Blog - Page 46
A collection of 2,507 blog posts
One of the questions I get asked most as the social media manager here at Buffer is: How do you break up your day in order to get the most out of social media? Up until recently, I hadn’t really thought about it much. A little bit of content creation, curation, audience engagement, emails, outreach, and some Buffer scheduling. I kept wondering, is there really a social media manager formula for success? How are other social media professionals spending their time during the day? Do we share t
Facebook has recently launched Groups for Pages, enabling the 70 million+ Pages on Facebook to create their own unique communities and feeds. This update provides new ways for brands to boost engagement and could go some way to countering the decline in organic reach Facebook Page owners have been experiencing for the past few years [https://buffer.com/resources/s
“How do you know that people are actually working if you’re all at home?” This is a question many of us get asked at Buffer. We’re a fully remote in multiple time zones around the world, and unless you’ve experienced remote work in this way, it can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around. Specifically, this question of how to tell who’s actually working is one of the major curiosities. To put the question another way, perhaps what people are really asking is how trust functions in an environm
This week on #bufferchat, “tech humanist” Kate O’Neill (founder of KO Insights ) stopped by to share her thoughts about using data to shape experiences. The community discussed how to measure experiences, how to identify meaningful data , what to do when the data doesn’t match your intuition, and much more! Read on to discover all of the awesome insights that were shared durin
Every company is a media company these days, and Buffer is no different. We started the Buffer Social blog in January 2011 and since then it has been a key component in the success of the company. We have published more than 1,000 posts—and we’re honored to receive more than 1.5 million visits every month. It’s been a long, challenging journey, though. We first hit one million sessions in a calendar month during March 2015—a full 4 years after launching—and after months of floating around 1.1
Can you remember where you were seven years ago? I was in my apartment in Birmingham, UK, coding up the very first version of Buffer as a tool to schedule tweets. So much has changed since then: the Buffer product has evolved, the social networks themselves have matured, and social media managers have grown exponentially in skills and influence. Today, I’m excited to share an early look at what we believe these ch
In the past, if you wanted to run Snap Ads (Snapchat ’s full-screen video ads), you would need to go through one of their ads partners. Now, though, you can create Snap Ads yourself through Snapchat’s new self-serve ads tool, Snapchat Ad Manager. Snapchat has even included a video creation tool in the Snapchat Ad Manager to make creating engaging, awesome-looking vertical videos a breeze. We’re thrilled by the possibilities that Snapchat Ad Manager has bro
Social media is changing. It used to be a one-to-many channel. Businesses would publish links, photos, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, hoping to reach as many people as they can and drive a high number of leads and sales. When marketers first started using social media as a marketing channel, there was less content, less noise, and people were willing to click on almost everything they saw on their news feed. Then, we hit content shock. There is now more content on social pla
Engineers tend to be hardwired for knowledge sharing. Because of our Buffer culture , contributing to the open source community has never been an uphill battle. We’ve never had to “convince” anyone that this a good idea and that we should let engineers spend time on it
Facebook Cover Photo Size The ideal size is 820 pixels wide by 462 pixels tall. According to Facebook, your cover photo is displayed at 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall on your Page on desktops and 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall on smartphones. But if you want to use a single image that works pretty well on both desktop and mobile, 820 pixels wide by 462 pixels tall seems to be the best. The Facebook cover photo. It feels like it should be so easy to pick one, and yet finding the perfect
One happy side effect of Buffer’s value of defaulting to transparency and sharing lots of what we’re working on and going through as a company is that you get to have lots of great conversations. Folks from other companies read what we’re up to and share advice about similar situations, or share a challenge they’re going through and ask for advice. And the No. 1 question I get asked is this: How does a company begin to approach the topic of diversity and inclusion for the first time? Folks are
Keeping up with new changes on the various social media platforms is essential to staying ahead on social media. Did you know for example that Facebook now allows you to upload GIFs ? Or that Facebook has also changed the News Feed to encourage high-quality links to be shared ? If a piece of social media news is big enough (such as the lau
Is social media best used for sales or for brand awareness and engagement? The age-old question that marketers have been debating even before Mark Zuckerberg started TheFacebook in his tiny Harvard dorm room back in 2004. So what’s the right answer? Is there one? Many marketers lean towards the side of brand awareness and engagement, while others can’t quite see the point of social media unl
This might sound contradicting — and it’s scary for us to admit. But, despite building a product that helps people succeed on social media, we have committed a good number of social media mistakes ourselves. Mistakes that have cost us reach and engagement, maybe even fans and customers. Now that we have learned from many of those mistakes, I would love to share our top 10 and how you can avoid committing them yourself. Let’s get started… Learn from These 10 Social Media Mistakes We’ve Made
I’ve always been a person who follows the rules. No coloring outside the lines. Work within the system. At times, this has worked out fine. More often, though, I’ve had to work to retrain myself to take bigger risks, speak up more and be less afraid of “getting in trouble.” Especially at work, rule following can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Getting tough feedback for being out of line or overreaching is hard, but so is missing an opportunity you know y
Do you remember your first social media profile? Or, how about your first social media post? My first profile was on Myspace, my first friend was “Tom from Myspace,” and my first post was something like, “Myspace is awesome!” The rest is history. Social media has changed and evolved so much since the early days, it’s almost hard to believe how far we’ve come. How people use social media has changed as well. Gen Zs (now beginning to enter the workforce) only know a world with social media, com
Finding the right balance between role performance and personal development is not easy, and it’s something that I got very wrong at first and am still trying to perfect. Over the last few months, I’ve had a lot of experience trying to balance my performance as a Happiness Hero (on our customer support team at Buffer) and my passion for learning more about engineering, which allows me to help my team outside of the Happiness inbox.
When you hear the term ‘stock photo’, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? My hunch is it’s probably a photo of a group of friends awkwardly laughing, business people staring at charts on a wall, or something along those lines. Probably not the best connotations, right? Used correctly, though, free stock photos can really bring your ads, blog posts, and content to life. And at Buffer, we use stock photos daily. Here’s why: * Stock photos are cost effective (mostly free ?) * If you
This year at WWDC 17, several promising new technologies, frameworks and APIs were revealed to eager developers. Each year Andy and I try to focus on not only the keynote, but the Platforms State of the Union session to get a sense for what we should prioritize for the upcoming iOS release among all the new things introduced. For iOS 9, Apple pushed multitasking. Last year, Message Extensions were quite prominent. This year, there was no doubt about what we really wanted to hone in on: The new
One of the 10 Buffer values we aspire to is constant self-improvement, which includes learning new skills, new information, new everything. Little did we know how much there was to learn about learning itself! Recently, we’ve specifically sought out even more ways to encourage learning for our whole team at Buffer, with projects spearheaded by our People team and our teammate Deborah. The main question she’s been asking is: How can we help encourage a culture of learning on our team? That’s w
Startups get a lot of advice. And for good reason – there are millions of decisions to be made as you begin the journey of building a company. Some of the advice is clear-cut. More often, you’ll hear a chorus of voices with different experiences and points of view. Perhaps nowhere is the advice more confusing than when it comes to if, when and how a company should add HR or People functions into a team. (For a little taste, read through this Quora thread.) There are a lot of reasons why this
What’s working for you on social media these days? One of our goals at Buffer is to always be iterating and experimenting with what we do on social media and in marketing. Whether it’s cutting our posting frequency, curating content, or creating square videos , we’re always up for trying new strategies ! Lots of times these experi
Our whole team engages with many people online every day across various platforms. Most of these experiences are happy, positive, thought-provoking, and often quite funny. We have some truly wonderful Buffer customers , and getting their messages throughout the day makes the whole team smile. Sometimes though, things are less happy and positive, and more angry and negative, like with online hate or when a customer might become abusive towards a Buffer teammate.
I used to think the few seconds I save by using keyboard shortcuts are not useful. I mean, what can I do with those few seconds? A lot, it seems… A few seconds here and there can add up. And according to Brainscape , you can save up to eight workdays per year! Just by using shortcuts—enough time for a long vacation. Being a social media marketer , you spend a lot