Leo Widrich
A collection of 186 posts by Leo Widrich - Page 3
Wow! We couldn’t believe it. With all of you on board, we’ve hit the milestone we didn’t even dream about when starting Buffer: 1,000,000 people have signed up for Buffer as of today. We thought, what an incredible opportunity to reflect on the journey up until this point. To breakdown some of the core numbers about Buffer, take a look at the infographic below: Along the way to reach 1m users a lot has happened for us. Here is a brief review of the last 2.5 years: The journey to the 1 millio
After announcing the addition of being able to post and schedule to Google+ pages a few weeks back, we’re super excited to bring you another one of the most popular feature requests to Buffer this week: Buffer for LinkedIn Company pages. Next to Twitter, Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn profiles, Google+ Pages and App.net
An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next. It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone. Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+
Over the last few months, we launched a ton of new integrations for you to use Buffer with other tools, such as Feedly, Followerwonk and lots of others. One of the most important ways to use Buffer was still something that was very hard to do: Directly schedule Tweets and retweets via Buffer inside a Twitter client. So we are super excited to announce that with today, we have partnered with Echofon, one of the most established Twitter clients for Android and iPhone to help you Buffer your tw
This is the holy grail for every marketer, entrepreneur and any other professional on the internet: To go viral. At least, when I first started out writing articles and producing content, I could think of nothing else other than trying to figure how to get this post spread like mad on Facebook, Twitter and all the other important places. What I quickly found out is that it takes a little more than posting cute cat photos, although I keep questioning myself on that. A few months back, we did som
Ever since we started Buffer a little over 2 years ago, people have been asking us about one question very specifically: How can I write great headlines for social networks and my blog? The topic is a very tricky one, as the accuracy for what works best is hard to nail down. Whilst we have some specific techniques that we are using for our own postings and article headlines every day, I thought looking at the most cutting edge research is definitely required. So I thought of combining all the
One of the most unchanged elements of our life today is our optimal work time or how long we should work – generally, every person I’ve spoken to quotes me something close to 8 hours a day. And data seems to confirm that: The average American works 8.8 hours every day. At least, those are the official statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: And yet, for most of us it is obvious that knowing how long the average person works every day has little to do with how efficient or productive th
Ever since I’ve started blogging about topics on social media and especially Twitter, one of the questions that I have by far heard the most often is the following: “When is the best time to Tweet for me to reach more followers?” A lot of this requires a lot of data-analysis and whilst a ton of tools exist out there, they aren’t always terribly accurate. That’s why we’ve come up with this: We couldn’t be any more excited to have teamed up with the folks from Followerwonk [https://follower
This article appeared in full form on OnStartups and you can read the post “The Pitch Deck We Used To Raise $500,000 For Our Startup ” there. When Joel and I first arrived in San Francisco around 2 years ago, we had absolutely no idea about fundraising. Even the term “pitch deck” was something copmletely new to us. One lessons, that we quickly learned, however, was that it’s a big no-no to
Out of all internet users 67% are using social networks. And which kind of demographic uses which social network has been forever interesting for marketers. Some of the latest insights from Pew Research centers reveals the latest stats. Twitter is still used more than Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Also, African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to use Twitter than Whites, according to the study. Most of the findings are in line with what you might expect and some are truly surprising.
We’ve all heard what makes us more productive. To be more productive, get: Better sleep, better food, better work environment, etc. And I think these tips are amazing and a great focus to have. Heck, we even wrote about most of these and the science behind it here on the Buffer blog. And yet, today, I thought of changing it up dramatically. It goes nicely with Tim Ferriss’ moto: “To do the impossible, you need to ignore the popular.” So with this article, I tried to really step aside from the
Body language is older and more innate for us as humans than even language or facial expressions. That’s why people born blind can perform the same body language expressions as people who can see. They come pre-programmed with our brains. I’ve always been incredibly fascinated with body language and how it helps us achieve our goals in life. The power of body language is probably best described by Amy Cuddy’s famous quote: “Our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us.” If y
“I like to go with my gut!” is something I’ve told myself many times in the past. “Yes, all those other people need to track their social media metrics, I don’t, I’ve got a good intuition.” That was probably one of my biggest mistakes for a long time. Tracking things all the time and developing a data-driven mindset is one of the most important things I’ve learnt in the past 2 years. And there is still a long way to go. Here are some of the social media metrics worth your time and what I’ve di
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve started to cover a lot of heavily scientific articles recently here on the Buffer blog. And judging by the spread of them, they have been really well received. One thing struck me though. What about simple things we can do? A friend recently told me she has added a 20 minute window in her day where she tries to go for the “quick wins”. I thought that’s a brilliant idea! So I went ahead and looked up 7 simple things all of us can do today to get more productiv
Why did the Mona Lisa become one of the most famous paintings of all time? That’s a question an incredible amount of people have asked themselves in the past. And one possible answer is this: because of her unique smile. The smile is is the “the symbol that was rated with the highest positive emotional content” concludes scientist Andrew Newberg. And for me personally, I’ve been very reluctant before embracing smiling. Only a few years back, when one of my teachers told me: “Why don’t you
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” goes one of the most famous quotes in business. And this line has also been one of the biggest problems in doing great customer service. “But you can’t measure it!” is the response I receive from a lot of budding entrepreneurs when it comes to chatting about customer support. And to be honest, it is tough to measure it. Yet the reason we place such huge importance on customer support as we develop Buffer’s social media management suite [https://buff
One of the first things I’ve learnt, close to 2 years ago when taking the plunge into Social Media with Buffer, was that things aren’t yet very defined. There guiding metrics and studies are really just in their beginning phase and a lot is still quite vague. To help make things a tiny bit more clear, I thought it might be helpful to collect 10 of the most interesting social media studies and see what we can best learn from them. So without any further ado, let’s dig in and talk about the most
“Manage your energy, not your time.” – Tony Schwartz This is the quote that made Tony Schwartz famous. And it is one, that I believe best represents a truly efficient lifestyle the best. And yet, living in a way where you “manage your energy, not your time” is incredibly hard, at least for me. It probably took me around 1 year just to fully grasp its meaning. Since then, I’ve turned my life upside down and changed my routine dramatically. As we develop tools for better social media management
One of the things I fuss about a lot (especially at Buffer) are words—very simple words, in fact. Should it say “Hi” or “Hey?” Should it be “cheers” or “thanks?” How about “but” or “and?” There are many occasions when Joel and I sit over one line and change it multiple times, until we feel it really sits right. This is partly to improve our metrics for click rate and others. It is also to simply create the right emotion. The one key question we ask ourselves is: “How does this make you feel?”
There is no doubt that you have heard about the uproar on Twitter and the blogosphere: Google Reader is shutting down. As of July 1, 2013 Google will discontinue Google Reader and shut down the site. A lot of people, who have been using Buffer with Google Reader got in touch with us yesterday asking if there is any way to keep reading their RSS feeds whilst sharing their articles with Buffer. And most importantly a Google Reader alternative to be safe after the site shuts down. And fortunately
“I’m not really a creative person”, always struck me as an odd sentence. Could it really be that some of us are born to be more creatively gifted than others? If so, I thought at first, that’s definitely a downer. In school, what was considered “being creative”, like writing or drawing nice pictures was never my strength. It bugged me for a while I have to say. For today, I finally decided to research and read up on the latest studies of creativity and the science behind it. The truth, which I
Recently I sat down with Brendan Baker, one of the smartest people I’ve come across here in Silicon Valley. Clearly his brainpower exceeds mine by far and Brendan started explaining about a few things that I somehow always deemed true, but could never quite back up with great arguments or put my finger on: “Your environment has a huge impact on how productive you are. That means the temperature in your room, the colour of your walls and the noise happening around you. There are lots of great ac
We’ve been super hard at work here at Buffer over the past few weeks to make one of the most awesome new integrations available today: Buffer and Feedly are teaming up to make discovering and sharing awesome content easier than ever before. Feedly is one of the smartest and most beautifully designed newsreading apps for iOS, Android and web. Intuitively it syncs across all your devices and lets you find and read the best content from across the web. It came as no surprise that so many of you we
This month, I was kindly invited to speak at a conference in Las Vegas. In the audience of my panel session were two people, Marc and Angel Chernoff, whom I’ve admired for a long time. When I was lucky enough to be able to get dinner with them afterwards, I told them that I’d have loved to switch roles and be in the audience listening to their advice. Why? Marc and Angel run one of the most incredible blogs at marcandangel.com. They publish inspiring content that regularly spreads ac