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A collection of 2,602 blog posts
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. When I first started working on Buffer and learning on sites like TechCrunch about the kinds of amazing perks and benefits some startups provide, I thought unlimited vacation time sounded like such a great idea. Giving everyone the opportunity to unplug whenever they needed felt so right that suddenly the “old world,” where you had a specific number of
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. What job perk could possibly be better than unlimited paid vacation days? Just picture the perfect work/life balance , the quality time you’d spend with family and friends
The good news: your boss or client is totally on board with your running content marketing. (SCORE!) The challenge: she wants to see a content marketing plan . . . and you have NO IDEA what that’s supposed to look like. I’ve been there. It’s a tough situation, because you’ve been doing content marketing with your gut this whole time, and now you’re being asked to put all that into a document. (And the gut-to-document process can be pretty painful.) Plus, you know that awesome content marketin
Editor’s Note: This is an older post, check out our new social media calendar here. Imagine you could plan and manage your social media updates the same way you do your Google or Outlook calendars. We wanted to bring the ease of scheduling events on your calendar right into your Buffer account. Sharing with Buffer will never be the same! Introducing the Social Media Calendar for fully managing all your social accounts, at-a-glance! With the social media calendar, you can plan ahead,
I’ve been a college basketball fan for as long as I can remember. Sports teams are like any other organization: They strive to organize individuals to accomplish shared challenges and goals. As a Michigan Wolverines fan, I’m continually inspired by how Michigan’s coach, John Beilein, accomplishes these goals. Beilein is the only active collegiate coach to have achieved 20-win seasons at four different levels, as well as one of only 6 active Division I coaches with 700 or more career wins. Wha
Whenever I get asked what my favorite book is, I always reply The Pirates Dilemma. The book tells the story of punk, disco, hip-hop, graffiti, and how modern technology has made the ideas and innovations of youth culture increasingly intimate and increasingly global at the same time. It’s truly fascinating. And when you look back, you can see the origins of the current social media revolution can be traced as far back as the 70’s (if not even further). Back in the 70’s punk was the start of
In the world of weight training, it’s well known that having a partner can lead to seeing gains more quickly. And research has shown that those who switch from training alone to using a personal trainer see many improvements. Similarly, pair programming has been shown to improve quality of code, as well as keep both developers in “flow” state for a more sustained period of time. The people around you can have a significant impact on your behavior. If I tell a friend about my goals, I’m much mo
Working on making Buffer an inclusive place where all kinds of people feel they belong and thrive is one of my favorite things. It’s a unique time to be working on diversity goals at a tech startup. On the one hand, there is quite a bit of work to do to make the strides we’d all like to make. On the other hand, there is so much hope and so many cool innovations, programs, and even tools that can help move us toward where we want to be. We’ve shared a lot of our thoughts, strategies and mistake
Of all the things that have been known to keep me awake at night, one of the repeat offenders is thinking of times when I’ve said the totally wrong thing to a person. That embarrassment of putting my foot in my mouth or just rubbing someone the wrong way tends to linger long past the initial moment. Luckily, technology is working on making these sleepless nights a thing of the past! I’m always on the lookout for writing tools that can help me communicate more clearly and empathetically online,
Infographics are such a fun and effective visual way to display information. We at Buffer have certainly used them quite a few times to share information. I always enjoy looking at them, but always feel like there is no way I could ever create one myself. Or is there? There are so many tools being released every day allowing us to easily create better and better images— including infographics—to share and use in our marketing efforts. Even folks (like me!) who never thought it possible to cr
Twitter favorites are changing to Twitter likes. The star is switching to a heart. What might it mean for marketers? We’re thrilled to see the all the latest changes and improvements to Twitter (Twitter hearts come hot on the heels of the announcement for Twitter Polls), and we’re eager to learn what effect it might have on our sharing, engaging, and marketing. As we start experimenting and testing, we’d love to pass along some early thoughts on what we think could happen with the shift from
A while back Danielle Morill asked this question on Twitter: How many startups provide a spreadsheet explaining exactly what would happen to your options given several possible outcomes for the company — Danielle Morrill (@DanielleMorrill) May 13, 2015 Explaining equity is something we try to do as best as we can at Buffer, which Joel shared in his reply. A big learning we’ve had as we’ve added team members is that understanding stock options and putting them into context is not very easy.
Making time to go offline is never easy. There’s almost never a “right time” to do it; you might lose opportunities or even business while disconnecting. And yet, if you don’t actively look for ways to disconnect, it’s not very likely to happen by itself. We have all accepted that eating well and exercising are important to be in great physical shape. We’re now also starting to take better care of our minds by managing our attention. Our own attention is a scarce commodity. Where we focus our
I sometimes feel like URL shorteners are some of the most understated tools in internet marketing, and there have been more than a few times that I wished I’d had someone share some advice on URL shorteners earlier in my marketing career. For instance: What do you do with really long links? What if you want to track the results? What if the link—long and unwieldy—upstages the content? So, if you’re new to the world of URL shorteners—much like I’ve been—here’s a list of things you may find h
Treat every piece of content—every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email—with the utmost care. There needs to be a bit of an internal struggle when we hit send or publish, if we don’t feel it, I don’t think it’ll be good enough. This shouldn’t be confused with perfectionism, we want to push things out with consistency and without lingering. This is about self-discipline to go through that struggle—even if it’s felt ever so slightly—every single time. We don’t want
Try to think back to a time when you felt incredibly confident. You instinctively knew you could handle whatever came at you. You were on top of things, making all the right moves. You were in the zone. It’s an amazing feeling, and one that we’d probably all like to have more often. The book The Confidence Code gets right to the point of why this element is so crucial in our lives: “Scholars are coming to see (confidence) as an essential element of internal well-being and happiness, a necess
When people learn about our devotion to transparency at Buffer, there tends to be one big question that looms large. Here’s the gist of it: “Transparency seems like a great policy when things are going great. But what about when they’re not?” Ed Fry summed up this often-asked question quite perfectly during an “Ask Me Anything” session some of us Bufferers did over at inbound.org a while back: There’s one element of my answer to Ed that I’d like to revise. Back then, I said that “transparency
What sets winning businesses apart from the competition? Automation is one edge. The Lenskold Group found that 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation. What is an underrated way to drive more conversions? Again, automation. Companies that use marketing automation also see 53% higher conversion rates than non-users, according to the Aberdeen Group. All of which raises the question: What kind of marketing automation are these winning businesses doing? An
What motivates you to do your best work? In an ideal world, most of us want more from our jobs than just a paycheck. We want things like work satisfaction, a connection to our coworkers and the opportunity to make a difference. What can give us the kind of feeling that makes work more than just … work? For many companies, the answer is values. Your values tell the world what you’re about. They give your employees a reason for what they do—and your customers a reason to cheer for you. Today,
Anyone is capable of mastering social media marketing. You can take a huge leap forward in just 10 days. We’re grateful for the opportunity to be immersed in social media marketing here at Buffer, developing our best processes and systems for building a social media marketing machine. And we’d love to share our blueprint with you. Join us for an action-packed 10-day email course to learn exactly how we manage social media marketing here
While building Buffer, there have been times when things have started to go a little crazy. It might be being featured in a big blog, seeing lots of tweets about us, or noticing a big influx of signups or upgrades. When this happens, it is very easy for my thoughts to drift off and to start thinking of the big-picture possibilities for us, long into the future. It may be healthy to be ambitious, but often these thoughts occupy more time than they should and stop us doing the real work we need
We reached the 50 team members mark in September! This feels like a big milestone and a special moment to reflect on. For me, the most exciting part of this is that 50 people are able to join our journey of working as a fully distributed team, where you choose to live and work from the place which makes you happiest and most productive. We’ve had several examples of teammates moving or traveling to find their happy place, or being able to move easily to help and be with their significant other
This is a little tough to admit. I’ve been failing at social media marketing. It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more. And that’s super scary to admit. What’s happening? I wish I knew! We’ve got lots of theories as to what’s behind our decline, and we’re in the midst of new experiments to see if we can
I used to work a lot — 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week… I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor…I loved telling people how “busy” I was…and how much I “had to do”. Sound familiar? Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse. One day I’d had enough. T
