think for a very new account, is still considered outlier. Right. And so I think for me, one, it was another experimentation ground. Two, I had a story that I just knew that I had to kind of put myself out there and figure out if there’s appetite for this. There is.

Sabreen Haziq [00:29:30]:
The other nice thing about it is, you know, as creators, we truly nobody, I think, gets to see the behind the scenes. There is a lot of work that goes into it, I think production, post production, scripting work, questions. And when this is a really opportune place to actually say that because podcasts are a lot of work. I used to run a podcast a couple of years ago. It’s a lot of work. And so I do, quite honestly, I do want to move towards monetization. And I know that there’s a lot of controversy around platforms like maybe TikTok and Instagram that don’t necessarily pay you for the amount of work that goes into creating a piece of really good content. And it doesn’t always land because of the algorithm and what virality really means in this age and time.

Sabreen Haziq [00:30:16]:
So I think YouTube was a testing ground for me. It worked. I’m actually. This is comical because as soon as I found out I haven’t created a new video, so I really need to go back to creating more video content for YouTube. I am very close to the monetization threshold. And then I think another reason why I went for it is because there are people on our team at Buffer who created net new accounts on Instagram and TikTok where it’s actually harder to break into big followings very quickly. And within 5 or 6 months there are 10k followers, which then you’re like, why am I not putting myself out there on a different platform? So I think that was another reason why I pushed myself and decided to go with YouTube. And I think, I think it’s working.

Sabreen Haziq [00:30:58]:
So that’s the good news.

Rocio Osuna [00:31:00]:
Huge congrats. Honestly. That is very admirable. And love seeing, honestly, as a marketer, love seeing the behind the scenes and how you break everything down on LinkedIn to say with one piece that you mentioned, where certain platforms don’t monetize, LinkedIn should start monetizing. That’s one of the ones my Griff is LinkedIn should have, just like TikTok and I think Instagram too, where they’re paying the creators. LinkedIn should look into that 100%.

Sabreen Haziq [00:31:25]:
But I’ll tell you where the big bucks are. The big bucks are in brand deals. And yeah, you know, even if LinkedIn kind of moves into that territory, I don’t think that it’ll ever equate remotely to the negotiation power of you knowing your worth and what your content is worth and how much time you’re putting into it. And I don’t say this in the sense of, yeah, let me just throw a number out there and see what they say. And if they say yes, then I’ll charge them more. It’s more about no. I put in a lot of work into this. So I think that is one area where I need to personally improve is start pitching.

Sabreen Haziq [00:32:02]:
I haven’t pitched at all and all my brand deals have come in purely organically inbound. I think the other reason, kind of going back to your YouTube piece is I am hopeful that on YouTube, through the way that their monetization structure is defined, that I’m able to achieve that without pitching myself. Even though long term, I do want to also pitch for brand partnerships on YouTube.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:27]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:33:04]:
Yeah, I think your, your view of what LinkedIn would probably do is. I agree a lot because by LinkedIn being a business oriented platform, brand deals make more sense. Like YouTube doesn’t have a database of businesses and so you’re going basically to consumers. Whereas on LinkedIn they know what businesses are spending money, they know where the budgets are and businesses know who they, how they can target their audience based on what the creator’s already creating. And so you see even some of our previous guests, I think Goldie Chan was a few weeks ago, so you know the cases where you see their natural style, then you realize, oh, this is for LinkedIn or LinkedIn paid for this video or some other brand, paid LinkedIn and paid this creator for that. And so I think it’s, it’s ripe for businesses to pay more creators through that channel instead of directly to the, to the creator, more or less brand deals. Because it’s a brand platform.

Sabreen Haziq [00:34:03]:
Absolutely. And along the way, as you’re becoming a creator, it’s also really important to capture that audience in some way. Capture is such a bad word, but you know what I mean, like you have to find, you have to give them a home. Have I done that 100%? No. I think YouTube is one place, even though it’s not a platform. I own, own. I think, you know, how can I translate this audience, whether that’s LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, can I have a mailing list, can I have a newsletter that’s kind of my own and then what can I do with it? I think the whole coffee venture was Actually almost a little bit of a litmus test to see that this community that I have cultivated on LinkedIn, is this community going to show up? Because I didn’t really go into it with a profit margin mentality, but it was mostly let’s see what it does. And then majority of those proceeds actually go to a cause of my choice.

Sabreen Haziq [00:34:57]:
So I think that’s the other piece, figuring out the math and. Yeah. So never cultivate an audience on a rented stage. Figure a way out to own that list and then figure out how to deliver value to the people on that list rather than looking at them from the lens of monetization only like dropping.

A. Lee Judge [00:35:19]:
That’s a key question I had because I want to know about. Community is a thing, right? I mean, people are working on communities. I’ve tried, I’ve participated in some really good ones. I’ve tried to create one and admittedly failed. And so I want to know like, you know, from the inside, what are some of the things you’ve seen work and not work in terms of trying to build a community? I know you said one was like thinking about monetization. That’s. Yes, that’s a no go because that’s not what you want to do to your community. So what are some of the things you would and wouldn’t do?

Sabreen Haziq [00:35:49]:
Don’t get it. Just, just don’t. I think the whole idea of community is cross pollination of creativity, ideas, advice. And I think that when you gate it and you’re already putting a dollar amount in terms of, you know, I don’t even know what’s on the other side yet. Yes, you have a landing page with a lead gen form and it tells me what I am going to get. But I think it’s not up to you as the community owner to decide whether I will actually end up receiving that value. Because I’ve tried to join some of these communities and then I go in there and it’s crickets, I think I can again, kind of. Buffer has a community of 10,000 plus people on Discord.

Sabreen Haziq [00:36:27]:
We run a lot of really cool challenges in there. So we have something called Creator camp, which for 30 days we give you content creation prompts. So for example, share one piece of advice that was like a springboard that pushed you into something amazing. Well, not those exact words that’s too wordy for a prompt, but that prompt that actually lives within something called a template library within. Within Buffer, which people don’t have to be Buffer users at all. That’s also not a mandate within Our community and people find those prompts to be so helpful. So for 30 days, we actually have one running right now. For 30 days, they are posting alongside us.

Sabreen Haziq [00:37:07]:
And this is something I did even before I joined Buffer, which is how I built some relationships at Buffer and then eventually got hired. Over 30 days, people are locked in and people have grown in their following. Everybody kind of has become friends like you engage with each other even when the Buffer team is offline. Sometimes we’ll go in there and we’ll see new members are welcoming each other and talking to each other and that are like full threads of conversations. So I think a good community really is when, yes, Buffer owns it. But I think that the community develops a founder mentality within the community and starts taking ownership for certain very niche topics and starts to educate one another. So I think, again, I think gating is just something that I fundamentally am not a big fan of. I think you should eventually understand, like businesses have to run and all that stuff has to happen.

Sabreen Haziq [00:37:59]:
But transparency is a big value for us as a company. And so we run every single program with that at its heart, philosophy wise. What else? I think hyper personalization is another layer. So for example, if we are running a challenge and you know, we have some marketing where we’ll send an email to say, hey, we’re kicking off this new challenge, Hundreds of people will join and we have an intros channel where hundreds of people will then jump in and introduce themselves. Every single person gets a response. It’s not a catch all. Hey, user. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Sabreen Haziq [00:38:35]:
Welcome. No, hey, Simon. Welcome. Wow, what a blog. I read that. That’s incredible. I just subscribed. By the way, how long have you been running this for? And we’re not very many people, we’re just a handful of people.

Sabreen Haziq [00:38:52]:
But we’re so committed to making sure that everybody feels very seen. So I think that we’ve also cultivated a very personal equation with a lot of people in the community. And I think that’s one of the reasons the excitement behind also maybe being acknowledged by people who work at Buffett in some way is exciting for them. There’s also another piece of, oh, Sabrina acknowledged this person. So nobody else has to go in there and kind of, you know, they introduce themselves. And Sabrina said, hi. No, Sandra’s gonna jump in, Tammy’s going to jump in, Kirsty’s going to jump in. Multiple things.

Sabreen Haziq [00:39:24]:
People are on such a high and people feel so celebrated in our community and that I think if they’re ever having maybe a Not so nice day. They’ve mentioned to us several times that we actually come to this little corner of the Internet where we feel very seen and celebrated. I think the other thing is somebody starts something new and is like, I’m really confused. I thought this would work. This is not working. What am I doing wrong? Scores of people will jump in with such nuanced advice. It’s not generic. Yeah, just try doing this.

Sabreen Haziq [00:39:57]:
Switch a tab, delete this. Try setting up your list in a different way. Okay, let’s talk about it. Actually, do you want to huddle? Like, let’s do that. People go. They’re really invested in each other’s growth trajectory. So I think I’m very lucky that I came into a community that already had a really strong foundation, but now I’m finding other ways and strategies to continue to build those nurture tracks. None of it is gated.

Sabreen Haziq [00:40:20]:
All the information is available. I’m pretty sure we have a few competitors in there who haven’t identified themselves. Everybody’s welcome. We don’t look at it like that.

Rocio Osuna [00:40:29]:
See, I love that about. Because I was. I jumped into discord. And I can say that that’s actually what happened when I introduced myself. And so I could say it was actually from you. You came in and I think I mentioned something about gardening and loving gardening. And then you jumped in as well and actually went in depth about the question and going back into the community. You know, it’s nurturing community.

Rocio Osuna [00:40:52]:
You know, any company can create a community and just launch it and leave it, right? And say, oh, we got a hundred thousand people, but you didn’t nurture it. It’s just an empty void there. And I feel like I myself, I created a community, a real life community called Career Moms Connect. And I nurture it. We launch once a month. We come in and we’re invested in each other’s future and what you’re doing. And we’re going in and giving each other resources. And it’s that nurture part of it, right? It’s the community.

Rocio Osuna [00:41:20]:
You build it, but it’s really what you do with it while you’re in it. Are you nurturing it? Are you actually watering the seeds? Are you, you know, following up? Are you giving each other advice? Or is it just generic, you know, made up things just to look good? No, I think with community building, it’s not just a key word. You generally have to invest your time and your effort to generally caring about these people because it is a community, right? You want to be able for them to thrive, because if they thrive, you thrive too, 100%.

Sabreen Haziq [00:41:49]:
And there’s, you know, we have a product feedback channel where people will sometimes really come in with, I need this to be fixed. And people from our product team will then lean in. So the other piece is we have a lot of people who come from the customer advocacy team, the content team, someone on the growth team. Like, we have a good amount of representation from across teams on Discord. So we have a PM who’s very actively listening to what kind of product suggestions are coming in, what are the different friction points. We also, interestingly, you say that a lot of these communities are launched and then nothing really happens. I think, again, going back to. I think we talked about this briefly.

Sabreen Haziq [00:42:33]:
It’s about the lens that you create these surfaces with. I think to a lot of other companies, they launch communities because they need another surface to announce that they launched something. And I think that the. Over a period of time, there is a lot of engagement regression, which is why you could have 20,000 followers. And it’s like crickets. And trust me, we also have like lull periods between really exciting projects. And I think that those lull periods are needed. You don’t have to have something big and exciting happening all the time because these are creators.

Sabreen Haziq [00:43:05]:
They also have very full lives and they also need breaks. So, which is why we don’t really push people into doing things all the time. And we have very intentional creative breaks and flow sessions. But also, you know, I was, you know, once we kind of crossed 6,000 or 7,000 followers, I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed in terms of. When somebody asks me, like my manager asks me, how is the community really doing? My responses were not very. I was like, I think, good, because it’s buzzing. Everything seems to be going really well. People are communicating with each other.

Sabreen Haziq [00:43:42]:
But I think we live in the age of AI now. So I decided to wear my builder hat a little bit and I decided to build this monthly intelligence report where essentially I pulled eight or nine channels that are a good representation of the narrative arc and sentiment of the community. Because we have a lot of channels. We can’t possibly think about pulling context from all these channels into a Google sheet and all that stuff. That’s too much and that’s too much noise. And I think I used Zapier, essentially. So I have a workflow where we pull a lot of what is said every single day in seven or eight channels that are our primary channels into a Google sheet. And then from that Google sheet, it goes into an AI model like Claude, whichever, like one of the highest tier models.

Sabreen Haziq [00:44:29]:
And then from there there is a very detailed prompt in terms of what exactly I’m looking for, sentiment analysis wise, what are the big opportunities from a programming perspective? What kind of workshops can be run? Oh, like are there specific product suggestions that are consistently surfacing, you know, month over month? And now we also get like this monthly download every single month off. Like, what did June look like? Oh, that’s where a lot of our ideas come in from the community itself. It looks like the community wants a workshop on how to use Canva or they’re really interested in doing a sprint around building really cool content creation flows using Claude. And I think when you create a community, you have to lean in and give people something to lean on. And so in order to be able to do that, because you’re one person or you’re a couple of people, how in a scalable way can you possibly be present and be everyone to everyone all the time? So you have to kind of leverage AI as well in a meaningful way. So you’re able to then build this infrastructure which becomes another nurture track as the community grows. Because my hope is that we hit 100,000 at some point and then how are you going to manage that volume? So I think that’s another piece of how do you build a successful community and keep it running.

A. Lee Judge [00:45:45]:
So, Sabrina, I want to end with a value nugget for our listeners to take away and have a feeling that they need to go do something based on what they learned from our conversation today. So earlier we were talking about creating content from a business standpoint and what you define as good content. And for me, a lot of what I teach is that content needs to have some information gain. Like what did I learn from that, from that content? That’s not something that everybody else says, what did I gain new from that? And so in kind of a meta way, I want to give some information gained from this episode and also ask you for some information. So you mentioned a lot of the new information that Buffer makes in terms of their internal research, internal experiments. Is there a recent trend or discovery that fascinated you that you could mention?

Sabreen Haziq [00:46:42]:
Well, if it’s very tactical and platform specific, then we were quite surprised to find out that carousels actually do a lot better engagement wise as a content format, maybe even compared to videos or. I remember we did a pretty extensive study on how posting consistently relates to engagement and follower growth and how significant the drop is for someone who commits to posting two times A week versus five times a week. And I think that when people read that data and they realize, oh my God, so my growth rate could be X percentage. If I actually posted four times a week, then why am I sleeping on this? And I think it completely changes their frame of mind because it’s almost like every single day you have a chance to enter a lottery where in some ways a win is guaranteed, even though it sounds ironic because it’s a lottery and lotteries don’t come with a guarantee. But I think that the research has shown us that consistency is a big part of how you grow. And I think people underestimate it. The other thing, and I think this is like, I came up with this on my own and I kind of, I feel like I should trademark it. Maybe in order for your content to do well, it has to exist first.

Sabreen Haziq [00:48:03]:
It can’t do well if it doesn’t exist. Right. The other thing is, and I’m maybe going on a little bit of a tangent here, but I will die on this hill is the thought in thought leadership has to come from you. You can have a ghostwriter and you can have a squad of people who throw ideas at you and all that stuff. If you don’t fundamentally believe in the idea itself, it is not going to land. Because yes, like, you could talk about how to make pizza and like, so what’s new about that? Like every, a lot of people make pizza, you can buy ready made pizza at the store, but you have something unique to offer by the dint of who you are. You absolutely do. And the only way you’re going to find that angle is if you spend enough time with your idea.

Sabreen Haziq [00:48:54]:
Like, I used to run the self improvement podcast called the Lavender Fix. And I think I need to in some ways kind of go back to it and create more episodes. But I interviewed a woman who was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. And after I was done interviewing her, I asked her, is there anything interesting? Because, you know, I do a discovery call before we actually record the episode. And I asked her, is there anything? Even if it’s trivial to you, it may not be trivial to me. She said, no, I don’t think that I missed anything. Oh, well, maybe, you know, my doctor told me not to eat my favorite foods while I was going through chemo. And I said, why? And she said, it’s because you regurgitate quite a bit and then you end up hating the things you love.

Sabreen Haziq [00:49:38]:
And she’s like, but I’m stubborn. So I ate goat. I kept eating goat cheese and now I hate it. So the name of the episode became Endometrial Cancer made me hate goat cheese.

Rocio Osuna [00:49:48]:
Right.

Sabreen Haziq [00:49:49]:
It’s not a doomy episode anymore. There’s an element of surprise. There’s also optimism, humor, and I think that somebody else would have done the same episode with a different angle. But I think I really wanted to lean in and bring something unique to the forefront. And I think you develop that muscle over a period of time, but that comes with an investment. So please, experiment. Put more content out there. Carousels do really well.

Sabreen Haziq [00:50:18]:
Put more carousels out there. And hey, you might come back and say carousels actually didn’t do that well for me. And then you can pivot to video, but you won’t know if you don’t try.

A. Lee Judge [00:50:27]:
Wonderful. That is a mic drop. So I’m so happy that Rocio brought you to the show because it’s been an amazing conversation. I really enjoyed it and thanks for joining us.

Rocio Osuna [00:50:41]:
Thank you so much.

Sabreen Haziq [00:50:42]:
Amazing. I think I did a lot of cognitive processing about my own ideas in this episode, so I am really grateful and I hope we can connect across platforms because I would love to follow along more episodes. So very, very interesting questions.

A. Lee Judge [00:51:00]:
All right, that was a really great conversation. Thank you for joining us today on the Business of Marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. We’ll catch you next time.

Sabreen Haziq [00:51:14]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing Podcast, a show brought to you by contentmonsta.com, the producer of B2B digital marketing content. Show notes can be found on contentmonsta.com as well as aleadjudge.com.