Episode 143 - Chasing Shiny Objects
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Sabreen Haziq leads brand marketing and creator-led go-to-market at Buffer through storytelling, distribution, and community-led growth.
She’s perhaps best known for Buffer’s Team of Creators, a company-wide content initiative that has led to over 20,547 posts published, 22 million organic reach, and $647K in earned media value in 13 months.
TL;DR: Sabreen answered questions from the Superpath Pro community that covered three topics:
Inside Team of Creators: Support, flexibility, and clarity from leadership matter far more than incentives. The program is gamified in places, but it isn’t in anyone’s job description, nothing is scored, and nothing is tied to compensation. The expectation is that you’re open to being a creator, in whatever form feels right to you.
Measurement, attribution & influencer programs: Your creator program doesn’t have to drive direct pipeline to be useful. For influencers, Sabreen watches relationship longevity, the quality of comments, and whether a creator’s language later shows up in the community. For employees, the goal is empathy, product intuition, and brand distinctiveness.
Personal brand & LinkedIn: Do one thing well first and focus on showing your thinking. A minimal presence still does the work for you. One platform that’s alive beats five that are half-tended, and process breakdowns open more doors than high-engagement takes.
Buffer runs a four-day work week, and the recommended rhythm is one to two posts a week off a single batching block, so the operation behind those numbers is smaller than you’d guess. Below is her AMA with the Superpath Pro community, lightly edited for readability.
Are there any similarities between the internal program and Creator Camp? Do you have internal channels where you share writing prompts and topics? What else helps (leaderboards, streaks, awards)?
Quick context for anyone who hasn’t come across Buffer’s Creator Camp: it’s a free four-week consistency challenge we run inside Buffer’s Discord. One prompt per weekday, 20 prompts total, no weekends, and we release the full week of prompts ahead of time so people can batch and schedule content. Shameless plug, but our ninth run kicks off Monday, August 31, and anyone here is very welcome to join us at buffer.com/our-community.
To your question, the two programs rhyme more than they mirror each other.
My honest read on the Resources HQ, and the reason I’m rebuilding it, is that a static hub hands every person the same docs regardless of where they are in their creator journey, and it assumes the blocker is information. It usually isn’t. It’s confidence, time, or the fear of showing up in public. So during our Build Week this month I prototyped a replacement, working name Cool School, an interactive campus that will live on Buffer’s internal repo instead of Notion. It asks 13 questions up front, then a coach called Caret writes you a plan: one platform to focus on, a rhythm set from your busiest week, and two things to work on first. Five modules, each ending with one thing to do next. Very much still in progress, and I’m excited for how it shapes up.
On the mechanics you asked about:
I’ve been curious if companies could pull off this kind of creator program without making it officially part of the role responsibilities. In your piece you said, “To truly make the vision for our team of creators be a reality, Joel set a clear expectation that everyone on the Buffer team participates and starts their creator journey, with managers supporting this work along the way.” Is this in everyone’s JD? Does it come up in performance reviews? How does this work get prioritized alongside everything else the person is expected to do?
Great question! It isn’t a task in a job description. It’s closer to a hiring criterion: we look for people who are open to building in public, and the collaboration day in our interview process gives us a real read on that.
It does come up in monthly reflections with managers, held supportively rather than as a review item. Nothing is scored and nothing is tied to compensation.
On prioritization, which I think is the heart of your question, we deliberately don’t treat this as a separate project competing with someone’s day job. The rhythm we recommend is one to two posts a week and a single 30 to 45 minute batching block, and it’s scaled small on purpose since we’re on a four-day work week. Most of the material already exists inside work people have done: a Campsite write-up, a thoughtful Slack reply, a Linear project update. We even have a little ritual where anyone can flag a teammate’s internal writing as worth posting publicly using a specific emoji reaction.
To your original question, I do think you could run this without making it official, though I’d expect it to stay a small volunteer cohort. The company-wide part came from Joel setting that expectation clearly and managers carrying it forward.
Is that expectation enforced in any way? And how do you feel about incentives overall? We just ran a program with a pretty big incentive and got very little participation, granted we weren’t running as many complementary programs.
Yes, it’s a real expectation, and it was set by Joel, our founder and CEO, at our June 2025 All Hands as one of Buffer’s company-wide strategic themes. What matters is what’s being expected, and it isn’t posting about Buffer. The expectation is that you’re open to being a creator, in whatever form feels right to you.
We’re not an employee advocacy program, and that distinction is the whole spirit of this. You could be using the product to run an Instagram page about birdwatching, or posting as a pizza enthusiast, or sharing something you’re building on the side. All of that counts fully. The people we build for are creating about the things they love, and we want our team living that same experience, which is a much richer thing than talking about our product.
As for enforcement, there isn’t really any. It comes up in monthly reflections with managers, who hold it in a really supportive way, and there’s no quota, nothing tied to compensation, and nobody being scored.
On incentives, we don’t try to incentivize participation. The incentive is your own growth as a creator, and the brand equity that stays with you well beyond your chapter at Buffer. Joel’s framing is lovely on this: it’s an expectation, and much more than that, it’s an opportunity.
Buffer hires people who “have a personal stake in the world of content creation,” so I always imagine that posting comes more naturally to the team. What’s your advice for running this kind of program at a company where most employees aren’t natural posters?
Great question! Honestly, posting doesn’t come naturally to a lot of our team either. We have teammates who are quite reserved and don’t especially enjoy it. What hiring gets us isn’t a team of natural posters, it’s a team open to building in public.
What we screen for is willingness to experiment and build in public, not an existing audience. Nobody needs to be a mega influencer or even a nano one. We also run a collaboration day in our process, where a candidate joins our Slack and systems as though they already work here, sits in meetings and posts project updates. That gives us a real read on how someone communicates in the open, which is the same muscle the creator work asks for.
Transparency does a lot of the work too. Our salary benchmarks and company metrics are public, and teammates share openly about the projects they’re on, so building in public isn’t a foreign idea by the time someone joins.
Two pieces of advice if you’re running this somewhere it isn’t already in the culture:
After that it’s a support question. We have the resources hub, onboarding for new teammates so they understand the program properly, and help whenever someone gets stuck. It’s a muscle to build, a bit like exercise, and it does get easier.
Is there any difference between running Creator Camp with technical teams like developers and engineers vs. commercial teams like marketing and sales? Any tips for getting them as excited about posting as us in marketing?
While we haven’t run a Camp for a technical community yet, here are five things I’d change if I were building one:
And if a prompt-a-day format still doesn’t fit, the version I’d try is a build sprint or hackathon where the output is something shipped and the posting comes as a byproduct. That’s what we’re exploring next.
Do you need to prove that the program feeds pipeline to your management to keep it going? If not, how did you get buy-in? And if so, how do you attribute leads to the creators’ work?
One thing worth mentioning up front, since it shapes everything below: we’re not an employee advocacy program.
On pipeline, the honest answer is no. This isn’t a demand gen play for us, and it hasn’t needed to be one to keep going. More scoop:
The qualifier that makes this different from a typical employee advocacy program is that none of it has to be about Buffer. Where advocacy programs ask people to post about the company, we’re just asking folks to be creators in whatever way feels right to them.
For launches and new features we do share materials with the team, always positioned as optional, and most of the team jumps in anyway, which is lovely to watch.
So marketing is a byproduct, and a really fun one. When your feed fills up with Buffer teammates building openly in public, it shapes brand perception and keeps us top of mind. That effect is real, even though it’s not something I’d try to put in a forecast.
What we do track is reach, impressions, participation and consistency. We don’t report earned media value anywhere, though selfishly I do calculate it now and then for the sense of accomplishment: 27.7M reach since June 2025 against a $30 blended CPM puts us north of $800K.
What are some metrics you use to evaluate a healthy creator or influencer program, besides conversion?
The signals I trust most aren’t performance metrics at all.
I also watch whether the content is reusable, like a piece we can run as an ad. And would that creator recommend working with you to another creator? Your reputation among creators sets your future pricing and access.
I especially love three elements of Team of Creators: the leaderboard that measures consistency rather than reach or engagement, the encouragement to post in whatever channel people are already comfortable with, and the wall of wins celebrating their work. How much time do you spend managing and measuring everything?
Thank you so much, and you picked out exactly the three things I care most about.
On the leaderboard, yes, that’s a very intentional choice. We do capture reach and engagement, we just hold it collectively rather than ranking anyone on it. Some of our teammates came in with substantial followings, so they’d naturally sit at the top every month, while someone newer who’s doing really well relative to where they started wouldn’t get seen. Consistency felt like the fairer thing to celebrate.
Collective reach is still lovely to look at, and that’s how we use it: a sense of togetherness and a look at what we’ve built as a group. That’s also where we have fun with it. We run cheeky parallels at our monthly all-hands, like total reach expressed as X number of Taylor Swift Eras Tour stadiums filled, and those tend to be the slides people remember.
On time, the measuring part is close to zero now, and that’s down to work we did up front. I worked with our data scientists to pipe data from our Buffer org IDs, since everyone on the team schedules through Buffer, so it flows straight into a dashboard. We use Hex for that and keep iterating on the angles and the visual storytelling. The weekly streak round-ups are automated too.
Where the time really goes is in continuity: keeping energy up, programming workshops, and keeping our #buffer-creators channel buzzing so people feel supported. None of that automates, and I wouldn’t want it to.
If you were counseling a marketing team making their first foray into influencer marketing, how much money would you recommend they earmark for their experiment? Where would you recommend they spend it?
I’d think in collaborations rather than dollars. Budget for five or six small-to-mid creators rather than one big name, because round one is about learning the shape of what works, and a single data point teaches you little. Spend it on people whose audience is already talking about the problem you solve, pay a flat modest fee and pay it quickly, and buy usage rights so the content works beyond the post. Hold a little back to boost whichever piece performs best.
What I’d skip in round one is exclusivity, elaborate briefs, and one expensive bet. Also worth saying, the real cost isn’t the money, it’s the coordination time, so budget your own hours honestly.
Do you differentiate influencers from content creators? If so, what is that difference for you?
Yes, and the difference changes how I work with someone. With an influencer, the audience is the asset and you’re essentially grabbing niche attention, so brief lightly and let their voice carry it. With a creator, the art is the asset and you’re commissioning work, which means you can build something together that also lives on your own channels.
At Buffer it blurs in a lovely way, since our customers are creators, and the partnerships that work best for us are with practitioners who already use the product in their real workflow.
Your personal site is out of this world. Did you make that for fun, or did you find it served you as a freelancer? How long did it take you to create?
Thank you, that’s very kind of you! I should confess the site is out of date and needs a lot of work. It’s a bit of a coloring book for adults for me, and I enjoy tinkering with hex codes and animations far too much. Squarespace not having an MCP is the only thing standing between me and a rebuild, so stay tuned.
A bit of both, and the trigger was joining Buffer. My old portfolio site felt archaic and it embarrassed me, mostly because it said nothing about how I think. So I built the “How I Do It” hub, which walks through a few projects and the exact steps I took to get the result. Most portfolio sites list the brands someone has worked with, and I wanted to get into the thinking instead. It still doesn’t cover my work at Buffer or Team of Creators, which is a shame and next on my list.
It took me about two to three days, with the bulk of it in about a day and a half. I did it in the gap between my last company and Buffer, not on work time, and then slipped into perfectionism and kept fiddling with it. My advice is to build it in piecemeal rather than all at once. Start with one or two pages that matter most, a cover, and one piece of work that shows what you’re building.
In the same way people expect fashion designers to have incredible style, do brand people have to have an incredible brand across platforms and digital presence? Are there particularly high impact places to showcase this?
I love that you asked this, and I’ll be honest with you: yes it helps, and no, the bar is nowhere near as high as we tell ourselves it is.
The designer analogy is fair, though I’d tweak it slightly. Nobody hires a designer for the outfit they wore to the meeting, they hire them for the collection. Your presence is evidence, not the product. It only needs to point at the work.
Which is why minimalism completely works. One platform that’s alive beats five that are half-tended. If performing isn’t your thing, don’t perform. Point clearly at the value of your work and let that carry it.
Two places I’d put the effort:
And for the record, my own site is out of date, doesn’t mention Buffer or Team of Creators anywhere, and I still get the conversations I want. So please don’t let building a perfect digital presence become the thing standing between you and the work.
Do you think it’s important for brand people to have a hyper-personalized style or online presence?
If you have the time and energy for it, yes. Mine hyper-personalized itself without me planning it. The whole site turned out to be food metaphors, which I only noticed afterwards. I went in wanting two things, vibrant and process-first, and the personality showed up on its own.
What platforms and portfolio pieces do you think brands most want to see?
It depends entirely on the kind of work you’re going after. Writers need writing samples. Content production, embed the posts. If you build frameworks, screenshots or a Loom walking through one. What I notice with a lot of portfolio sites is that they’re logo walls, and I come away not knowing how that person works. Whatever you share, share it with that in mind.
How much time a week do you spend on your own personal brand vs. Buffer’s brand?
More on my own brand these days, and that’s because I front-loaded Buffer’s brand when I joined. I’ve been fortunate to use Buffer’s brand equity to grow as a creator, and it goes both ways. Having Team of Creators and a culture that encourages us to be creators is what makes that possible.
For context, I was at 2,400 LinkedIn followers about two years ago and I’m at roughly 34,000 now, plus working with brands outside Buffer, which feels like the right direction with plenty still to do.
If you were starting over today as a senior marketer with no audience on LinkedIn, what would you focus on over the next 12 months?
I’d start on LinkedIn much sooner, and I’d build my own content strategy with the same rigor I’d bring to a company’s. The work you put in up front is what makes everything move faster later. Success is subjective, of course, but a personal brand buys you visibility you won’t get otherwise.
What separates the people who become genuinely respected voices on LinkedIn from those who simply create a lot of content?
The respected voices pause and listen before they respond. They bring net new value rather than something generic or high level, and they tell you how they achieved something instead of only what they achieved. They peel back failures alongside wins, they teach rather than gatekeep, and they’re solutions-oriented.
What loses me fastest is sensationalized content. I see posts calling a basic brand campaign a masterclass when the team had a $3 million budget behind it. I’d much rather hear from someone who had none of that money and still made a real impact.
Looking back, which types of posts have created the biggest career opportunities for you, beyond engagement?
Process breakdowns, by a wide margin. The posts where I walked through how something was built end to end, including the parts that didn’t work. Those brought me conversations, brand work, and inbound I’d never have gotten from a high-engagement take. Building in public did far more for my career than performing in public.
LinkedIn is becoming increasingly saturated. What do you think makes someone build a memorable community or audience?
Before I answer, what do you mean by saturated? More creators arriving, or the demographic shifting? Since LinkedIn introduced the video feed I’m seeing a lot of Gen Z on a platform they had little interest in before.
Either way, what makes someone memorable is reciprocity. I make a point of engaging with other people’s content whether they’re big or small, and reaching out over DM when I have the time. I’d also own a space beyond LinkedIn, whether that’s a newsletter or a Discord community, which is something I’d love to build. LinkedIn is a rented stage and we’re at the mercy of whatever they decide to do with it next.
Where do you think LinkedIn creator culture is going? What changes should creators start preparing for today?
LinkedIn is going full creator mode. Companies are hiring creators before they budget for awareness campaigns, because people follow people.
As a builder and a tinkerer, I now have AI tool companies reaching out to demo their product and share an honest review with the process shown, rather than the old book-a-demo or download-this-case-study route. Those relationships are becoming longer term too, which I love.
What I’d prepare for is portfolio differentiation. You can say hungry, famished, or starving, and there’s always another way to say the same thing. You may well be covering the same ground as everyone else, but you have something unique to offer by dint of who you are.
Thank you so much, Sabreen!
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