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A collection of 2,598 blog posts
Sometimes things don’t go according to plan. Tools break, wires get crossed, the best-laid plans fall apart. And on those occasions, it helps to know exactly what happened—so it doesn’t happen again. Moments like these are when we at Buffer turn to a simple but remarkably effective process: The 5 Whys. It’s just as it sounds: A discussion of the unexpected event or challenge that follows one train of thought to its logical conclusion by asking “Why?” five times to get to the root of what
“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
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Joseph Addison We’re a remote team that loves reading (and self-improvement ). In fact, through the first nine months of 2018, we’ve read over 1,000 books! So when International Literacy Day popped up on the calendar, we wanted to get involved. International Literacy Day, celebrated annually on September 8 ,
We’re working towards better accessibility for our Android apps here at Buffer. That’s why when we recently added a new feature to Reply , we took a little extra time to make sure it was accessible. This feature includes some swipe gestures: a user can swipe left or right on a item in a list of conversations to perform some action on that conversation.This is great for quick management of the list, but leaves out people using TalkBack [https://developer.android.com/tra
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS Looking to catch up on the latest social media news, but short on time? We have you covered! This week (episode #110) we’re chatting about all of this and more: * According to an interesting article from Digiday, Facebook is shifting gears with brand advertisers. After years of trying to sell brands on the Facebook news feed, they’re changing their pitch to Instagram, Stories, and Messenger engagement. * Facebook interv
Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Starting the conversations, negotiations, and process of this buy out was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in the Buffer journey so far, and it was the culmination of more than a year of work. This is a key inflection point for Buffer that puts us truly on a path of sustainable, long-term growth. Here is the full journey of how we decided on t
* After Twitter changed its rules on sharing identical tweets, we set out to experiment with new ways to boost the reach of our best tweets. * This strategy helped us to generate 122 percent more impressions, 87 percent more engagements, and 90 percent more link clicks for our top tweets. * It’s incredibly simple to implement this strategy — you just need to identify your best tweets and retweet them — and it can be done using Buffer or directly on Twitter.com (and Twitter apps). Keep readi
Remote work has been the norm at Buffer for many years now; we ditched our office in 2015 and have been hiring remote teammates since 2011. We now have over 85 teammates spread across 10 different time zones. Over the years, our team has experimented and learned tons about productivity, tools, collaborating, communicating, and disconnecting as they each relate to remote work. Here’s a full list of all of our resources on remote work. Comment below if you have a question and we haven’t written
While much of the focus over the last few years on social media has been on Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn has been steadily growing its user base to more than 500 million users. And we’ve seen first-hand that businesses are working hard on perfecting their LinkedIn marketing strategy so that they can tap into the world’s largest professional network. A few months ago, we asked you (our readers) to let us know which social media networks you would like to learn more about – LinkedIn (53%) ca
The greatest marketing campaigns are the ones that connect with us, inspire action and leave a lasting impact. Think Casey Neistat’s ‘Make It Count ‘ collaboration with Nike, Airbnb’s ‘Belong Anywhere ‘ or Patagonia’s ‘ Fighting for Public Lands ‘. Very few businesses ever achieve anything that connects with their audience like these campaigns. In fact,
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS Looking to catch up on the latest social media news, but short on time? We have you covered! Join 17,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways. This week we have a super interesting episode lined up for you, starting with specific details around Facebook’s plan t
Have you ever looked at the Android System settings page for a specific application and wondered about the option to view “Additional settings in the app”? If you haven’t seen this before in your settings, or aren’t aware of it, this is what it looks like This option allows developers to essentially provide a link to a push notification settings screen in their application – this allows users to quickly and easily continue altering their notification settings for the chosen app directly from th
Editor’s Note: Here’s part 1 in the series, A Transparent Look Inside Our Process For Creating Buffer’s Annual Budget. We believe that numbers tell a story and we hope that anyone looking at our budget for the first time will have a good idea of what we value based on how we’re planning to spend our money. Last month we shared our approach to creating a budget. Today, we’re excited to invite you to take a closer look at how that approach led to allocating dollars in our budget and how that inf
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS What do psychology and social media have in common? A lot more than you might imagine! Believe it or not, there are some very scientific reasons that people like, share, comment, click, and even purchase products online. Understanding the psychology facts behind the way audiences think on social media is the first step in creating better experiences, stronger relationships, and even more loyal customers in the long run.
There’s a lot written about churn. A quick google search returns several blog posts with various definitions and types of churn. That said, not a lot of what’s written is in form of code. At least not open source code. Since the definition of churn depends on the domain and company, a few companies share how they predict churn. At Buffer , we decided to spend a few weeks trying to predict when our customers are going to stop paying for a specific subscription. We called that
I love the little traditions that develop organically at Buffer. One of them is to welcome each new teammate with a long email chain of happiness that begins with that person’s introduction. More often than not, the introduction has a certain ratio: * 1 part what this person will do for Buffer and has done for work in the past * 2 parts who this person is in the world—a mom, a breakdancer, an ex-Marine I love this 1:2 ratio because it speaks to a simple truth we strive to recognize as a tea
During a recent hack day we added a bunch of small but impactful features into our application, one of these being integration with the GIF input provided by the Google keyboard. This involved us making use of the Image Keyboard Support (IKS) functionality that was introduced in Android 7.1 (API level 25), this allows us to hook into the media functionality of keyboards and make use of the data that our application retrieves from t
Facebook has made some big changes to business Pages in order to better support small and local businesses. Over 80 million businesses use Facebook Pages, with more than 1.6 billion people around the world are connected to them. And each week, two out of three people on Facebook visit a local business Page or an Event Page. So it’s clear that business Pages are an incredibly important part of the Facebook ecosystem. However, as Page reach and engagement continues to dip for brands, Facebook ha
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. We love conferences, and who doesn’t? They’re a great place to connect with like-minded individuals. Over the years as the Buffer team has grown, we’ve not only been attending more conferences, but we’ve started seeing more and more Buffer speakers as well. Speaking has so many benefits for the Buffer t
What a year for Business Pages on Facebook! It sure feels like every time we as marketers and business owners think we have our Facebook marketing strategy figured out, a major algorithm change is announced or a new tactic becomes the latest trend. Over the years, we’ve learned that the best way to reach our audiences on Facebook is to study the data, experiment constantly, be open to learning, and take a growth mindset. In the spirit of learning, we partnered with BuzzSumo to analyze more th
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS Is your business prepared for the future of social media? The social media industry changes so quickly that it can be a challenge to keep up with all of the different announcements and platform updates from your favorite networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That’s why we’ve created news episodes on The Science of Social Media where Hailley and I discuss the most important trending topics that your
MRR $1,498,636 ARR $17,984,388 EBIDTA $1,340,654(+15%) Paying customers 79,665(-2%) Q2 Revenue $4,527,930(+6%) EBITDA Margin 29.61% This quarter was Buffer’s 9th company-wide retreat and it was a joy to get to see the entire team in Singapore for a week. Our People team did an incredible job of creating a relaxing and productive space for the team to gather and it was a week packed with insightful sessions and team-bonding. In addition to being able to spend time together, in Q2 were deep
Recently I managed to get my hands on a Pixelbook. If you haven’t got one, or even read to much into them, then you’ll be excited to know that they have the ability to run Android applications on them. That means that if you have an application in the Play Store, anyone on Chrome OS can download that app, install it and run it on their device. Whilst in most cases the applications will work out of the box, there are a bunch of things which you can do to improve the experience of your applicatio
How to subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS It seems like everywhere we look there’s some new social media or marketing tactics being touted as the next big thing. As marketers and businesses, we’re constantly looking for ways to reach our audience in creative ways and so we often jump around from strategy to strategy – often leaving what used to work in the past. But what about those marketing tactics that once worked like a charm? Today on The Science of Social