Blog - Page 61
A collection of 2,507 blog posts
Having a remote job has been a life-changing experience for me. I worked in traditional offices for a few years before I decided to start working remotely. Working from anywhere frees you from commuting; it also requires you to be organized and productive, everyday. There are so many benefits of remote work — it’s hard to name them all. I feel fortunate to have been given the chance to work from where I’m happiest and most productive. I’d love for others to get to experience the freedom of re
Around 8 weeks after giving birth, I began to panic. It was a rough time for us — our little one wasn’t too keen on sleeping at night and endured colic that left him crying for hours at a time. With my return-to-work date only two weeks away, I wondered how it would even be possible — especially because we hoped for me to continue as the baby’s primary caregiver while working full-time. Doubts crept into my mind: * Would I even be capable in my new role? * The team had functioned so well w
A great social media marketer today and an awesome advertiser in the 1960s have much in common. David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, was famous for spending an inordinate amount of time on headlines. Why? Because that’s the line that people read the most, so it mattered a lot. Ogilvy was a master at stuff like this — prioritizing what was really important. If he lived through the age of social media, I’m fairly certain Ogilvy would say something like: On the average, many more people eng
The social media world moves incredibly fast and to help you stay up to date, we thought we’d round up some of the latest news, trends, research, and statistics that caught our attention this week. From Twitter redefining itself and some big news from Facebook to new features on Pinterest and Periscope, it’s been an exciting week. Let’s get started! What’s new in social this week Want to jump to a particular story? Try clicking one of the headlines below: * Facebook reaches user mileston
Buffer is now the largest team I’ve ever worked with. This time last year there were 29 people on the team. Today there are more than 80. Hyper-growth mode is both exciting and scary because it means a new chapter and challenges. One thing that’s been on my mind is how can we keep our startup mindset as we keep growing. I have been seeking advice from a few people I look up to, and last September I chatted with Greg Brockman, who was the CTO at Stripe when they were growing fast. I asked him
What tools do you use to get your online marketing work done? Can you do all the same work of a digital marketer, and do it for free? The list of tools you use—often referred to as a marketing stack—probably covers a variety of different uses and needs, everything from social media marketing to content to email and lots more. Is it possible to have all these great tools without paying a cent? It was a fun challenge to come up with a way to build a $0 marketing stack, to find free alternative
Updated 5/4/2016: Added some new insights and learnings into the blog post here on the best times to tweet. We’re so grateful for the chance to learn from the community on this! Imagine removing all guesswork when you schedule your tweets, knowing the best times to experiment with tweeting for maximum clicks and maximum engagement. As someone who is working on social media marketing strategy or shares frequently to social media, this info would be fantastic to have! We’re always eager to dig u
When 50 fashion influencers on Instagram posted a picture of themselves in the same Lord & Taylor dress, it sent out signals that this dress was a must have fashion piece. The following weekend the dress was completely sold out. This Lord & Taylor campaign is a perfect example of the power of influencer marketing. 65% of brands now run influencer campaigns and according to an infographic by The Shelf, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people—even if they don’t know them person
It’s nearly inevitable: Humans tend to associate with those who are similar to us—whether politically, economically, racially or otherwise. This phenomenon, called clustering, is so prevalent that white Americans have 91 times as many white friends as black friends, according to research from the Public Religion Research Institute reported in the Washington Post: And not only are we more likely to have friends who are similar to us, but many popular social networks employ algorithms that “rewa
Imagine having a way to control how you’re presented online, a way to identify yourself or your company and differentiate yourself from others. Sounds a bit like social media, right? Sounds a bit like branding. The two go hand-in-hand. Branding happens on social media, and social media is an outlet for the voice of your brand. Many people have found success with personal branding and company positioning online, and agencies have come along to help people with both. One of these agencies, Janu
Whenever I dream up a home improvement project for my place, I end up working smartest and fastest when I have the right tools at my disposal. It’s amazing the difference a good tool can make – and the extra time it takes to get work done without a helpful tool. Fast-forward to online marketing. How can you work smarter and faster with SEO? It starts with having the right tools . I’ve collected
Whenever I hop onto Facebook to do something specific—find a link I saved for later or see what’s happening on Buffer’s Facebook page, perhaps—something strange happens. Despite my best intentions to stay on track and accomplish my goal, I get sucked in. Suddenly I’m checking my own notifications, looking at what’s been recently posted and generally forgetting why I came to Facebook in the first place. This isn’t entirely by accident. There is science and psychology that explains why so many o
Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That’s nearly one-third of our planet’s total population of 7.125 billion! As social media marketing professionals, we’re lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media. Everywhere we look it appears that brands and companies have it all figured out on social media. Wit
This interview is an excerpt from our Complete Guide to Snapchat, originally published on February 23, 2016. Snapchat is one of the fastest growing and most exciting social networks for marketers at the moment and the app now boasts over 100 million daily active users and 7 billion video views, daily! But with any growing social media platform, it can be a little hard to figure out where to get started. In order to deliver the best, most actionable Snapchat tips, we teamed up with Everette Tay
Recently I learned something new about the history of photography that illuminates a lot about the relationship of technology and diversity. In the 1950s, Kodak sold almost all the color film used in the U.S. To make sure the colors of their prints were calibrated correctly, Kodak had to set a standard that any studio that processed film could match against. Shirley cards, likely named after the first model to pose for one, became the standard for color calibration in photo labs all over the w
Some people go to great lengths to find the best ways to share to social media. Social media management tools definitely help, and so too do the workflows and tactics that social media marketers discover to save time each and every day. This is especially true for busy marketing agencies who run social media marketing in addition to a host of other duties. The folks at iM Image Marketing, a digital agency from Youngstown, Ohio, most definitely fit this description, juggling social media manage
When I started working at Buffer, there was a phrase I heard often when discussing projects and ideas: “Let me reflect on that.” It’s a sentiment I had rarely heard at the previous tech companies I worked for, and it surprised me. While moving fast and making quick decisions can be a very valuable approach, I have learned from Buffer that it’s also great to make the space to pause and reflect. At the 1-year anniversary of Buffer’s image-creation tool Pablo, it feels like a good time to reflec
F8 2016 is in the history books, and there was certainly no shortage of brilliant new Facebook features and ground-breaking announcements from the social media giant. In his Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg took us through Facebook’s 10 Year Plan with an emphasis on “developing a family of apps to share anything they want with anyone.” And although many of Facebook’s goals sounded highly ambitious, the company has already laid a solid foundation to successfully execute their plan. At the heart of it al
Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to publishers of all sizes. In this post, we’ll guide you through the ins and outs of Facebook’s publishing platform and how to get started. The announcement that Instant Articles were being opened up to all publishers came in February 2016, and they were officially opened for all on April 12, at Facebook’s F8 conference. A Facebook-native publishing platform has been rumored since the social network changed its News Feed algorithm to favor “quality conte
💡August 2023 Update: We have a brand new Transparent Product Roadmap and it's even better. You can upvote your favorite ideas and suggest features we should build. Take a look → Buffer is known for being transparent in radical ways. We share the diversity of our team. We share our cultural evolutions and learnings. We share our salaries. We keep sharing because we keep learning so much along the way! So many of you participate in discussions and help us shape the Buffer path. And we’re inspir
With the rise of messaging apps and bots, the way many of us use social media to share and interact is fundamentally changing. As we progress through 2016, and beyond we’ll start to notice most social activity is no longer going to happen in public, instead transitioning to private groups and messaging apps. This represents a significant change in what “social media” is. This is a change that will challenge everything we’ve learned about social media over the past decade-or-so. Until now, stan
For a long time, almost as long as I’ve been a member of the exclusive “Women in Tech” club, I’ve avoided talking about diversity. I modeled myself after Marissa Mayer, who when asked what it was like being the only female engineer at Google (back in the day) said, “I didn’t notice.” I completely believe this. It’s often very useful not to notice. Perhaps her blindness came naturally. For me, I trained myself not to notice being the only woman in the Slack channel because noticing hurt me. It
Update 4/14/2016: F8 is complete and so many great new Facebook features have emerged onto the social media scene. For a top 10 list of new Facebook features, check out our post here! One of the most highly anticipated conferences of the year, Facebook’s F8, is almost here! Taking place on April 12 and 13 in Fort Mason, San Francisco, F8 is sure to deliver excitement for marketers, publishers, and developers alike. And if this year’s conference is anything like the 2015 version, we’re certainl
Over the past few years, social media marketing has shifted a great deal, and we’ve almost reached a point where what works to drive engagement and clicks on a social network one day, may not the next. This fast paced movement and rapid change isn’t an accident. It’s an essential part of any social network’s progression. If you look closely at the evolution of the biggest social networks out there, a trend emerges and two clear periods of opportunity stand out for marketers. We call it the law