Blog - Page 47
A collection of 2,517 blog posts
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
Over at Android on Buffer, we recently hit 1 Million downloads – so we’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all of our users for making this happen! This also came with great timing, as we’ve just launched a brand new version of our Android app (something we’ve been calling v6 internally for a short while) ? We made a bunch of changes to the app (both visually and behind the scenes) with the aim to make it easier to use, easier to maintain and also more stable for our users.
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. Have you ever worked on a project where it was unclear who — if anyone — was leading? ✋? I have. And it made me realize that knowing who is responsible for what and who is leading which projects makes a huge difference in really accomplishing work. In one of my 1:1s with
For all of history creativity has, in a sense, been taken advantage of by business. Look at any musician’s record deal. Or any painter who has found someone to represent them and put their work in galleries. Or the author whose book you see atop the NY Times Bestseller list. It’s a perfect symbiotic relationship. Well, that is, until recently. Over the last decade,
Have you ever walked out of a meeting and messaged someone who had been in that very meeting to say something that you didn’t feel you could say in front of the group? I know I have. A while back, we came across the concept of “Artificial Harmony” which is one way to describe that feeling I just mentioned. In Patrick M. Lencioni’s The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team , Artificial Harmony refers to a team of people who don’t
How do you know what’s working with your social media? And what’s not working? The social networks provide us with a ton of data about our posts but it can be hard to distinguish the signals from the noise. Imagine having a framework to pull out the signals from the noise — a framework that points you to the key information about your social media performance. With this framework, you can easily identify successful posts and understand why they did well. The key is social media analytics and
Over 8 billion videos or 100 million hours of videos are watched on Facebook every day. These stats were reported early last year so imagine how much larger the numbers are today as Facebook continued to grow and double down on videos. Now seems to be the perfect time to take a closer look at Facebook video and how to use videos to engage more fans on the platform. Wit
Being spread across 50 different cities, we place a high priority on communication, going so far as to adopt it into our ten values. For us, communication tends to break into two types, asynchronous or synchronous. At most companies, synchronous communication is the norm. Everyone is online at the same time, chatting with the same tool, attending the same meetings and calls, etc. Asynchronous communication becomes more critical for distributed teams. Asynchronous means not everyone needs to b
Quick note: This post was written in May 2017 and updated in March 2018. The tips and strategies listed below continue to work for us despite the recent changes to the Facebook algorithm . Enjoy! In October of 2016 we dramatically changed our Facebook posting strategy. A gradual, but noticeable shift in the Facebook and Instagram algorithm, plus an influx of
Our company values are the foundation upon which our team has grown and our product has developed. They emerged in the early years of Buffer when we were a small team of 10 people, and they have guided us ever since, leading to a number of work culture experiments and lessons along the way. In all, we have 10 values that we aspire toward: To us, these values are motivating and inspiring. We talk about them all the time whenever we see a great example of a value in action or we experience a sit
Instagram places a big emphasis on search and discovery of content. It’s one of the few social media platforms with a Search and Explore tab in its app. Being featured in the search results or in Instagram’s Explore section can be a great way to boost your success on the network with added exposure and the chance to reach new users who may not have otherwise seen your content. There are also several other ways you can use Instagram’s Search and Explore for your business — finding the best hash
Let’s say you’re a startup or early stage company and you’ve made it a priority to grow in a way that’s diverse, inclusive, and representative of its surroundings. That’s a great decision! Now, how do you make it happen? Do you tell everyone to say something when they see something? Create a committee? Appoint one person to create change? At Buffer, we’ve tried all 3 of these methods and even more mixed combinations between them. In the last few years, we’ve: * Allowed diversity projects t
Managing a social media strategy is consistently challenging for individuals and businesses of all sizes. There’s the art of uncovering when to post your content. Continually measuring your ROI and social analytics. And, of course, the constant demand for fresh, engaging content to be shared. Added to that, each major social network has continued to diverge both in how they are set up and what your audiences expect on each one. Each different platform also has its own set of character limits,
It’s 10:00 a.m. here in England. Alfred and I have just finished our weekly content sync. Alfred is a content crafter here at Buffer and does an amazing job producing most of the content we post on our Social blog and I’m an editor focusing on our content strategy. We catch up for an hour every Tuesday to discuss the various pieces of content and projects we’re working on for Buffer’s Social blog. Alfred is based in Singapore, where it’s 6:00 p.m. for him when it’s 10:00 a.m. for me. He’s about
Running social media campaigns can be quite different from managing your social media profiles on an ongoing basis. Unlike your ongoing social media marketing, campaigns tend to be for a specific purpose and only last for a certain time period. The strategy you’d take for running a social media campaign might be different from your usual social media marketing strategy. So how do you run a successful social media campaign? Through case studies of successful social media campaigns by companies