How Dustin Kuhns Uses Buffer Insights to Let Taste Lead

At a glance

• Customer: Dustin Kuhns, founder of Kuhns, Inc.
• Based in: Mid-Atlantic, US
• What he does: Consulting for arts and culture organizations, connecting their strategy to social, email, and the rest of their communications
• Channels in Buffer: 10+
• How he uses Insights: Tags campaigns by theme and subject, then reads performance back across a full year to shape what his clients post and program next

---

Dustin Kuhns started using Buffer in 2023. Today, he runs social media for a roster of arts and culture organizations, managing more than 10 social media channels. Buffer just fits the way he prefers to work, so he’s stuck with it as his business expanded. 

The work: “arts and culture supply chain management”

Dustin doesn’t think of himself as a social media manager. He runs a consultancy from Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and describes his role as something closer to logistics than content creation. 

“I specialize in arts and culture supply chain management,” he says. “How does content go from leadership vision to a creative team and get put out into social media, email, the website, or advertising?” 

His clients range from teams of two or three people to institutions, including religious nonprofits, film festivals, historic theaters, and arts organizations.

Early in his career, he came to see that the thing holding most of these organizations back was rarely their creative work. “It wasn’t a stellar brand or better creative content that most of these organizations were missing,” he says. “It was consistency. And the thing they needed to be consistent was a tool that would grow with them, not dictate their workflows for them.”

Dustin’s own background runs through music and the arts. He grew up playing music in church, went on to produce shows for other bands, spent several years in design and construction, and eventually moved into communications. He regularly curates fine art exhibitions, and it is that sense of taste that he credits for much of his business. 

“Clients come to me to feel confident about what they produce,” he says. “They trust my taste.”

Sticking with Buffer as his business scaled was a no-brainer for Dustin.

He would rather use a tool that is excellent at a focused set of tasks, rather than one that tries to do everything, and complicates his workflows in the process.

“I’ll choose a tool that has 75% of what I need and find workarounds for the other 25% before I’ll use one that has 200% of what I need,” he says, “and then let all that extra capacity get in the way.” 

Dustin manages a wide range of clients, each with their own priorities, so what he values is a tool that does its core job excellently and then adapts to him, rather than one that pushes a single way of working. Buffer works the way he works, which leaves his attention free for the specific priorities and needs of each client.

How he uses Insights

One of the workaround Dustin previously looked for was deeper social media analytics — until Insights landed in Buffer. Insights is Buffer’s brand-new answer to analytics, tracking, and reporting, and Dustin was an early adopter. 

Two features have changed the game for him. The first is the ability to see performance data from every channel in a single view — this is huge when you’re reporting across a dozen accounts.

The second (and the feature he relies on most) is tagging. Tags — the ability to sort your posts into different color-coded categories — feed directly into Insights. Dustin can group his posts by campaign, theme, or subject and review how each one performs over time.

He describes one example involving a nonprofit client that built much of its content around influential ideas and quotes from experts. Dustin  created a whole series of quote graphics featuring various writers and subjects, organizing them into different tags in Buffer to compare their performance quickly.

“In a matter of minutes, across a bunch of campaigns over a year, I can see how content from specific thinkers, on specific subjects, resonates with an audience and how that engagement changes,” he says.

What makes this valuable is what he does with the finding, because he brings it back to the client as a recommendation. “These insights don’t just inform the social media,” he says. “I can go back and say, people really resonate with this, and that can shape the client’s programming. Maybe the client runs a webinar on a particular subject, or writes a newsletter or blog focused on a particular thinker driving engagement on social media.” 

A tag becomes a read on the audience, and that read goes on to shape the client’s broader strategy as well as their next posts.

Letting taste lead the data

Dustin is careful to point out that analytics on its own is not enough. “We need to see which things work best so we know what to focus on,” he says 

But the element he believes most people overlook is taste.

“Everyone’s critique of social media these days boils down to a central problem: taste never entered the conversation when we started using data to drive engagement at any cost,” he says. 

For example, he says, a religious nonprofit can generate a great deal of engagement on social media if they chase controversy. Of course, much of that engagement is hostile.

“It’s engagement. It’s getting me the views. But does it further my client’s mission? Probably not.” The data shows him what is performing, and his judgment determines which of those results are actually worth pursuing. 

For Dustin, Insights is a way to understand how an audience is responding to the work, so that he can decide what to do next, rather than chase whatever happens to perform.

This is also why he values the way Buffer approaches AI. “The one thing I love about Buffer right now is that it’s the only platform I work with that isn’t shoving generative AI in my face,” he says. “The communities my clients work with wouldn’t respond well to that anyway.” 

Insights follows the same principle, with its intelligence running in the background to surface patterns worth a closer look, and without writing anyone’s posts or standing in for their voice.

If this sounds like how you work 

If you’re a creator, social media manager, or agency owner like Dustin — who trusts their gut as much as they trust the metrics — Insights was built for you. 

It allows you to zoom out and look at the whole picture of all your channels’ performance, side-by-side, or wade in to inspect every chart at the channel (or tag!) level. 

Some more handy features worth noting:

• Takeaways that guide your next move. Instead of leaving you to squint at a chart, Insights reads your performance and tells you (in plain English) what’s working and what you could try next.
• Reports your clients understand. Export polished PDF or CSV reports for any channel, date range, or campaign, without hand-building a single spreadsheet.
• Your data, wherever you want it. Download it as CSV or PDF, or copy the whole lot as markdown and paste it straight into your favorite AI tool, like Claude or ChatGPT.

Bonus: Most of Insights’ features are available on the free plan. Create your free account and try Insights on your own channels.