All posts - page 59
A collection of 2,599 blog posts
We call members of our customer support team “Happiness Heroes,” and positivity is one of our core values. Smiley faces are a key element of our communication. And like many tech companies, we have lots of swag items, like T-shirts, water bottles, stickers, socks and more. So it’s long been our policy to give out lots of swag. We send goodies to anyone, (pretty much) anywhere! Free stuff makes people happy, right? We ask for a mailing address anytime we get a hint that someone might need chee
A lesson I’ve learned over the past four years building and growing the team at Buffer is how important awareness is to self-improvement. I’m starting to think awareness is the tough part. Most of the battle for learning, growing and improving is being aware of what to improve. When I joined Buffer, I was surrounded by a team that values self-improvement and communicating with clarity. Since we’re a remote team of 80 people across the world, how we come across in written communication is utte
It’s not everyday that you hear of someone leaving the tech giant Google to pursue their own fast-growing business. For Allison Esposito, that’s exactly what she did. What first started as a fun side-project and a way to get to know other women in tech, Tech Ladies now connects more than 5,000 women around the world to a network of jobs and opportunities. We had the pleasure of speaking with Allison about her incredible journey from Google to full-time entrepreneur. Allison shares the story of
Have you ever received a compliment that brightened your day? Your week? As Mother Theresa said, “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” Creating a culture of praise, positivity and recognition has been a pivotal cornerstone of our Buffer culture. Here’s a bit more about why praise is so important, how we deliver praise and recognition across our remote team of 80 employees, and a few lessons we’ve learned. Why praise matters: 83% of employees say
Buffer Investor Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Investor reports * All Buffer reports 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. September was a month of big achievements and deep focus. We launched a new effort aimed at improving Buffer’s core, began planning our next team retreat, and launched a podcast! Read on fo
How active is your brand on Pinterest? With 150 million monthly active users spending an average of 98 minutes per month using the platform, Pinterest can be an underused network for some, while a primary source of website traffic for others. Earlier in 2016, we did a study on brand marketing (studying over 16 million social media posts from 100,000 brands) and learned that Pinterest, in particular, holds a lot of potential for brands. This inspired us to dive even deeper into what’s happening
Public speaking is a scary or uncomfortable idea for many people. Some people feel they don’t have anything valuable to share. Others feel it’s a lot of effort, don’t see the benefit in speaking publicly or are too anxious to do so. These are definitely all points that previously put me off speaking in public. If I rewind to just a few years ago, there’s no way I would have ever dreamed to speak in front of an audience. But as we’ve mentioned on the blog before in our exploration of stage frig
I like to think that reading the blog of a marketer I admire is like having a coffee with them and getting a chance to learn all about their approach to marketing. ☕ Personally, I have benefited a lot from reading these blogs, especially blogs published by startup marketers. Here are a couple of reasons why I love them: 1. When they write about their work, I get to learn about how they approach growth and marketing at their company and what tactics, techniques, and channels they use. 2. When
How many Facebook Groups have you joined that you don’t check regularly? If you’re like me, that number might be quite high! Imagine my surprise when I joined the Rich20Something Facebook Group and was constantly excited to see all of the new, value-packed content being shared by both the founder, Daniel Di Piazza, and all of the other group members (now nearly 15,000.) After years of following his work, I had the pleasure of chatting with Daniel about his best practices for building a truly e
Do you remember the last time you focused solely on one project — a big personal or work-related task — until it was finished? Recently, our data team tried this with a stretch of two full work days they called “hack days.” Four projects came about as a result, as well as a host of other benefits for the data team (and entire company!) Read on to learn more about the experiment, the process and how you could try an event like this for your business or team. In need of focus time, an idea
What is it that the customer wants? What is the problem they face each day? What services are they hiring out for that we could meet with a bit of software? What if we could help people create better social media ads? What if that isn’t quite the problem, but rather tracking and spending ad dollars wisely? What if…? What if….? What if…? Sometimes a series of “what ifs” or “whys” can lead to new and exciting places. For three Buffer teammates, an exploration of “what ifs” created a whole new
Social media offers a huge opportunity for you to reach and connect with people in creative ways. Via great content. Hilarious cat GIFs. Amazing brand stories. Social media helps strengthen relationships, and stronger relationships increase the likelihood of someone recommending you to their friends or even making a purchase. That’s why maximizing time is such an important factor. The more you can streamline your social media processes, the more time you’ll have for other marketing and brand-
The art of Facebook marketing in 2016 is one that is constantly evolving. Tweaks to Facebook’s algorithm look to drive a more pleasant user experience while brands and individuals share more and more organic and paid content everyday. But some brands continue to drive hundreds of thousands of engagements on Facebook each month regardless of the influx of content. The Next Web is one of those brands! We had the pleasure of speaking with Matt Navarra, Director or Social Media and Head of Content
Buffer is a remote company; we are a team of 80 people operating in 11 different time zones, and we don’t own any offices! At Buffer, everyone gets to work from the place they feel the most comfortable in. This lifestyle opens up a lot of possibilities: Some team members decide to pack up and go traveling, while others embrace family life to the fullest from their home office. This freedom also requires us to be more disciplined when it comes to working together — particularly when it comes
Editor’s note: Join the journey of Buffer’s data analyst, Matt, as he and his wife and two dogs travel across America in an RV while working remotely! This is the first post in an ongoing series. And they’re kicking off their voyage today, October 7th! Go, Matt and Jenna! On a Friday evening in late October, 2015, my wife, Jenna, and I were back-porch philosophizing over a bottle of Tuscany red blend wine at our home in Boulder, Colorado. We can’t remember whose idea it was to begin with, but
Buffer Marketing Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All marketing reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Buffer signups 12,422 +25.7% Buffer for Business trials 1,034 -13.7% Social blog sessions 1,227,494 -2.7% Email subscribers 97,205 -3.6% NPS 56 -1.7% Last summer, in a tiny Icelandic coworking space on a Buffer team retreat, we recorded the very first episodes of the Buffer marketing podcast. More than a year later and sans thos
Buffer Product Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Product reports * All Buffer reports Weekly active users (Awesome + Individual plans) 165,180 +5.1% Weekly active B4B users 4,854 +2.4% B4B Monthly Recurring Revenue $473,425 +4.6% Social updates sent by B4B users 2,998,879 -0.7% Users starting B4B trials in September 5,796 -44.4% Converted B4B trialists 410 +30% Users ended their trials in September 8,064 -15.1% In
Buffer People Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Applicants 505 +49% Open blog posts published 17 +2 Open blog visitors 133,309 +2.4% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% If we’re known in particular for any of of our 10 core values, it’s probably the value of “default to transparency.” We share our salaries and salary formula, our revenue, our equity, even our emails. We have a transparency
Respond Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Respond reports * All Buffer reports Key Metrics Customers crushing their support queue in < 2 hours 82% Paying customers ? 82 MoM growth -4% Respond 2 launching in late October! We’re so excited to announce the upcoming release of Respond 2. It’s the culmination of many months of learning and hard work, and the product has been built from t
Buffer Happiness Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Happiness reports * All Buffer reports Key stats in September Responses within 1 hour 36% -24.7% Customer satisfaction score 91 Email conversations 11,698 +39.5% Twitter conversations 5,956 -29.9% Hour avg. Twitter response time 4.2 +27.2% Onboarding Webinars hosted 8 September and in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn has begun. This means people are back from vacation an
Buffer People Report September 2016 * All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Team members 79 Revenue in cash receipts $996k +1.2% MRR $987k +4.6% ARR $11.8m +5.0% Debits $854.5k –6.1% Profit $122k –1.9% We have $1.56m in the bank as of September 30, which is a good signal! We continue to be cashflow positive, and plan to remain as such. In September, we’ve worked hard on a few topics, especially improving at forecasting o
Buffer Engineering Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Key stats Requests for buffer.com 196 m Avg. response for buffer.com 226ms Requests for api.bufferapp.com 1.04 b Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 86.8 ms Bugs & Quality * Code reviews given: 68% of Pull Requests were reviewed * 4 S1 (severity 1) bugs: 4 opened, 3 closed. (42% smashed) * 24 S2 (severity 2) bugs: 9 opened, 13 closed (59
Each year after Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference we switch most of our focus onto a bigger update to our Buffer iOS app to build out support for the newest iOS features and changes. This year was no different, but this time we also focused a bunch of time on performance and future proofing. New version of iOS = new changes to Buffer iOS app During the time after WWDC, we typically will run through the app and adjust our minimum target to the previous iOS release. In this case,
On September 14th, I celebrated my first Buffversary — a year at Buffer, a social media management startup. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take some time to reflect on the past year and share some of the things I learnt. A bit of background: I’m a Community Champion and I have been working on our community initiatives such as our weekly #bufferchat and our Slack community. Recently, after the Marketing and Community team combined forces, I have started working on a few marketing pr