Blog - Page 66
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
We reached the 50 team members mark in September! This feels like a big milestone and a special moment to reflect on. For me, the most exciting part of this is that 50 people are able to join our journey of working as a fully distributed team, where you choose to live and work from the place which makes you happiest and most productive. We’ve had several examples of teammates moving or traveling to find their happy place, or being able to move easily to help and be with their significant other
Twitter has long been the place to turn for opinions on everything from who will win tonight’s game to ideas for your next blog post. And now it’s just become even easier to gather opinions from your audience on Twitter. With the release of its new Polls feature (available to all Twitter accounts in the coming days), you can now create super-simple polls directly on Twitter with just the click of a button or a tap on your phone. We can’
This is a little tough to admit. I’ve been failing at social media marketing. It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more. And that’s super scary to admit. What’s happening? I wish I knew! We’ve got lots of theories as to what’s behind our decline, and we’re in the midst of new experiments to see if we can
I used to work a lot — 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week… I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor…I loved telling people how “busy” I was…and how much I “had to do”. Sound familiar? Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse. One day I’d had enough. T
On social media—whether you’re a business, a brand, or an individual—you’ll likely come across plenty of different conversations — each presenting a unique challenge. For instance: How do you appease an angry commenter? How do you handle a technical question? What to do with a troll? It can feel overwhelming. If you take a step back and examine the emotions and psychology in play during each conversation, things can become a lot clearer and you can start to formulate your replies in a more
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. How do people work best together? It’s fun to think about. You may know some things about your own work style and productivity preferences—for example, do you prefer solo or team projects? Being in the middle of many tasks or finishing one before going on to the next? Now, take all those unique fa
Since we launched our Pablo image creation product in the spring, Pablo designers have created more than 500,000 images! And we’ve been excited to work toward making Pablo even more useful. Today we’re thrilled to announce Pablo 2.0 , the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly. We’ve expanded Pablo’s function
Self-management was a bold and unique experience that we’re glad to have tried at Buffer. We learned a lot! Here are some of our self-management lessons as well as our current approach with natural hierarchy. When I got my first job, it never occurred to me that there was more than one way to work. You went to an office, followed directions from a boss for 8-ish hours, and then went home. That’s not quite how Buffer does things. During the time I’ve been lucky enough to be on board
Facebook lead ads are here! Facebook has rolled out a new form of advertising that’s now available to marketers everywhere. Lead ads make the process seamless for marketers to ask for info like emails, names, job titles, and more. The process is smooth and easy for Facebook users, too, as they never need to leave Facebook. (It’s very similar to how a Twitter lead gen card might work.) I find this pretty exciting for a few reasons: 1. Generating leads from Facebook may have just got a whole l
Buffer hit a new milestone recently, but it wasn’t a metric like annual recurring revenue, total users or cash in the bank. In fact, this one is more of a philosophical milestone: We closed down our office. Now, since our startup operates with a fully distributed team, it might seem a bit odd that we ever had an office to begin with. But for a variety of reasons, many distributed startups still have a physical office: Automattic, GitHub and Basecamp are a few examples. Here’s how we came to
Have you ever wondered what percentage of people actually see your Tweets or Facebook posts? The data shows it can be as low as 2%. This is in line with our findings at Buffer — on average our 10 most recent Facebook posts have reached around 2.4% of our fans with our highest reaching post being seen by 5.25%. When you work hard to produce and share great content, it’d be great if people could see it! I’m excited to share some things we’ve found that can help your content break through and re
“Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” — Ben Horowitz Buffer has recently grown to more than 50 people during our fastest 2 months of growth ever. I’ve found that a lot changes when you grow to this size, and any time the team grows quickly. There are a bunch of challenges and it’s also invigorating. It might be the most exciting and toughest phase of building the company so far. Since I’m lear
So much to do, so little time. I imagine many marketers might feel this way, what with all the wonderful hats we all get to wear. One of my favorite fixes for helping stay organized is Evernote. There are so many ways to use the app and since we talk a lot about productivity here on the Buffer blog, I wanted to share 20 ways you can use Evernote for your productivity and marketing. (A sneak peek at one of the ways: I researched and wrote this article all from within Evernote!) Are you an Eve
The Buffer blog brings in 10x the traffic of the Open blog. It has 50x the reach of our email courses. A single post on the blog reaches more people in a day than we reach on Facebook in two weeks. It is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it. We’re pivoting right now, as we speak! The latest change, which I’m excited to share below, fits with this remarkable culture of experimentation, where there are no sacred cows or off-limits areas. Everything is on the table to impro
September was a great month at Buffer! We extended 6 offers for new team members to join us in Buffer’s bootcamp. As a result, we are now more than 50 team members (accounting for both full time team members and bootcampers—you can see the full list over here). September hiring conversations Here’s at look at the September numbers. Our “Total Conversations” are the number of email conversations we have open (we sometime have duplicates), “Customers” are our applicants and “New Conversations”
One of the first blog posts I ever wrote at Buffer is this beginner’s guide to SEO. When published originally, it had the title “Beginner’s Guide to SEO Even Your Mom Can Understand.” Holy casual sexism! When I think of all the amazing women and moms I know in search optimization and search marketing (here’s a primer on just a few), I am still super embarrassed to have made this giant mistake even nearly 2 years later. I’d like to think I and the whole team at Buffer have come a long way sinc
The psyche of a writer bounces wildly, hourly, from confidence to self-doubt, certainty to fear, love to angst. Wild times like these call for reassurance. Here are some of the reminders I keep for myself, 36 quotes to remind myself that writing is completely worthwhile, entirely fulfilling, and all the best kinds of difficult. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. – Walter Benjamin Annie Dillard has said that da
I try to read as much as I can, and every morning I put aside 30 minutes to check out the latest posts from my favorite blogs and writers. In 30 minutes, you can only take in so much. Some posts I read thoroughly, others I open and close again within a matter of seconds. My favorite ones, I load into Buffer and share. Often, my decision to read a post and then subsequently share it relies a lot on the formatting: Is it easy to read? Can I scan through? In this post, I’m excited to share with
It seems you can learn a lot about someone by looking at their phone: the apps they use, the folders they create, and the pictures they’ve added. We’re excited to share a glimpse into our phones (and our lives!) here at the Buffer team. A lot of what you might see here are some of the tools we use at Buffer like Hipchat, Trello, UP, and of course the Buffer app itself. A few other themes that pop up: Lots of great social media apps and tools and many apps focused on self-improvements like medi
Awhile back, a phenomenon swept the Internet where people shared pictures and video of what’s inside their refrigerators. This isn’t that, but it’s close. ? I asked 20+ wonderfully generous and incredibly talented marketers to share what’s on their smartphone home screens. In need of any app ideas? Looking for new ways to organize your phone? Check out our list of 20+ home screens and favorite apps. Hoping inspiration strikes! (And if you’re up for it, we’d love to see your home screen, too!)
There is a myth in entrepreneurship that many newcomers believe, and it could be a key reason why many others don’t even “try.” The myth is that you need to know how to do everything, and you need to do everything perfectly. When you look at successful startups, it’s easy to believe that they did all the right things. The reality is often far from that. In fact, I think it’s very healthy to have a good dose of naivety while building something new. The scale anticipation fallacy One prim
If you’re curious for ways to grow your social media numbers, to have more success, to get more followers and more clicks, the absolute best piece of advice we’ve found is to keep trying new things. Always be testing. Need inspiration? I’ve drummed up 29 new, small, and simple experiments and growth hacks you can try this month to see what works for you. They’re all low-cost, big-potential. I’d love to hear which ones you’re interested in trying! (And which ones work for you.) My must-have
We’ve been studying and learning the best ways to reach a social media audience on mobile—where 60 percent of social media time is spent! How does one go about implementing mobile into a social media marketing plan? To really get to know the best strategies and workflows on mobile, we asked. A half dozen Buffer for iOS users were so kind to share how they go about mobile social media, using Buffer’s app for iPhone and iPad (newly updated to version 5.0!). We’d love for you to have a look at t
Given 140 characters, how can you make the absolute most of every single word, hashtag, and link in a tweet? We’ve been excited to test and experiment with answering that question by trying out headline ideas, power words, psychology, science, and more. Now we’re happy to share the quantitative numbers—based on 1 million tweets from Buffer users—about what seems to drive the most clicks, retweets, and engagement on Twitter! tl;dr The top takeaways from Buffer’s study on ideal tweets We’ll