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A collection of 2,599 blog posts

PodcastsDec 12, 2016
Instagram Marketing: Proven Strategies for Growing Your Instagram Account – Sue B. Zimmerman [SSM021]

What strategies does it take to effectively grow your Instagram account? Today, there are more than 500 million people across the globe using Instagram to not only share photos of their lives, but to connect with personalities, brands, and businesses in meaningful ways. Now is a perfect time for marketers to learn the ins-and-outs of Instagram Marketing so that you can take advantage of an opportunity that is growing by the minute. In this episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with The Ins

Self-ImprovementDec 12, 2016
Most People Don’t Have Transparent Salaries, So Here’s The Research on Talking About Pay

A while back, an awesome group of women in tech in Hamburg, Germany reached out to Buffer. They explained that they wanted to support women in being more confident about the money they make and negotiating, and asked if we would we be interested in talking about our journey with transparent salaries. And that’s how I, with a track record of literally never negotiating and a mostly hilarious salary history that looks like this: 1st job, NYC: Conde Nast editorial asst: $26K 7 yrs @Tennessean/G

ReportsDec 9, 2016
Buffer in November: State of Social Media Survey, Deep Work Wednesdays and Welcoming Friends and Family

Editor’s Note: Every month we share an update with all of Buffer’s investors. We also publish that note in full for our Buffer Open audience in keeping with our value of transparency. Buffer Investor Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All Investor reports * All Buffer reports MRR $1.05m ARR $12.6m MoM 1.9% from October Paying customers 64,515 +2% MAU 277,367 +.4% WAU 172,506 +.6% Cash in bank: $1.8m (+8%)  78 team members

How User Generated Content (UGC) Grew Our Instagram Account by 400% in One Year

Have you ever stumbled across a company’s Instagram account and wondered how they have so many followers or where they got all of those amazing images from? If you’re anything like me, that’s a reoccurring thought! For social media marketers managing Instagram and other social accounts this is something we all certainly strive for – Gorgeous images, a huge following, and incredible engagement from our audience. With that in mind, I began studying hundreds of Instagram accounts, researching wa

OpenDec 8, 2016
Buffer’s 2016 Year in Review (and the 8 Year-End Reflections That Inspired Us)

Can you believe that 2017 is around the corner? The end of a year always has me excited for a fresh year with new goals and exciting projects. Plus of course, looking back at the past year for learnings, takeaways, smiles and memories. This year at Buffer we decided to put together something we’ve never done before, and invite you to take a look back at a few of our favorite moments of 2016 to celebrate the year we’ve had. Check out Buffer’s End of Year Report : 2016 from A – Z ! Why share a

ReportsDec 7, 2016
Would You Pay for a Social Media Workshop? We Went to Chicago to Find Out! (Spoiler: Yes)

Buffer Marketing Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All marketing reports * All Buffer reports Buffer signups 14,943 -15% Buffer for Business trials 918 -30% Social blog sessions 1,252,131 +2% Email subscribers 93,232 -3% NPS for Buffer for Business 44 +1.7% What makes for a great community event? We’ve been eager to explore that question for our Buffer events, brainstorming between intimate meetups and blowout conferences and everyt

ReportsDec 7, 2016
Happiness Heroes Here to Help: Deepening Our Social Media Knowledge

Buffer Happiness Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All Happiness reports * All Buffer reports Responses within 1 hour 42% -6.6% Customer satisfaction score 91 -3.2% Email conversations 12,270 -2% Twitter conversations 5296 +1% Avg. Twitter response time 4 hr 1 min -.9% Webinars hosted 9 Deepening our team’s social media knowledge with training We believe that our customer service shouldn’t just answer the question in our

ReportsDec 7, 2016
We Just Can’t Get Enough Of: Buffer Friends, Family and Babies!

Buffer People Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Applicants 360-24% Open blog posts published 15-4 Open blog visitors 129,472-.6% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% Welcoming friends and family! As we build the futu

ReportsDec 7, 2016
Connecting Customer Growth and Financial Forecasting for a Clearer View of 2017

Buffer People Ops Report November 2016 All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Team members 78 Revenue in cash receipts $993k -3% MRR $1.03m +1.17% ARR $12.4m +1.6% Expenses $916k +14% After a tricky 2016, we’re headed to a more stable financial position with a bit more visibility on how 2017 will shape up. We’re also working hard on our skeleton model, as detailed in our previous report, to get better at exploring unit economics. Also,

ReportsDec 7, 2016
Working Smarter: Automations Now Available in Respond

Respond Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All Respond reports * All Buffer reports MoM: +25% (+1,350%) Paying customers 80 (+1.2%) Bugs fixed 100+ November has been a huge month for Respond and our incredible customers! Though the holidays are just around the corner we’re continuing to improve the product and experience at a blistering pace. Working smarter: Automation features in Respond One of the most powerful new features to come to R

ReportsDec 7, 2016
Could Deep Work Wednesdays Help Your Team be More Productive?

Buffer Engineering Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Requests for buffer.com 203 m -1.9% Avg. response for buffer.com 265 ms -5.4% Requests for api.bufferapp.com 430 m -59.8%* Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 196 ms +100% Code reviews given 63% of pull requests -3% *We offloaded nearly 60% of requests to api.bufferapp.com onto the Kubernetes cluster with the new links service! The links

ReportsDec 7, 2016
More Features Coming Soon for Instagram Reminders

Buffer Product Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All Product reports * All Buffer reports Weekly active Awesome + Individual plan users 164,945 -1.8% Weekly active Buffer for Business users 4,887 -1.1% Buffer for Business Monthly Recurring Revenue $509,313 +1.8% Social updates sent by Buffer for Business users 3,815,321 +15% Users starting Buffer for Business trials 4,638 -25% Converted Buffer for Business trials 272 -29%

Building The Buffer Links Service

On the surface the Buffer link counting service is pretty simple. Its job is to keep track of the number of times someone has created a Buffer post with a given url embedded into it. An Example Link { "url": "https://buffer.com", "created_at": "1480431305", "update_id": "123456", "profile_id": "654321" } Behind the scenes this is what powers the Buffer Button counts. As we’ve recently shared, Buffer is moving towards a Service Oriented Architecture and moving the links counting logic into it

On Empathy: A Letter We Shared with Our Happiness Heroes

(Our Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn, shared this note with our Happiness team after some deep auditing and reflection on our communications with our customers. If Carolyn’s note inspires or resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!) Hey Heroes. :) I need to start this note with an apology. Instead of creating an environment where you’ve felt entirely free to speak and write and care for customers in your own unique and special way, I fear that we’ve created some misconc

ResourcesDec 5, 2016
The 10 Best Social Media SlideShares of 2016 to Get You Ready for 2017

With all the great articles out there, it can sometimes be hard to catch up on every single one of them. So imagine being able to go through a 2,000-word article in a minute or two. Or even faster. Enter: SlideShare! With SlideShare, great ideas and strategies are condensed into a couple dozen concise slides. For marketers, it’s a powerful content network: Over 70 million people visit SlideShare, and we had several Buffer SlideShares that got over 100,000 views apiece. For those eager to lear

PodcastsDec 5, 2016
The Power of Podcasting: Driving Social Media and Marketing Results On Air – Tyler Anderson [SSM020]

Have you ever considered starting a podcast for your personal brand or business, but aren’t quite sure where to begin or what results to expect? If you’re on the fence about podcasting, consider this: 21% of Americans ages 12 and up have listened to a podcast in the past month. That is up from 17% in 2015. Monthly podcast listenership has increased 75% since 2013. Now is the perfect time to start recording! In this episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with entrepreneur and host of one of

Celebrating Around the World: How Holidays Work on Our Distributed, International Team

Some people might be surprised to hear that we didn’t used to get time off for Christmas at Buffer—or for Hanukkah, Canadian Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year or any specific holiday at all! Instead, we had unlimited time off and the full trust of our teammates to make great decisions about how to use this privilege. Great in theory, but as it turns out, challenging in practice. Over time, we learned that unlimited vacation policies statistically see employees take less time off, not more. And ha

PodcastsNov 29, 2016
Top Strategies for Taking Your Online Community Offline with Marketing Events – Stefanie Grieser [SSM019]

How do you go from having no conference — from almost having no marketing team, just you being the 9th employee and one of the very first marketers — to a marketing conference of 1,000 attendees, acclaimed in your industry, a must-attend destination on the annual events calendar? How do you do all of that in just four years? We had the pleasure of speaking with Stefanie Grieser, International Marketing Manager at Unbounce, about the multifaceted strategies that go into marketing and growing on

OpenNov 29, 2016
Nomading and Working Across America in the “Rover and Hab” (Part Two)

Editor’s note: This is a multi-part series chronicling the journey of Buffer’s data analyst, Matt, as he and his wife and two dogs journey across America in an RV while remote working. Check out part one here! Hello from the road! I shared a bit in Part One about how a random “what if” question over a bottle of wine on the porch of our home in Boulder, Colorado spawned a total uprooting of our suburban life. Now myself, my wife, Jenna, and our two dogs are out on the road, traveling the Unite

3 Breakthroughs and 2 Failures that Have Shaped Buffer

In Buffer’s past six years, we’ve experimented with product and culture and had some successes and some flops. And yet there have been some breakthroughs that evolved naturally, some intentionally. On the flip side, we’ve had some failures that have been outside our control and also fully within our control. Each up and down has shaped us as a company, as a product and me as an individual. Here are a few of those breakthroughs and failures. Breakthrough #1 – Living and working transparenc

OpenNov 22, 2016
Remote Work Must-Haves: Our Team’s Gear, Gadget and Bag Recommendations

The remote work movement is a growing global phenomenon. 79 percent of knowledge workers worldwide said they work from home, and 80-90% of the U.S. workforce would like to work remotely at least part time. And while no two remote work situations are identical, there are some common themes when it comes to the tools and accessories for success. Of course, the most crucial element is wifi. But after that, there’s still plenty to consider: the desk setup, the commuter bag, the headphones, the tr

ReportsNov 21, 2016
Buffer in October: Instagram upgrades, Unsick Days and planning our 8th retreat

Editor’s Note: Every month we share an update with all of Buffer’s investors. We also publish that note in full for our Buffer Open audience in keeping with our value of transparency. Buffer Investor Report October 2016 * Last month’s report * All Investor reports * All Buffer reports MRR $1.03m ARR $12.36m MoM 4.4% from September Paying customers 63,273 +2.9% MAU 276,314 +2.8% WAU 172,468 +2.6% * Cash in bank: $1.75M (+12.2%) * 79 team

Where Social Media Is Headed in 2017: The Biggest Trends to Watch For

What does the future look like for social media? That’s a question we regularly discuss here at Buffer and one we’re not quite sure anyone has a concrete answer to. However, there are some clues out there as to what the future in 2017, and beyond, may look like. As part of our State of Social Media week, it feels like a great time to sit back and reflect on the social media landscape and what may be ahead. So let’s take a look at some of social media’s biggest platforms (Facebook, Instagram, S

PodcastsNov 21, 2016
Social Media ROI: How to Connect Social to Real Business Results – Neil Patel [SSM018]

We’ve found that one of the biggest challenges for social media marketers today is connecting social media to real business objectives and goals. From brand awareness right on down to customer conversions, social media has the potential to fit into many parts of the marketing and sales funnel. But where does social media fit best? That is the important question we set out to answer! We had the privilege of speaking with entreprenuer and social media expert, Neil Patel, about specific ways ma