Belle Beth Cooper
A collection of posts by Belle Beth Cooper
A collection of 98 posts by Belle Beth Cooper - Page 3
I’m pretty lucky to have Leo around, because there are lots of times when I’m stuck on a title for a post, or the perfect word for something I’m writing. Fortunately, we’re pretty keen on experimenting and testing here at Buffer, so I can try lots of different ideas and see what works best. Even better, though, is having some data to give me a rough guide on where to start. I found some really useful data about crafting the perfect blog post or copy, and hopefully you’ll find it useful too.
I recently covered some big changes that Twitter has made, and here is another one. Twitter just added inline images to tweets so that you don’t need to click a link to see an attached image, but rather the Tweet itself expands. This only works with images uploaded directly to Twitter, which use a pic.twitter.com URL. If you Tweet a Vine video, you’ll also see this inline on Twitter.com or in the official Twitter apps for iPhone and Android. On top of that, you can easily post any image you fin
I’ll confess up front: I have terrible posture. It’s been bad since I was in high school at least, and probably for even longer than that. It’s one of those things I keep in the back of my mind as something I know I should do, but never get around to, like eating more vegetables and sending more postcards. It’s really interesting to explore commonly-held assumptions for the Buffer blog, because I often find out surprising things. Researching how our posture affects us was no different. If you’r
If you’ve been venturing a bit in the online marketing world like me, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “marketing funnel” before. To be frank, it was never something that appealed to me. It always seemed like just a way to optimise how many people are giving you money, which doesn’t seem very caring. So when I came across this post by MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut about why he hates funnels, I was excited to see that the traditional funnel isn’t the only way successful companies do marketing.
Quick Summary We didn’t publish any content for an entire week after we were hacked at the end of October. This affected our traffic numbers, which dropped 2% compared to September. On the upside, we got 55% more email subscribers than we did in September. How did the blog do overall? * Total uniques: 547,339 (-2% from Sep) * Total posts published: 15 (9 in-house, 6 guest posts) * Total posts republished: 4 (TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Fast Company) * Top 3 referral sites: Facebook (84,374 uniq
Ah, ideas. Who doesn’t want more great ideas ? I know I do. I usually think about ideas as being magical and hard to produce. I expect them to just show up without me cultivating them, and I often get frustrated when they don’t show up when I need them. The good news is that it turns out cultivating ideas is a process, and one that we can practice to produce more (and hopefully better) ideas. On
As the Buffer team grows we’ve been able to make some awesome adjustments to our mobile apps, including some great new features. In case you missed some of the recent additions, I’ve collected a run-down for you of how they work in our Android and iPhone apps. We’ve also included a few features that are easy to miss and might be a good bonus, which should make your Buffering much easier. Look f
Wow, it’s really not a small task these days to keep up with all the recent changes to Social Media. Only a few weeks ago, we talked about the biggest, new Facebook changes where especially the link posting iterations changed a lot of our behaviors. Looking at the biggest Social Media statistics [https://buffer.com/resources/10-surprising-social-media-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-strateg
Recently, I read a great book and promised to mail it to a friend overseas when I was done… about nine months ago. Today, I finally wandered down to the post office and mailed it, because the alternative was working on this blog post. This is classic procrastination at work. If you’ve noticed yourself doing this as well, you might have explored “cures” for procrastination , or tips to improve your productivity [ht
Five years ago I was re-doing my last year of high school, managing a retail store full-time and performing in a play five nights a week. Suffice to say I burned out pretty quickly and in hindsight I can see why. Hindsight is a grand thing, but we don’t all go through the same experiences, so the hindsight of others can be beneficial to us as well. These 13 successful entrepreneurs and startupers have some great stories to tell, and I thought asking what they wish they knew five years ago would
When I wrote a recent post for Buffer titled 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier , I didn’t even consider the possibility that striving for happiness might not be in our best interests. Who wouldn’t want to be happier? Happiness isn’t necessarily bad for us, but I did find out recently that happiness alone isn’t enough for us to feel fulfilled. Sadly, chasing happiness is really common thes
When Joel started Buffer , its aim was to help you schedule Twitter updates for smarter sharing. It’s come a long way since then, and now we have lots of features to help you improve your social media presence across a whole bunch of networks. To help you get the most out of Buffer, we collected 10 of the most useful features together into this post. 1. Using Feedly and Buffer [https://buffer.com/resources/feedly
The internet went nuts a couple of days ago (or at least, the SEO world of it did) when Google confirmed that it would be encrypting almost all keyword searches in the near future. The Not provided Google Analytics section has easily become the most talked about thing in the past. Various industry professionals weighed in on the change, what it means for marketers and what other options we have to inform our marketing choices. Let’s take a look at what happened exactly, and then we’ll explore
The list is the origin of culture. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. – Umberto Eco When I was a kid, I read a book called The Listmaker. It’s about a young girl who uses lists to organize and make sense of her life. At the time I didn’t read any more into it besides the fact that this was an odd hobby for a pre-teen girl to spend s
Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of October. It features our latest thoughts, ideas and questions about content and the Buffer blog . Since we default to transparency with our culture , we thought making this public could be useful for others too. Quick Summary In September we published 15 posts on the Buffer blog, 3 of which were guest posts. Our total uniques we
Facebook changes so fast, I often miss new features or updates to existing ones. Since there have been a few changes recently, I thought it would be helpful to do a bit of a wrap-up of what Facebook’s been up to. 1. Images are now bigger and wider – Here are the right sizes to use Some recent changes to how Facebook displays thumbnail images mean that we need to be more aware of the size and aspect ration of any pictures we post. Because Facebook will automatically resize images that don’t matc
Get ready to have your mind blown. I was seriously shocked at some of these mistakes in thinking that I subconsciously make all the time. Obviously, none of them are huge, life-threatening mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more rational, sensible decisions. Especially as we strive for continued self-improvement as we build Buffer’s social media management platform, if we look at our values, being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thin
I’m really excited to write this post today! It’s the feature I’m most excited about, and I hope that it’ll be equally helpful for you to start using it! If you’re anything like me, I’ve had this one on my Buffer wishlist for a long time. Since at Buffer we want to focus the most on helping you share better on social media and saving you time by scheduling your updates, we’re really ex
Twitter hashtags are so ingrained in Twitter now that I rarely second-guess them. They seem so much a part of the service, it’s as if Twitter shipped with them in its original version, even before it had vowels in the name. But actually, Twitter’s version of the hashtag has a vibrant history which is really fascinating. Let’s take a look at the origins of the hashtag and how to use it best on Twitter. The origin of the hashtag The very ephemerality of hashtags is what makes them easy and com
Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjusting my own routine in the hopes of getting more done and wasting less time in-between tasks or activities. While it’s important to understand how your own brain works and what routine will suit your body best, I always find it interesting to see what works for others when planning something new for myself. Amazing routines of 7 successful entrepreneurs In the hopes of building
I’m pretty well known for making mistakes. It’s kind of a known trait of mine. Just this weekend I walked into a door because I didn’t open it properly first. When it comes to social media, though, I try hard to learn from mistakes since they’re all saved for me to reflect on. Plus, I research and write about social media enough to have access to stats that make it easier to
One of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains work and how they actually do. On many occasions I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do things, only to find out that actually that’s the complete wrong way to think about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it’s literally impossible for our brains to handle 2 tasks at the same time. Recently I came acr
One of the thing that people often ask us is how we are running the Buffer blog here. A few of the key questions that people ask us are the ones below: * How do we come up with ideas? * How do we manage our content pipeline? * What do we use to write? * What are our goals with the Buffer blog? * How do we measure results? As we work hard on growing and improving the Buffer blog, we thought it would be fun to answer these questions and share what happens behind the scenes to keep fresh con
If you take a look at my bio here on the Buffer blog, my Twitter account or my website, you’ll see that my name is Belle Beth Cooper. That’s been my name for about eight months. Prior to that it was Corina Mackay. Corina Mary Mackay, in fact, since about ten days after I was born. Changing your name so dramatically isn’t something many of us do, so I thought it would be fun to tell the story of why I changed it, what the process was like and what I learned from it. Why I changed my name Changi