Blog - Page 73
A collection of 2,484 blog posts
Sharing transparently about all aspects of what we do at Buffer—pricing, salaries, fund-raising, earnings, hiring, and more—has been an amazing opportunity to connect with and learn from others. We get such great ideas and encouragement from sharing openly. We’ve shared before about our content marketing goals, numbers, and adventures, and I’d love to continue these stories in regular blog posts here! I’ll be sharing how we’re doing, what we’re up to, what we have planned for the future, and a
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t is a Jim Collins classic that shares an eye-opening study on how top companies managed to manifest great results and maintain them for more than a decade. After the study was completed, Collins found key business traits and strategies that transformed these companies into successful, elite companies. So how do these traits apply to content marketing? What makes a ‘good-to-great’ content marketing strategy? Here are the seven ste
In a forest, there is absolutely no waste. Every single element is reused in a continuous cycle. A tree produces leaves. The leaves fall to the ground and become compost. And the forest uses every last ounce of the compost and puts it back into its ecosystem. We have the exact same idea for Buffer’s organizational design as we move towards a self-managing company. Without any processes, save 4 essential ones, there is little to no occurrence of waste. As an example, we recently completed our f
How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette? For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting , and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media , I had just the most basic rules and intuitions. Even now, I feel like I learn a new quirk or quibble on a near-daily basis. It’s hard to know which
Syed Balkhi , founder of WPBeginner , dropped by #bufferchat recently to share tons of recommendations for supercharging your website! Read on for the highlights, or check out the full recap of this chat ! What advice do you have for someone just starting out with their website? From Syed: * Use WordPress as your platform and build an email list from Day 1!
In my recent travels around Asia, I’ve had the great opportunity to meet a lot of local founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. A few themes that seemed to come up many times are questions like “What triggered you to become passionate about company culture and transparency?” or “How did you know you wanted to build Buffer to what it is today?” One of the most memorable moments for me was talking to a super smart lady who is having a lot of success at a large company and longs to work on something
I am writing this post to Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel—one of whom is likely you. You see, Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel are personas, created with a combination of raw data and educated guesses, representing slices of this blog’s readership. Dan could be you, and Mary could be your coworker. What these sketches provide is a touchstone for creating content : When I can put a name and a background to the people reading what I write, I c
Have you ever delivered a speech or considered public speaking as a way to network or build your business? Speaker, author and professor Dr. Emad Rahim joined us for a #bufferchat to share advice and resources on how public speaking can grow your personal or business platform. Read on for the highlights, or check out the full Storify recap here. What’s the best way to get started in speaking? From Emad: * Start small speaking at clubs, events, parties and classrooms. Speak where you are f
It seems like a great portion of the social media research we do at Buffer often comes back to a few big questions for social media sharing. How do I get more followers ? What should I share? When should I share it? And how often s
Do you have a favorite author or blog whose content is always so amazingly useful that it earns an automatic read every single time something new comes out? Rand Fishkin is one of those authors for me. And Moz is one of those blogs. Rand’s slide deck on content marketing is one of our favorite content resources here at Buffer. His article about individual contributors [http://moz.
I’m delighted to share that José Gilgado joined the Buffer team in December. José joins us from Madrid, Spain and helps out the team with a focus on backend development. José learned how to code when studying computer science in school and even cofounded a small web studio while in school. José was recently in charge of supporting push notifications to mobile clients, and we’re excited to have his experience to help support our Android and iOS apps. Here’s a cool story that Sunil shared with
In February of 1999, Mari Smith needed a sign from the universe. It showed up in the form of … cake. The Scottish-Canadian had arrived in San Diego on a borrowed round-trip plane ticket (“That’s how broke I was!”) with 50 British pounds in her pocket and a feeling that she was supposed to start her nascent seminar business in the U.S. instead of Scotland, her former home. But she was running out of time. She could only come into the country for 30 days without all her immigration paperwork don
Travel is embedded pretty deeply into Buffer’s values—so much so that our entire remote team meets up every 5 months at various spots around the world. Our Buffer retreats are special times for our remote, distributed team to connect in person with one another, with our Buffer audience and with the community of our host city. Traveling to different locations each time also gives us a great new perspective on gratitude and the extreme privilege we have to be able to work and live the way we do.
When you sign up for a new app, what are the first steps you take? Customizing your settings? Installing add-ons and extensions? Setting up your profile pic? (<– this is a personal favorite) The steps you’re asked to take—click here, customize this, try that—are referred to as onboarding, the process of helping a new person get accustomed to a new place. You’re likely to experience onboarding in many different cases. There’s onboarding in the new apps you download and services you use. Ther
Just minutes ago, I went ahead and published a new version of Buffer’s culture-deck on Slideshare. It contains a tiny change that I and many on the Buffer team deemed a very important one. Here is the slide that changed before: and after: The essential change, as you can see, is the removal of the word “always,” which many of us felt made things slightly dogmatic and too one-sided. We’ve also changed the words “never” to something less one-sided, to be a better reflection of how we work as h
When it comes to social media, lately I’ve been surprising myself by how often I’m turning to LinkedIn. With the addition of LinkedIn Publishing, there seems to be more awesome content on the business social network than ever before. And I don’t think I’m alone. LinkedIn has more than 347 million users across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. We’ve written before about some of the best practices to make the most of your LinkedIn marketing, but I’ve recently discovered even mor
There’s something special about Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It makes me happy every time I read it on social media or elsewhere. What it implies for me, is that if you change yourself, and only yourself, you have the best chance of changing things around you too. This is a very non-violent and conflict-free approach. I believe this also extends to organizations as much as individuals. It’s something we try to apply at Buffer. One of Buffer’s core values, take
💡Looking for an easy way to save all your best ideas? Check out Ideas from Buffer → Some of my favorite tools posts end up being the ones where people share the specific tools they use to get jobs done. There’s power in knowing the tools that others find useful and important enough to make part of their regular workflow. For content marketing, I seem to take a particularly keen interest because I’m always on the hunt for new and amazing products to try, and I also appreciate a thoughtful rec
In January at Buffer, we grew the team, made big progress on upcoming new features, launched a new Transparency Dashboard, and started sharing feedback transparently amongst the team. Here’s a quick update on what’s been going on: The latest Buffer metrics * 2,090,805 total registered users (+4.4%) * 183,638 monthly active users (+9.0%) * 44,790 average daily active users (+10.8%) * $441,108 monthly recurring revenue (+4.6%) * $5.29m annual revenue run-rate (+4.6%) * $2,084,935 cash in
I’m so excited to share that Thomas Dunn joined the Buffer team in December. Tom joins us from Bristol in the UK, with a focus on customer development and UX research. He has a really neat story before finding us at Buffer. Tom was in a rock band after high school and also started and managed his own company. He did full-time social media freelance work while he finished his degree. Wow! Here’s how Leo described Thomas as he introduced him to all of us on the team: “I loved how many high-r
We’ve been having a lot of fun hearing some of the amazing feedback on how many of you are using Buffer. One of the key areas that we heard about where we felt we could improve was our social media analytics area. We then reflected and brainstormed with many customers about how we could make analytics better. Today, I’m really excited to unveil one of a series of planned analytics improvements for paying Awesome [http://bufferapp.com/awesome?utm_source=socialblog&utm_medium=launchpost&utm_
We never get tired of thinking about happiness, do we? Life is so much nicer when you’re able to couple it with joy and gratitude. We’ve published posts before about simple ways to be happy and retraining your brain for more gratitude, and Buffer’s CEO Joel has even shared his own daily to-do list for happiness. (There’s also our popular list of things to stop doing to be happier.) Meanwhile, science continues to study happiness, finding ever more specific and idiosyncratic ways we can bring j
It’s 5:02 a.m. on Friday as I am writing this. The dog is on the floor licking…something (he likes to lick a lot!) and my wife is asleep beside me in bed. The last 10 minutes have gone something like this: • What’s happening on Twitter? Boring. • How about Facebook? Someone else got engaged. Yay for them. • Any new emails? Delete. Delete. Inbox Zero! • Hmm… Then I opened up the Buffer iPhone app (forgot I even had that inst
Note: We’re lucky to have the chance to experiment quite often with the way we work. Because of this, some experiments come and go. The post you’re about to read is one of these experiments; we learned a ton and are now exploring new approaches! I remember the first time I heard about companies operating with no managers. During a conversation about it with Joel, we were both absolutely baffled. There was no way, we thought, that Buffer could ever work in that way. How can any work get done wi