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Buffer's 2017 in numbers
▾ What happened in 2017?
1
New Salary Formula
Every few years we iterate on our salary formula, which we use to calculate all Buffer salaries. We also publish the formula and salaries transparently. The latest update to the formula included a remote-first emphasis with benchmarks based on a single city, San Francisco.
For the first time at Buffer we experimented with learning sabbaticals: multi-month time off for current teammates to develop the skillsets they need to move to other roles. Two teammates took a learning sabbatical in 2017, acquiring skills for design and engineering.
Being a fully-distributed, worldwide team makes our company-wide All Hands meetings a bit tricky to schedule but oh-so worth it to see everyone together. We had five All Hands in 2017 and are on a consistent bimonthly cadence. Plus, we experimented with smaller All Hands that highlight one team within Buffer, and we had two of those this past year: product and marketing.
6
Days closed
In 2016, we closed Buffer for two days at the end of year to give our team an extra break. This year we took it a step further and closed Buffer from December 25 to January 1, giving the team six business days off.
In total we had 7 Buffer babies join the Buffer family in 2017! We’re so grateful that we get to see adorable photos pop up in Slack and little happy faces in Zoom!
18
Speaking Engagements
We’re lucky to have many teammates keen on speaking at conferences around the world. In fact, one of our teammates, Joe, spoke at six conferences just this year!
24.5
Percent of new code that was open sourced
Our engineering team has been working hard to make sure Buffer is more open source. In 2017, 24.5% of the code added to Buffer's codebase in 2017 was open source.
The team at Buffer works on some pretty neat projects in their free time! This year we counted 36 projects currently in the works. You can check them all out in the link below.
Between our Social blog, the Open blog, the Overflow blog, and now our Customer Experience blog, we’ve published a lot of posts. Here’s the breakdown: 183 on Social, 47 on Open, 12 on Overflow, and 7 on Customer Experience.
1,106
Vacation Days Taken
Last year we implemented a new minimum vacation policy at Buffer to encourage employees to take at least three weeks off. In total the team took 1,106 days of vacation, which is an average of just over 15 days per person.
Our team does lots of reading (buoyed by a generous Kindle book perk). This year, the most popular book on our team was the The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team. As a result we spent lots of time thinking about artificial harmony at Buffer in 2017.
This year we debuted a learning and development perk: $20 per month, per teammate. Teammates used the stipend for everything from books and courses to buying online kits and learning to crochet.
Every Wednesday we host #bufferchat in two separate timezones. This year we chatted about everything from Millennial Marketing and Customer Journeys, to Presentation Skills and Digital Nomading.
Our team has been busy updating code this year! Throughout the entire year there have been 5,264 pull requests across our private and open source repositories, last year there were 3,749 pull requests so 2017 was a 40 percent increase!
We welcomed 45,906 new customers to the Buffer family in 2017! We’re so grateful for each and every one of these new customers who make Buffer possible.
85,903
Support Tickets Solved
That's a lot of conversations and questions to have and our Customer Advocacy team loves making it happen! These tickets were put forward by 44,030 Buffer users and in total there were 106,859 emails sent by our team with 56 percent of inquiries getting resolved on the first email.
As you might imagine, social media is a priority for us here at Buffer. We run various experiments and try to keep up a strong social presence. This year resulted in a total of 241,770 new fans and followers. Here’s the breakdown:
• 193,200 new Twitter followers • 34,400 new Facebook fans • 14,170 new Instagram followers
544,879
Podcast Downloads
2017 was the first full year of our podcast running and with 53 episodes this year we were thrilled to have over 544,879 downloads of those episodes!
As a remote team we rely really heavily on Zoom. In 2017, we had an average of 25 meetings per work day plus we spent a total of 1,050,000 minutes on Zoom. That’s over 729 days!
With Buffer you can connect and manage multiple social media accounts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. This year we had 2,317,400 social media accounts connected to Buffer! (That’s a lot of social!)
Buffer users send out a ton of posts every year. In 2016, they sent 261,419,836 posts sent through Buffer, and this year the increase was 24.4 percent!
It’s been a year of many numbers and milestones, as well as much learning within the team. While it is fun to browse our annual progress in terms of numbers here, at the front of our minds as we closed out 2017 were the customers we are lucky enough to have using Buffer.
It is you, the customers, who we exist to serve and who allow us to have great jobs and do fulfilling, interesting work. For that, I want to say thank you on behalf of the whole team.
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