Blog - Page 68
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
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
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 or why we freely and emotionally share a post by a grieving widow after the death of her husband or why we feel an urgent need to pass on that video of the ice-cream eating dog to our an
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
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?
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
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
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 (
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
What makes a great social media manager? More specifically, what habits make an effective social media manager? What do the best social media managers practice every day that makes them amazing at what they do? There seems to be a lot of good advice out there about the best social media tactics used by marketers—tactics that might work great right away but are often not sustainable. I was keen to find the best habits. And to understand what traits would help a person become more effective as
Say you want to get started on a new marketing strategy—collecting customer research, or creating cool images, or measuring ROI. Where do you go first to find the tools that’ll make your job as smooth as can be? I often turn to listicles and roundups that bundle together a big handful of helpful tools. And this is maybe why I love Product Hunt’s collections so much. Their collections are user-generated tools lists that are easy to browse and simple to find just the tools that I need. I’m happ
In 2014, I became a full time remote worker. This year, I’ve been lucky to work and travel in Paris, Malaga, Copenhagen, Casablanca, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Barcelona… There’s one question that’s always in the back on my mind: How can I be as productive as possible remotely? I’ve tried many different experiments to do more in less time this year, and I thought I would share 5 tricks (and their accompanying tools) that have become part of my routine. 5 Methods for More Productive R
We’re incredibly grateful to have the chance to learn from others and experiment for ourselves with what works best on social media . And we’re so very happy to share our best strategies with you! To collect all these favorite tips in one place, we’ve compiled our top 25 social media strategies into a free ebook that you can download below. We’ve included strategies for Twitter [https://buffer.ghost
With its new features and updates, LinkedIn is becoming a social media platform that you shouldn’t overlook, especially if you are a B2B marketer. Just take a look at this infographic by LinkedIn : LinkedIn is now a promising channel to drive traffic, generate quality leads, build your thought leadership, and more. Here’s a rundown of the best Lin
Recently Joel and I were talking about the new Jawbone UP3. I had just gotten one for free as part of Buffer’s perks program, and I complained that I found the closing buckle a bit fiddly and let off some steam about how I struggled to charge it. At the end I remember saying something like “Oh, but it’s cool that I know my resting heart rate now, though.” It’s kind of ironic how much I focused on the small challenges and gave the fact that I could now track my health much more intelligently on
We are all about working smarter here at Buffer. Our focus on improvement and efficiency has led us to blog smarter, share smarter, and approach problems and activities with a fresh perspective of getting more done as quickly and simply as possible. To that end, we love automation. We get a kick out of tools and apps that do some of the work for us, leaving us more time to invest elsewhere. IFTTT is one of our favorite tools (and one that I’d imagine you might love as well). We use IFTTT in a