Blog - Page 46
A collection of 2,459 blog posts
I never planned on being an entrepreneur. That label always sounded far too lofty for me. Entrepreneurs were guys in suits working everyone in the room. Entrepreneurs only got three hours of sleep a night because the rest of the time they were hustling. Entrepreneurs would look at someone like me and realize right away that I didn’t belong. But that picture – my picture – has changed. Women now make up 40 percent of new entrepreneurs in the United States. And startups these days don’t have to
The Instagram algorithm, just like the Facebook News Feed algorithm, is so mysterious yet ingenious and brilliant in showing the best content to the most people. If you are creating great content, more followers — and non-followers — are going to see it. But how does the Instagram algorithm work? In this post, we’ll break it all down for you. We’ll go through the factors that could influence the ranking of your content on your followers’ feed and explain why the Instagram algorithm is
Since Instagram started sorting posts on users’ feed with an algorithm , many marketers have noticed a decline in their organic reach and engagement. But that doesn’t have to be the case for you. In fact, it could be possible for you to reach more of your followers now than without the new Instagram algorithm. In this post, we’ll share 10 straightforward ways you can use to increase your organic reach on Instagram today. Buffer for Instagram now c
Managing social media for a small business is a unique and sometimes overwhelming challenge for so many entrepreneurs and marketers. On one hand, you have a business to run. On the other, you want that business to grow and flourish. And although you know that social media has the power to be an important part of your overall marketing strategy , there’s tons of completely valid reasons why it never quite happens. Time, resources [https://
Editor’s Note: We’ve switched our Investor’s Reports from monthly to quarterly.We’re excited to keep publishing them in full for our Buffer Open audience in keeping with our value of transparency . Buffer Investor Report Q1 2017 * Last month’s report * All Investor reports * All Buffer reports MRR $1.18m ARR $13.8m MoM 1.9% from
We’re making the camera the first augmented reality platform. — Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook F8 conference 2017 Facebook’s F8 conference was once again filled with incredibly exciting announcements. Augmented reality (AR) could be seen as the main theme of this year’s conference. From augmented masks and special effects to 360 video camera to Facebook Spaces (an app where you can hang out with your family and friends virtually), Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook want to enable us to connect with one
More than 15 million businesses now use Instagram as a marketing tool. And one of the most important aspects of any Instagram marketing strategy is a clear focus on Instagram analytics. Without analytics, your Instagram marketing efforts can be a little hit-and-miss. How do you know if your Instagram marketing strategy is going well? How do you track your Instagram performance and improve your content? Analytics are often essential for answering your questions. With Instagram analytics,
Ninety-three percent of marketers we surveyed are actively using Facebook for their business. And almost everything that Facebook does to its family of products can have a great impact on marketers. From releasing stories across Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger, to going all-in on live video, Facebook’s product decisions affect billions of people globally. Imagine how it may feel like to know about Facebook’s upcoming developments and begin to plan how you can utilize them — perhap
Negativity. It’s human nature. At least that’s what research shows! Researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that negative information has a greater impact on the brain than positive information. So much so that we now call this common occurrence “negativity bias”. That negativity bias is a result of the of the fight-or-flight response that is activated only during negative experiences. But we wanted to know: Is it possible to rewire your brain for positivity and happiness? Storyteller and so
By now, it’s clear that video is an essential channel for marketers. But what makes a great video? And what keeps viewers engaged? Is it a good story? Or maybe it’s all about reaching the right audience at the right time. We teamed up with Wistia and sought to find out. We looked at some of our favorite examples of video marketing and uncovered some traits they have in common. Here are 7 secrets to creating successful video content. We hope these tips will help you as you plan and create your
Right now, the standards we expect on the web are being re-written for mobile. The rise of stories across Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Facebook is the perfect example of this. The News Feed is outdated and stories are becoming the default for content consumption. Very few formats, features, apps, or services are truly unique. Facebook, for example, didn’t invent the vertical scrolling feed. For decades, way before Mark Zuckerburg even enrolled in Harvard, online content has b
Ever since Pull Down to Refresh was introduced on iOS we’ve had it implemented as the main way to keep data fresh in our iOS app. With updates going out from your queue throughout the day, the update collection view within Buffer can change pretty often. These update collection views are used for our Pending, Sent, Contributions and Content Inbox, which makes up quite a portion of the app. Since v6.0 we’ve been using AsyncDisplayKit to do all of our
What do you do when the product you’re supposed to market is a dictionary? You make it fun, interesting, and bold! That’s exactly what the team at Merriam-Webster did when they started experimenting on Twitter with, well, being themselves. Since then, their account has grown by more than 200,000 followers in just one year – gaining the attention of major publications like Mashable, BuzzFeed, NPR (and more) and winning awards along the way. The brains and v
The phrase “culture fit” is a bit of an Inkblot test in the world of work—even when we all hear the same two words, we might be thinking entirely different things. There are countless filters and interpretations of the phrase—and a growing amount of interest in figuring out just what it means. When the phrase “culture fit” is thoughtfully and deliberately applied, it can mean a gauge for your company’s essential values. At other companies, it might simply mean, “Is this a person with whom you
As a globally distributed team at Buffer, our company retreats are a key part of our identity. We’re meeting coworkers for the first time in person, putting our heads together to shape the future of Buffer and making sure we put aside time to laugh and hang out with one another. There’s a lot going on with these retreats, and they’ve only become bigger in both scale and attendance with each one. As we recognized last year, we needed a solution to help us coordinate. That’s when we created the B
As a marketing team spread around the world — from the West Coast in the US to the East Coast in the US to Canada, to the UK and Singapore, we always keep an eye on the latest marketing and productivity tools to help us stay connected and do our best work. Our team also covers a range of marketing disciplines from social media to community building , to press relations, to con
Before becoming a marketer, Brian sold insurance. Alfred was in the army. Arielle was a health coach. I was a sports reporter. And now look at us! We’re a team of eight Buffer marketers, with vastly distinct backgrounds and educations, who collectively bring in 20,000 Buffer signups each week. Many of us fell into marketing, accidentally or on purpose. We’ve been learning as we go. And where exactly are we headed? Good question! We benefit a lot from free marketing courses and great educat
Thanks for reading our equal pay report. See our updated 2021 pay analysis here. At Buffer, we feel a close connection to the conversation about salaries. We strive to pay all employees fairly and equally, as evidenced by our adoption of a transparent salary formula. We share this formula publicly (you can try it for yourself here), and we share the actual salaries of the entire Buffer team: Every one of our salaries is available in a transparent spreadsheet. We whole-heartedly embrace trans
Did you know that there are more than 1.97 million blog posts published online every single day? And that’s on WordPress alone! Not to mention the millions upon millions of social media updates that are sent out to accompany those blog posts. GIFs , photos, videos , and Stories fill our feeds with enough content (surely) to last a lifetime. Bu
Facebook is still the leading platform for marketers. From our State of Social Media 2016 report , we found that 93 percent of marketers are actively using Facebook for their business. As social media marketers, we spend a lot of time on Facebook, managing our Pages , engaging our fans , finding good content [https://buffer.com/l
Facebook Stories are short user-generated photo and video collections that can be viewed up to two times and disappear after 24 hours. The story format, originated and made famous by Snapchat , has been on Facebook’s radar for some time, with the Menlo Park-based company first testing a Snapchat Stories clone within Messenger in September 2016. Now, Facebook users can share s
We used to have no managers at Buffer. Now we have tons. And we all have a lot of catching up to do. For most of the leaders at Buffer, we are new to people management . We have a strong culture of nurturing people into more advanced roles and promoting from within. This is fabulous for the opportunities we can afford our teammates; however, it does lead to a steep learning
How does someone with little-to-no marketing or social media experience go from a line cook to Director of Marketing for some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies? By taking calculated risks. As humans we naturally tend to forget that stepping away from the norm and trying things that are inherently risky can actually be a good thing in both our personal lives and careers. Clair Byrd , Director of
In an effort to get to the bottom of what makes videos successful on social media, we set out to answer two not-so-simple questions: * Where does video perform best? * In what format does video perform best? What we found is that there are so many ways to go about it! Video format, length, content, captions, and graphics (to name a few) all play a big part in the success of your video content [https://buffer.com/library/video-market