Blog - Page 25
A collection of 2,473 blog posts
Friday has become somewhat of an “experiment day” at Buffer. Different areas of Buffer have tried Fridays with no Slack , have reserved Friday afternoons for personal development , and have even taken Friday afternoons off . Using Fridays to try new ways of work has become such a part of our culture that we recently tried our first full-te
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media. We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too. Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions. Should you be replying to everyon
As ever, a ton is happening in the world of social media , and it can be hard to catch every story. So we want to highlight some of the biggest news items from recent weeks that might impact your social media marketing . We’ll touch on Facebook’s most recent product
“Hackathons” are pretty common at tech companies. During these events, engineers and others collaborate on a project with a goal is to have a usable piece of software to demo after the event – and eventually ship to customers. It’s a fun challenge to do a hackathon when you’re a remote team , which is why we’re especially proud after having recently hosted our third. Through every iteration, we’ve tried to improve. And after this third edition, it feels like
Today we’re happy to announce our new engineering podcast, The Buffer Overflow Podcast. And, our first episode is now available for streaming! How to Listen The Buffer Overflow Podcast is now available on all major platforms today, so if you open your podcast player of choice and search for us, we should be there! Here are some direct links: * Google Podcasts * Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/sho
Growing a team is an exciting prospect. More people means more capacity, more skills and more progress, right? But scaling a team often comes with its own special challenges and pitfalls. It’s been said that every time a company triples in size, everything breaks . We’re now a team of 90 at Buffer and have learned quite a [https://medium.com/slite/how-slite-buffer-and-doist-manage-remote-first-teams-2b9
10 billion. That’s the number of videos people watch on Snapchat every day. The same potential consumption (maybe more) exists for Instagram Stories — quick videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours, just like Snapchat, but with an audience of 500 million users. Does that sound like a channel worth exploring? We
Buffer’s People Team spends a lot of time thinking about perks. One of our biggest and most important perks is maybe the toughest to quantify: The freedom to work whenever, wherever, and however we like. Being a diverse, distributed team impacts our perks philosophy deeply. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach; we all work differently and are motivat
Small-but-powerful. Front-and-center. Instagram bios are well worth the time and investment to write well and test often. They’re one of the most visible descriptions of who you are and what you’re about! We’ll sort out all the best practices, design tips, and strategies that the top brands and profiles are using today. Should you go highly descriptive of what you do, or keep it loose and aspirational? Should you include contact info? hashtags? emoji? And how often should you update it? We’l
Less than two years ago, I had almost zero published articles with no audience of readers. However, this never stopped me from considering myself an aspiring writer. I knew I liked writing a lot and always wanted to share my thoughts. My biggest challenge was not knowing where and how to start . I was lost because I thought I had nothing original to share with the world . This was a
If you’re looking for inspiration for your next great Facebook ad, then we’ve got you covered with this post! We’re diving into the Facebook Ad Library to give you tips on how to research the ads of your competitors and how to find inspiration from some of the most creative and effective Facebook advertisers out
The biggest difference between remote work and co-located offices is where work happens. According to our State of Remote Work survey for 2019, 84% of remote workers work from their home. That means that most of us work and live in the same place. This results in the biggest struggle remote workers have: Unplugging after work. In this post I’ll share the four biggest lessons I’ve learned on how to create rem
Android 10 is officially here! On 3rd September it began rolling out for pixel devices, so we wanted to be sure that our app was ready to serve our users who would have Android 10 installed on their device. When these OS updates come around, as developers we sometimes don’t know how many changes we’re going to need to make to our applications. When Android Marshmallow was released, permissions changes were quite a big thing for many applications. As we move our way through versions up to Android
I am the kind of person who really thrives on lists. On the blog, we’ve written about lists as both a key element of a daily success routine as well as a vehicle for accounting for your productivity each day . Personally, I make lists of tasks every day in Todoist, and I also keep an ongoing list of my goals. There’s one group of lists I make in particular that I classify as “career lists.” There are fi
When marketers wish for more time and resources, they often wish to spend it on video marketing. Well, what if you only needed six seconds of video to make your impression? The current run of 6-second ads on platforms like YouTube and Twitter has opened up new options for marketers who are looking to get their mess
When someone makes a purchase or signs up for your product, how do you know where they came from? Especially when it comes to a top-of-funnel channel like social media, how can you ensure social gets credit for the impact it’s having? Attribution to the rescue! Seeing the impact of your social media marketing is definitely possible with an attribution strategy that assigns value to the channels that send new bu
One of our values at Buffer is to improve consistently, so we focus a lot on learning. Up until recently, a Buffer perk we were pretty proud of was our learning and development stipend . This fund gave each teammate $20 per month, or $240 a year, to invest in learning from mediums like tutorials, online classes, or real-life courses. Budget-wise, this worked out to about $20,000 for the year (assuming everyone uses th
Some of the very best brands on social media get by with a little help from their friends — agencies and consultants and strategists. If the agency route is one you’ve thought about exploring, then we think you’ll find a lot to love in this collection of agency advice, tips, and strategy. Or if you already have an agency on board, then hopefully some of our examples will inspire your next collaboration. Keep rea
We held our 10th company retreat this past April and it was a big one! 83 teammates flew or drove to sunny San Diego for a week of work with plenty of team bonding and activities thrown in. We treat everything like an experiment at Buffer, so each team retreat is an opportunity for us to reflect and decide what to keep, what to discard, what to introduce, and what to iterate on. Here are some highlights
Launched in 2015, Daily Harvest has become one of the fastest growing direct-to-consumer food brands in the world. * In 2017, it raised over $43m — with investors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams * It shipped over one million smoothies in just one year after la
Isolation can be a persistent challenge for distributed teams. In our most recent State of Remote Work report , we found that loneliness was the second most common problem remote workers share. At Buffer, we’ve tried to counter this challenge in many different ways , like rotating weekly chats, online team events, and encouraging local meetups. Some initiatives have made a dent, but as we’ve grown the
Copywriting is one of the most essential skills for a marketer to have. Good copy is everywhere! Websites, advertisements, blog posts, and especially on social media. We want to give you the tools to write exceptional copy for even the tiniest of things on social: captions, tweets, Stories, and more. Consider this a crash course in copywriting for all the little
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote this blog post about the next step in Buffer’s social media journey . I described Buffer’s multi-product vision of the future, which included Reply and Analyze . This idea was such a huge vision and change for us as a company, and it’s taken a few years to fulfill it. But now, looking back the vision in that blog post, it’s our current reality at Buffer. W
Reddit is one of the most vibrant communities on the Internet and a powerful source of attention. A positive Reddit mention can mean thousands of visits to your website or your product. Your audience may be there. Opportunities certainly exist there. Should you be there, too? It’s a tricky question to answer because one of the first rules for marketing on Reddit — one of the first rules for marketing on any soc