Blog - Page 71
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
Just the other day, peeking into the social media schedule here at Buffer, I noticed that it was full of wonderfully-worded, completely click-worthy, queued posts—posts that I spent zero time writing or adding. Such is the beauty of collaborating together on social media sharing. Taking a team approach to filling a queue or managing a social channel is a splendid way of saving time on social media. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Others have amazing ideas and content to share. And of
Sometimes looking through your social media statistics can reveal some fun surprises. This was the case for us this month at Buffer. I looked a little closer into the stats from all of our tweets, including all the amazing replies by our support heroes. There’s some amazing hidden virality to these tweets! And there’s a great opportunity here to delight your customers and further your brand’s reach at the same time. Continue reading to see how this played out for us recently, along with all o
Whether you’re a community manager, a social media marketer, a PR pro or a digital strategist, chances are good you could use a sounding board once in a while. Joining a group of likeminded professionals is a great way to bounce around ideas, ask and answer questions and share industry news and tips. Luckily, there are lots of communities out there where both new and seasoned pros can go to talk shop and get help—whether your preferred network is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+! Here’s
A few days ago, I was in bed, getting ready to fall asleep. Often when I’m lying in bed, I listen to a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on SoundCloud. I find his voice and insights very soothing and it helps me calm my thoughts down and go to sleep gently. That night again, I was listening to one of his talks called “The 4 Qualities of Happiness.” It started off with a great intro and ideas around how to live a happy life by grounding yourself and how to do it. It talked about what true freedom means,
From the fun and silly (#FiveWordsToRuinADate, anyone?) to hard-hitting international news headlines, trending topics on social media have the power to keep us both aware and entertained. Marketers have long recognized the potential of these highly-trafficked, highly-searched (at least for a short while) terms as a way to get in front of a big and often new audience. It can be a risky gamble to go big on these fleeting opportunities, but the rewards of the right post at the right time can be e
If you’re managing multiple social media accounts—multiple channels for you and multiple channels for your brand perhaps—it sure helps to save time with the right tools. We’ve found time-saving tools for Twitter and Facebook and our daily social media marketing workflows. Now that we’ve turned attention toward Pinterest, we’re excited to discover the best time-saving tools for pinning, analyzing, and image building, too. Here are 21 of the ones that have caught our eye so far. We’d love to hea
Mackenzie Fogelson and her team at Mack Web strive to provide exceptional value to their clients and the social media marketing community–they created a comprehensive guide to building online communities and offer it free of charge. They’ve measured their success in the number of downloads—more than 8,000—and believe community is key to marketing success. Mackenzie and her team joined us for #bufferchat to share how to include community-building in your online marketing plans. Catch the full r
Marketer, speaker and author, Bryan Kramer, dropped by #bufferchat to talk about the art (and impact) of sharing. Catch the full recap here. How can social sharing impact your business and personal life? From Bryan: * There are 4 types of sharing. 1) H2M, M2M, H2M2H, and #H2H * 1) H2M = Human to Machine (we do this all the time with ATM’s) * H2M2H = Human to Machine to Human. We are doing this now by using tools to communicate to each other. * M2M – Machine to Machine – Watson Analytics
Is your brand—personal or professional—on Pinterest? Seventy million people are, with a large number of those being bloggers, companies, brands, and businesses. The opportunities to expand your reach and meet your audience are many on Pinterest, and they come in many unique ways. Though falling under the umbrella of social media marketing, Pinterest has its own special notes and best practices that help make it an extremely fun, exciting place to test, iterate, and add value to those on the net
Being great on social media isn’t always intuitive. Sometimes the best way to learn is to get inspired by the what others are doing. Late last year, Kapost compiled a list of 2014’s top brands in content. Much of what has made many of these brands successful is their social media strategies. Let’s learn from six of them here. Whether they’re inspiring their audience through a shared philosophy or learning with their fans and followers by sharing data and studies, these brands—both small and la
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning schedules customized just for you * Track and measure repins, likes, and comments Anyone can try out this fun new feature! Authorize your Pinterest account now and try scheduling to Pinterest for 7 days free: In honor of this
Our customers are the true heart of all we do here at Buffer — and we want to make sure the community knows it. We work on this in lots of ways—from striving for excellent customer support to hosting meetups to sending hand-written notes, swag and special gifts. From the very beginnings of Buffer, our founder and co-founder, Joel and Leo, sent hand-written thank-you cards and stickers to customers. They recognized the value of one-on-one relationships and how going an extra step can help show h
Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says: “Blue is the richest color for me; I can see all of blue.” Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions. After all, the visual sense is the strongest dev
For most business owners, the thought of telling the world all of your financials is intensely frightening. The prospect of the whole world seeing and analyzing your every business move is enough to put even the most seasoned entrepreneurs in the corner crying. But as we’ve seen with companies like Buffer, that sort of transparency and openness is becoming less and less of an outlier. For many, it’s actually part of the very foundation of their existence! More and more startups are finding be
Have you heard this advice before: “Follow your passions!” “Do what you love!”? And have you thought, what if my passions are my hobbies? Things that I could never be paid for? For some, the advice to “do what you love” seems possible only if you have a passion for things like finance or accounting or coding. Well, I’ve been happy to find that it’s possible to follow your passions into a career, no matter what those passions may be. With social media, you now have a platform to do what you lov
The change towards self-management at Buffer is our biggest and most fascinating challenge to work through right now. March found us evolving in quite a few areas including self-reviews, self-managed salaries and more—all while growing our user base and team throughout the month. Here is the latest update: The latest Buffer metrics in March * 2,171,877 total registered users (+4.5%) * 207,035 monthly active users (+9.4%) * 50,538 average daily active users (+5.4%) * $488,771.05 monthly r
Big or small, influencer or newcomer, everyone looking to get more followers and more likes on social media—more engagement, period—seeks out strategies that work. And what works with a platform of 11 million followers tends to work for platforms with 100, too. Social media is a moving ocean of posts, images, tools, ideas, and content that flows at a fast pace. You can find success by building your own social media strategy and keeping it fluid by checking and rechecking what’s working. I’ve
What happens when you tweet at a company, asking for help with their product? What’s been your experience with mentioning or tagging someone with a large following, looking to connect or engage? In order for companies and brands to excel at responding to their audience in a genuine way, they must first excel at social listening. They tune in to the right conversations, by using the right tools, and then are able to respond, engage, and delight. Having the right tools can be key—as well as kno
Sometimes when you get a good content idea, you can feel it. You just know that it’s fully formed, ready to be executed, and sure to be a hit. Other times, the idea isn’t quite so clear. Maybe it’s only a partial idea, or you’re not quite sure what actually creating it would look like. Anyone who’s dipped their toes in the content marketing pool knows that creating content can be incredibly taxing of our creativity. Worth it, but time consuming. Luckily, there are plenty of strategies and too
Optimizing one’s day for maximum productivity—and creativity!—is one of our favorite topics to research and think over. We’ve written on the blog before about morning routines, creativity routines, the routines of successful entrepreneurs and even ways to maximize your lunch break. But we haven’t managed to share any of our own daily routines, until now. Recently we were honored to be asked by the team at inbound.org to do an “Ask Me Anything” session, answering questions from their smart com
Did you know: Some bloggers recommend you spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it. (Derek Halpern of Social Triggers has an 80/20 split: 80 percent promotion, 20 percent writing.) Wow, this is an area I fall well short on. I’m so impressed by those who hustle to get their content out there and in front of as many people as possible who can gain value from it. Over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot from content promotion experts and am starting (slowly) to work som
Oli Gardner from Unbounce stopped by #Bufferchat to share the essentials of conversion rate optimization. Catch the full recap here! And continue reading for the best tips, tools, and strategies from Oli and the Bufferchat community. What is conversion rate optimization? From Oli: * Technically speaking, CRO is about getting a higher percentage of people to complete the desired action on any given page. * CRO is the act of increasing the performance of your marketing by uncovering ways to
One of our favorite tips on getting more value out of social media: Share your blog posts and articles more than once. We’ve come up with a sharing schedule for every new blog post that publishes on the Buffer blog—sharing the post when it publishes, later the same day, the next day, later in the week, and on and on into the future. And in doing so, we’ve come across some really interesting pearls of wisdom. There are some headlines that just keep collecting clicks no matter how many times we
Can you explain what your company stands for in just a few words? Can you quickly sum up how you and your teammates work together, and what it’s like to get things done at your organization? If you can’t, you’re not alone. Creating a deliberate company culture is an exciting (and oftentimes ongoing) challenge, and it begins with your company values. In the UserTesting marketing department, we knew we were going to grow, and we hoped to set a great example for our new team members and maintain
