Courtney Seiter
A collection of posts by Courtney Seiter
A collection of 187 posts by Courtney Seiter - Page 5
Social media evolves every day. We’re constantly learning more about how to connect better, empathize more deeply and create more lasting relationships. At Buffer, we’re so grateful to be part of social media’s rapid evolution, and we’re so inspired by all the tactics and strategies we hear from you, our audience, on your social media journey. As a result, we’re able to grow Buffer’s product and make it even more useful for you. Here are 10 new elements you can find in your Buffer account rig
If it weren’t for online tools, there’s no way we could do what we do at Buffer. (OK, technically Buffer wouldn’t exist either, itself being a suite of online tools … but you get what I mean.) The power to gather our remote, spread-out-all-over-the-world team to talk face-to-face, discuss what we’re working on and connect with our community is incredible, and we love sharing about the tools that make it possible. Previously on the blog we’ve discussed some of the tools that connect us acr
Ever since we wrote The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Social Media, we’ve been itching to dig deeper into mobile social strategies. After all, the evidence that we’re only growing more addicted to our cell phones is undeniable: * The average user looks at her or his mobile phone up to 221 times a day * 90% of American adults have a mobile phone—and 64% own a smartphone * 60% of social media time is spent on smartphones and tablets * 75% of Twitter users are active on mobile * 38% of Facebook u
How well do you know the humble GIF? The Graphics Interchange Format (the GIF’s fancy, formal name) has been around for decades—it was introduced by CompuServe way back in 1987 and went on to become one of the first image formats commonly used on the web. Today, GIFs are a big part of social media—and you can now share them directly through Buffer with Buffer for Video! In honor of this pivotal moment, let’s take a moment to praise the often misunderstood GIF, a pivotal and growing part of In
What does it mean to have a “startup mindset”? We’ve always tried to offer as much insight as we can into how we hire at Buffer. With Buffer’s core value of transparency, it feels like the right thing to do. In the past, we’ve often shared this diagram with teammates working in hiring and with potential candidates, showing the four main components that we’ve grown to believe make for a great fit at our startup. Lately we’ve been giving the “strong startup mindset biased toward action” quadran
Social media is constantly evolving. As soon as you feel like you’ve got Facebook and Twitter figured out, suddenly there’s Vine and Snapchat and a whole bunch of exciting new stuff to learn. It keeps things interesting, and keeps social media managers on our toes. Lately it seems like more and more social media managers are enthusiastic about Instagram and the opportunities there to engage with fans and share great photos and videos. And the opportunities are big! With more than 300 million
Social media has entered the video era. In 2015 we’ve seen the addition of video on Twitter and a giant push by Facebook to make video a major component of the News Feed . Check out some staggering social media video stats: * The number of videos in Facebook feeds has grown by 360% [http://media.fb.com/2015/01/07/what
We’re a fully remote team at Buffer, so we’re used to connecting with one another via video, chat, and other collaborative, remote work tools. Working this way is a lot of fun—and it means the times we get to spend together, all in the same place, are extra special. Not only do team retreats give us a full week to work (and play) together as a team, they also give us some time all together to reflect on the future of retreats as we continue to grow. (Our open roles are listed here.) So far, t
Being a part of a company that is run according to a specific set of values brings a great amount of clarity into everything we do at Buffer. Looking to our values becomes particularly important when there’s a challenging decision to make—for example, how to move forward with a feature that hasn’t yet found its fit. When we practiced this reflection with Buffer’s Suggestions feature recently, we decided that they’ve reached the end of their journey. Beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off
I have some great news: We’re welcoming Kat Zien to the Buffer team as a back-end developer. Kat is based in Bristol and has been helping out with all things engineering, including some cool stuff with oAuth and retweet with comment (coming soon!). Here’s how she described her bootcamp experience: “I love the team and how helpful and friendly and positive everyone is! It makes me smile a lot throughout the day :) I wish I could spend all day reading the Open blog and so many personal blogs of
“What gets measured, gets managed.” This well-known quote is often applied to business situations like marketing or product creation. But the basic truth is applicable to almost any situation: When we really want to focus on something, we pay close attention. We want details that can help us make good decisions. And at Buffer, we want the details that can help us grow as an inclusive and diverse team. We want to be conscious of how we grow: With a focus on the values that guide us, and with a
How many photos of you are on your phone right now? These days, humans take almost 1 trillion photos a year . (To put that into context, that’s more photos every few minutes than in the entire 19th century.) And lots of these photos are selfies—self-portraits, usually taken with a smartphone. As of this writing,
I have a confession to make: I’m a grown woman who peppers pretty much every text and social media post I send with smileys, hearts, stars and various other decorations. Emojis have taken over my communication—and I’m far from alone. According to Swyft Media, 74 percent of people in the U.S. regularly use stickers, emoticons or emojis in their online communication, sending an average of 96 emojis or stickers per day. All this adds up to a total of 6 billion emoticons or stickers flying around
It seems like there’s more great stuff to read today than ever before. And still, finding the good stuff that’s just right for you or your brand can take a lot of time, according to this survey by Vertical Response: When you’re sifting through the whole internet, it can help to have a guide. What if could open your inbox every day to find new, relevant, curated articles that you’d be thrilled to share to social media? We’ve written before about the rise of high-quality niche newsletters, a fo
From the fun and silly (#FiveWordsToRuinADate, anyone?) to hard-hitting international news headlines, trending topics on social media have the power to keep us both aware and entertained. Marketers have long recognized the potential of these highly-trafficked, highly-searched (at least for a short while) terms as a way to get in front of a big and often new audience. It can be a risky gamble to go big on these fleeting opportunities, but the rewards of the right post at the right time can be e
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer ! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning schedules customized just for you * Track and measure repins, likes, and comments Anyone can try out this fun new feature!
Optimizing one’s day for maximum productivity—and creativity!—is one of our favorite topics to research and think over. We’ve written on the blog before about morning routines, creativity routines, the routines of successful entrepreneurs and even ways to maximize your lunch break. But we haven’t managed to share any of our own daily routines, until now. Recently we were honored to be asked by the team at inbound.org to do an “Ask Me Anything” session, answering questions from their smart com
I believe in the power of women to build inspiring careers in all types of fields. At least, that’s what I thought I believed. It’s what my conscious mind thinks, at least. My unconscious mind, however, favors traditional Western gender roles: men focusing on careers while women focus on family. I learned about this dichotomy from taking an implicit association test, a social psychology test designed to measure a person’s unconscious or automatic associations between types of people and s
If you feel challenged by Facebook marketing these days, you should know you’re not alone. In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice. In fact, brands are now responding to plunging organic reach on Facebook by posting more content to Instagram than they are to Facebook, according to a report by research firm L2. But don’t despair; there’s plenty of life left in Facebook yet. We’ve been scouring the web to find out what’s
Social media automation, when done with care and the right strategy, is awesome. It can amplify your great content while freeing up your time to create more of it! We’ve talked before on the blog about automating some processes through services like If This Then That and Alfred, and in this post I wanted to share some of our favorite uses of another fantastic automation tool: Zapier. Zapier integrates with more than 400 different web apps, which means most marketers are bound to be able to fin
***Quick update: We’re building a more inclusive Buffer! We’d love your feedback on our new Diversity Dashboard.*** Not too very long ago, developers at Buffer were called “hackers.” We had front-end hackers, back-end hackers, Android hackers, iOS hackers, traction hackers. We started using the word “hacker”in Buffer’s early days because—at the time—it felt like the most inclusive way to describe the work developers were doing. I asked our CTO Sunil to describe what the word meant to him: “I
Of all the hundreds of social media acronyms and abbreviations out there, I think “KPI” has confounded me the most. I think it’s because the phrase “key performance indicator” always sounds like something you need to be wearing a suit in front of a Powerpoint presentation in order to say. But when you get down to it, it’s really quite simple. KPI is just a way of saying “This is the stuff that’s important enough to me to focus o
I’m so excited to share that Eric Khun has joined the Buffer team! Eric joins us from Beijing, and his focus is on back-end development. Eric was raised in France and fell in love with China when he went to Beijing for a year of school. He’s been there for 3 years now, and has even worked on an Android app called PartyBeijing , which allows foreigners to find top event venues in Beijing and communicate with taxi drivers more easily by offering easy Chinese pronun
Imagine having a quick and simple way to instantly increase the engagement on your social media posts. We’ve found that oftentimes images are the hook that draws more clicks, shares, and favorites on social media. And a number of marketing studies report the same: * Blog posts with images receive 94% more views than those without images * Having at least one image in a post leads to more than double the shares on Facebook and Twitter * Using an image on Twitter increases retweets by 28% and