Blog - Page 69
A collection of 2,517 blog posts
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
How do the best-performing Facebook pages get all that amazing engagement? And how can you and I do the same? The Facebook pages that are doing wonderfully well with likes, shares, and comments on their posts have so much to teach about new tactics and worthwhile strategies. Our friends at BuzzSumo analyzed 500 million (!) of these Facebook posts, and we’ve learned some amazing takeaways that you can implement on your page today. (I’ll be joining BuzzSumo’s Steve to chat with you live about t
I recently re-read two books that had a big impact on my upbringing: The Alchemist and The Little Prince. Those two novels capture a fascinating concept: Serendipity. I love how the characters embark on journeys where they learn a lot by trying to find their own path, through many chance encounters and learnings. Outside of the fantasy world and back in our own reality , I got to wondering what these concepts look like in my own life. We all want to maximize our productivity, and many of us t
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
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
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 my
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
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 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
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. Tame Your Email: My 7 To
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