Blog - Page 68
A collection of 2,507 blog posts
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
How much more memorable are visuals compared to text? One oft-referenced answer is that people remember visuals 6 times better than text—an answer referenced in Buffer’s article on the anatomy of a perfect blog post and an answer that led to the original research, it’s clear that pictures are more memorable than words. So the next question became: People remember visuals better than text. But which visuals exactly? I’ve spent some time collecting the best research and science on pictures, ima
Social media evolves every day. We’re constantly learning more about how to connect better, empathize more deeply and create more lasting relationships. At Buffer, we’re so grateful to be part of social media’s rapid evolution, and we’re so inspired by all the tactics and strategies we hear from you, our audience, on your social media journey. As a result, we’re able to grow Buffer’s product and make it even more useful for you. Here are 10 new elements you can find in your Buffer account rig
If it weren’t for online tools, there’s no way we could do what we do at Buffer. (OK, technically Buffer wouldn’t exist either, itself being a suite of online tools … but you get what I mean.) The power to gather our remote, spread-out-all-over-the-world team to talk face-to-face, discuss what we’re working on and connect with our community is incredible, and we love sharing about the tools that make it possible. Previously on the blog we’ve discussed some of the tools that connect us
Ever since we wrote The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Social Media, we’ve been itching to dig deeper into mobile social strategies. After all, the evidence that we’re only growing more addicted to our cell phones is undeniable: * The average user looks at her or his mobile phone up to 221 times a day * 90% of American adults have a mobile phone—and 64% own a smartphone * 60% of social media time is spent on smartphones and tablets * 75% of Twitter users are active on mobile * 38% of Facebook u
I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around social media advocacy. It’s scary for me to admit that because I write about social media for a living. I should know these things. I should have everything figured out. And I don’t. Social media advocacy has eluded me. Though that hasn’t stopped me from experimenting. I’ve muddled my way through what I believed social media advocacy to mean, and I went so far as to implement advocacy strategies – though not even sure I was doing it right. An
Quick: which social network is bringing in the most traffic to your website right now? It’s OK if you don’t know off the top of your head. (I don’t memorize that sort of stuff either!) But wouldn’t it be great if you could pull up the answer in just a few seconds whenever your boss asks you this? What about revenue broken down by social network? What about the percentage of traffic generated by social versus email? You can track it all, and you can track it for free: all you need are Google
We’re delighted to hit almost $7.5M in annual recurring revenue and be fast moving towards the big $10M ARR milestone. As a company, we’re starting to feel that some of our recent team growth and structure adjustments in the last few months are starting to take effect. Here are all the latest numbers and updates from all corners of what’s going on in the Buffer team! Key August metrics * 2,673,418 total registered users (+3.1%) * 211,520 monthly active users (+1.4%) * 50,489 average dail
We’ve been writing quite a bit about online video platforms lately here on the Buffer Social blog. We gave you 10 quick wins to get you started with Facebook video and a complete guide to YouTube optimization. Needless to say video is becoming more and more important as a tool for marketers. Perhaps you’ve wondered, “How do these people make such great videos?” And, “Is it at all possible for me to do video, too?” The great news: It’s absolutely possible! You can do it easily, no matter your
By now, you’ve heard a great deal about social media engagement. You know that it’s not all about getting a big following. You know it’s about getting a big following of the right people. You know that building an awesome, engaged community around your brand, product, or idea is key to tapping into existing markets—and creating new ones! And you know that social media is a great place to maintain relationships with your customers long after they’ve decided to pay you. But how does that happe
The Buffer community shared their favorite productivity tools, tips and books in #bufferchat! Catch our weekly Twitter chat, #bufferchat, every week on Wednesdays, 9 am PT/Noon ET/4 pm GMT, for valuable industry insights and networking with nearly 400 other smart marketers and community managers. What are your top three essential productivity apps? Resources shared by the community: * Evernote * Todoist * Feedly * GoogleKeep * Trello * Buffer * MeetEdgar * Hootsuite * BuzzSumo * O
Surfing through my daily content curation or checking out the latest, popular marketing stories, I’ll sometimes find strategies that sound completely fascinating—and entirely foreign. What do some of the biggest buzz words—remarketing, onboarding, CRO, etc.—even mean? And is it really possible for you to get these strategies happening for yourself? I’ve been really happy to dig in to all these intriguing new topics, and I’d love to explain 10 of these buzzworthy strategies—as well as some sim
aAs the end of summer nears, we’re still excited to grow the team and are getting much closer to 50 Buffer team members – you can see the live list on our salary spreadsheet over here! We would love to share with you our hiring numbers, how Buffer Bootcamp has evolved, how we are currently set up for hiring, and what happened when we changed the name of our “UX Researcher” position. Let’s dive right in! We start September with 15 open positions, including a few new open positions we’ve recentl
Creating company culture and company values isn’t a static exercise—it’s a constant evolution. Lately we’ve been excited to begin growing the Buffer marketing team (see the roles we have in mind!). With this growth comes the great opportunity to share with new teammates how we currently think about marketing at Buffer. And what we found in thinking ahead to these great conversations is that our understanding of Buffer marketing is rather quite implicit. As never larger than a team of three, w
Back in the old days of the Internet – that is, the late 90’s and early 2000’s – “build it and they will come” was a fantastic strategy. There were fewer people either building or visiting websites, and therefore, if you did create a website, newsletter, or e-course, it was almost a given that people interested in you would find you. It’s how I built my first business. I built it. They came. Today, that is no longer the case. You’re competing not only with people who offer similar content, bu
We’ve been lucky at Buffer to receive a number of acquisition offers along our journey so far. When I mention this to people, a key question that often comes up is “how did you decide not to sell?” The earliest offer we had for Buffer was not long after we had started, and it felt fairly easy for us to say no, simply because we felt we wanted to see where further our current path leads. In many ways, the reason we haven’t accepted an acquisition offer is in order to continue on our path. How