Blog - Page 67

A collection of 2,459 blog posts

ResourcesSep 10, 2015
10 Times Animated GIFs Make Perfect Sense on Social Media (and How to Use Them)

How well do you know the humble GIF? The Graphics Interchange Format (the GIF’s fancy, formal name) has been around for decades—it was introduced by CompuServe way back in 1987 and went on to become one of the first image formats commonly used on the web. Today, GIFs are a big part of social media—and you can now share them directly through Buffer with Buffer for Video! In honor of this pivotal moment, let’s take a moment to praise the often misunderstood GIF, a pivotal and growing part of In

Self-ImprovementSep 9, 2015
5 Acts of Generosity That Have Changed My Life

I like to think of myself as a “doer”—someone who can make things happen by himself. On occasion, I neglect the role that help from others has played and over-estimate the things I’ve achieved himself. Often, when I catch myself thinking like that, I’m a bit disappointed and I wish I was instead more connected to reality and the people around me. The most recent time I pondered on that topic, I decided to go through my life and re-collect the many incredible offers of generosity I was able to

OpenSep 8, 2015
Why I Don’t Shield My Team from Bad News

A prevalent concept is the idea that as a CEO or executive of a company, you need to shield your team from bad news, the risks of a startup, and other negative aspects that are inevitable on the startup journey. I  believe this concept could actually be quite dangerous. One of our core values at Buffer is to default to transparency. This means absolutely everything in the company is shared knowledge. It was scary at first, not least because the idea goes very much against the grain. I found m

Guides & CoursesSep 8, 2015
The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Choosing a Social Media Niche: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding, Analyzing, and Testing The Best Platform For Your Business

You’ve read all the articles and social media blogs, and you’ve heard that you should be on Twitter, you need to be on Facebook, and you’re losing out if you’re not on Pinterest. Is that truly the case? Turns out, most social media experts believe in prudence: that you might miss out on connecting with your true audience if you’re spreading yourself too thin on too many social networks. But who is your true audience? How do you get to know them? Where are they hanging out? How can you find

These 6 Types of Content Will Boost Your Traffic and Engagement. Here’s How to Do Them Right

How can you create content with the most efficiency and ease? Are you challenging yourself to come up with new ideas and new ways of imparting information about your business? Are you experimenting with the different forms of content that your customers may like to read? We’d love to help you get there. The 2015 edition of the annual B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America report put together by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that while 69%

What Is a ‘Startup Mindset?’ Why We Look For a Bias Toward Action in Our Teammates

What does it mean to have a “startup mindset”? We’ve always tried to offer as much insight as we can into how we hire at Buffer. With Buffer’s core value of transparency, it feels like the right thing to do. In the past, we’ve often shared this diagram with teammates working in hiring and with potential candidates, showing the four main components that we’ve grown to believe make for a great fit at our startup. Lately we’ve been giving the “strong startup mindset biased toward action” quadran

OpenAug 26, 2015
Tame Your E-mail: 7 Gmail Tips I Learned While Working at Google

My first day at Google in 2011 felt a bit like joining Hogwarts: you’re excited and not entirely sure what you’ll be doing! I was happy to do anything and learn in the process! For the next two years, I was lucky enough to train Google employees on Gmail and to pitch Gmail to companies of all sizes. Although I’m no longer affiliated with Google—I now work here at Buffer and on Remotive.io —I still use these 7 Gmail tips that have a daily impact on my work to this day. Ta

Guides & CoursesAug 26, 2015
How to Achieve Explosive Growth on Pinterest: 8 Key Ways to Build and Multiply Your Audience

Before he became the co-founder of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann moved to California and started working for Google in customer support before eventually starting a business. He says, of his then move from Des Moines, Iowa, to the Valley: Being close to people that inspire you is a very good first step. Fittingly, that’s exactly what his company, Pinterest, now makes possible: Allowing people to get close to the brands, products, and people that inspire them. With Pinterest now accounting for 25

ResearchAug 25, 2015
Why Do People Share What They Do? Here’s What Neuroscience, Psychology, and Relationships Tell Us About Highly Shareable Content

What makes you stop scrolling through an article, open up a social media app and hit the share button? Is it logic, emotion , or something else? Turns out, there’s more to social sharing than just measuring metrics: Psychology . The strange nature of our brains is the reason we hotly debate the color of a dress

The 4 Customer Development Questions I Use To Make Buffer Better

We’re always working to make Buffer better—whether it’s through big new features like Buffer for Video or smaller changes to existing features. Our customer development process is so important no matter the size of the change. In this post, I would love to share an improvement that we made to the Feeds feature in Buffer and how it happened based directly on feedback from you, our awesome customers. Digging into our Feeds feature We recently made an exciting move towards more structure at Buf

AnalyticsAug 24, 2015
How to Tell What’s Working on Social Media: An Introduction to Social Media Stats and Reports

How are things going for you on social media? I remember sometimes being a bit fuzzy with my answer to that question. I’ll have been really enjoying sharing and engaging with people, forgetting completely about the awesome stats and analysis at my fingertips. And knowing these social media stats can be incredibly valuable—for connecting deeper with my audience, for curating finely-tuned content, and for growing a following and a brand. So where do you go for these important social media stats?

Guides & CoursesAug 20, 2015
Complete Guide to YouTube Optimization: Everything You Need To Improve Your Channel

Ready to get started on YouTube? Or wish your YouTube Channel were performing better? I’m here to help! YouTube is effectively the second largest search engine in the world (behind only Google). With video becoming more and more important (we even launched Buffer for video last week!), now is the perfect time to start optimizing your YouTube Channel and begin reaping the benefits of a strong video strategy, including connecting with new potential customers, getting a better search presence and

Online MarketingAug 19, 2015
The Next Big Marketing Channel: How and Why to Create a Community With Slack

Many successful marketing campaigns involve groups. Some companies have their own LinkedIn or Google+ groups, while others stick to participating in relevant groups and chats. Whichever strategy your company takes, being involved in groups is a great way to find community, engage current audience members and prospective customers, build your brand, add value to your customer’s lives, and keep track of the industry’s climate. And now, there’s a new alternative when it comes to social media grou

ReportsAug 18, 2015
Buffer Investors’ Report: $6.86M ARR, Sixth Retreat, New ‘Areas’ Structure

At the start of July, we had our 6th team retreat! Despite the substantial cost of this and growing the team faster than ever, we are still profitable and the bank balance has gone up since last month. We are very happy with this slack we have and the health of the business, and at the same time we would like to grow the team faster and continue filling validated roles. I’m excited to share the latest update of everything going on at Buffer: Key metrics * 2,592,194 total registered users (

Tips / How ToAug 18, 2015
How’d They Do That? Learn the Techniques of Social Media’s Most Successful Sharers

People are brilliant and amazing. I’ll often run across an incredibly cool social media strategy or format or tool or link and think to myself, “Whoa, how’d they do that?” There are things like shortened custom URLs, evergreen queues, personalized recommendations, and more. And I’m so inspired by the cleverness and resourcefulness—not to mention the great value and utility—of these methods. So I’ve gone about trying to figure them all out. Check out my DIY tips below for putting together eac

OpenAug 17, 2015
When We Took Transparency Too Far: The Transparent Feedback Experiment

Sometimes people ask us: “Do you think there are any downsides of being so transparent in the way that Buffer is?” Usually, I can only think of the amazing things that have happened to us through being transparent and open. Recently, however, there was one learning that taught us that transparency isn’t a blanket solution for absolutely everything. For a few months we experimented with completely transparent feedback—even for those things that might be potentially difficult to hear or say, as

Tips / How ToAug 17, 2015
How to Make Sales on Instagram in 3 Easy Steps (Full-Strategy Infographic!)

Social media is constantly evolving. As soon as you feel like you’ve got Facebook and Twitter figured out, suddenly there’s Vine and Snapchat and a whole bunch of exciting new stuff to learn. It keeps things interesting, and keeps social media managers on our toes. Lately it seems like more and more social media managers are enthusiastic about Instagram and the opportunities there to engage with fans and share great photos and videos. And the opportunities are big! With more than 300 million

Buffer NewsAug 13, 2015
Introducing Buffer for Video: Upload, Schedule and Analyze, All in One Place

Social media has entered the video era. In 2015 we’ve seen the addition of video on Twitter and a giant push by Facebook to make video a major component of the News Feed . Check out some staggering social media video stats: * The number of videos in Facebook feeds has grown by 360% [http://media.fb.com/2015/01/07/what

OpenAug 12, 2015
11 New Teammates, 13 Open Roles: Hiring at Buffer in July 2015

In June, we brought back the hiring report after a long absence. Throughout the summer, we’ve been working on growing the team. Today we have 13 open positions to fill! Now let’s look into a little more detail into what happened at Buffer in July. New teammates in July Last month, 11 amazing people accepted our offer to join the Buffer journey. :) Some of those new team members will be joining us in August and beyond. In July we welcomed Philippe (Front-End), Marc Anthony (Product) and Jus

Finding Out the “Whys”: How We Do Customer Development at Buffer

In Buffer’s early days, the Lean Startup approach had a big influence on how Buffer took off. Joel blogged about this in 2011: “I reached something that would be truly valuable for people. It also taught me the value of customer development: to take advantage of those emails coming in by asking people questions.” Much of this mentality is reflected in the Buffer values today! Here is another illustration from Joel sharing his thoughts on how product management works with customer development:

Content MarketingAug 11, 2015
We Stopped Publishing New Blog Posts for One Month. Here’s What Happened.

One of the implicit values in our Buffer marketing is to challenge assumptions. And one of the biggest assumptions I have about our content is that we should be publishing original articles to the blog multiple times each week. Well … what might happen if we didn’t? To find out, we stopped publishing new content for 30 days, focusing instead on repurposing and refreshing our content from the archives. I’d love to share with you every single thing we tried and all that we learned, both what wo

OpenAug 5, 2015
What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy at Work

When Buffer first moved to a self-management model, we moved to a completely flat structure. We just let loose and the message was “everyone go figure out what you want to do and work on, without too much guidance or leadership.” We talked about some of those challenges recently here. In short, to describe what “flattening” an organization means exactly, here is what we did: * Removed all managers that would help decide what someone would work on * Stopped all 1:1’s and mentorship sessions

The Buffer Team Retreat Over Time: Here’s Every Retreat So Far

We’re a fully remote team at Buffer, so we’re used to connecting with one another via video, chat, and other collaborative, remote work tools. Working this way is a lot of fun—and it means the times we get to spend together, all in the same place, are extra special. Not only do team retreats give us a full week to work (and play) together as a team, they also give us some time all together to reflect on the future of retreats as we continue to grow. (Our open roles are listed here.) So far, t

ResearchAug 4, 2015
The Science of Storytelling Through Facebook Images: 10 Actionable Strategies from Successful Brands

On April 8, 2011, Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS shoes, did something radical: He asked everyone to go barefoot for a day. One Day Without Shoes is now a yearly campaign dedicated to educating the world of how many children in developing countries grow up barefoot and without shoes, putting them at risk of infections and diseases. TOMS already donates one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair of shoes it sells. This year, the company took it one step further. For every photo of