Blog - Page 75
A collection of 2,569 blog posts
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
Author and blogger, Susan Campbell Cross, joined us for #bufferchat to share about how to let your personality shine through your social media posts and blogs. See the full recap here. And continue reading for all of Susan’s tips on being genuine, defining a voice, and more. What does it mean to be genuine online? From Susan: * Be yourself! What you post online shouldn’t be anything you wouldn’t say/share among friends offline. * Oscar Wilde said it best: “Be yourself. Everyone else is ta
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
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
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 so
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
How do you get more clicks from Facebook? We’ve thought about this question lots before. It’s come up in our monthly reports and audits. Facebook marketing is one of the most exciting social media areas we’re eager to improve. And this month, we may have hit on a strategy that works. We’re happy to share with you all our latest social media stats and strategies from the last month—including what we’re trying with Facebook—in hopes that it may encourage or inspire some thoughts from you as wel
So much of digital marketing these days is about producing high-quality content that gets published and shared. You can control the publishing part. Can you control the sharing part? Sharing begins with promotion—the timing, targeting, and strategy behind solid distribution. To achieve your social media benchmarks, you need to understand what type of content will resonate in specific verticals, and when. Fractl recently partnered with BuzzStream to analyze 220,000 articles from 11 verticals
Before you hit the Publish button or send an update to the queue, what do you do? Quite often, I find myself publishing instinctively and sometimes failing to consider all the necessary questions and guidelines for what makes a wildly successful, viral —and valuable !—social media update. To do righ
Imagine starting a blog with zero overhead. Imagine having a place online to write your thoughts, tips, and learnings and share with a built-in audience and an immediate potential for viral traffic . Imagine a really great writing app . This is Medium , a blogging platform from the creator of Blogger and Twitter. It’s slick and snappy and could very we
I believe in the power of women to build inspiring careers in all types of fields. At least, that’s what I thought I believed. It’s what my conscious mind thinks, at least. My unconscious mind, however, favors traditional Western gender roles: men focusing on careers while women focus on family. I learned about this dichotomy from taking an implicit association test, a social psychology test designed to measure a person’s unconscious or automatic associations between types of people and s
Have you ever wondered why, in spite of your best intentions, you just can’t resist a clickbait headline on Buzzfeed? What was it about #TheDress that got everyone up in arms? And what is it about Malcolm Gladwell that makes his work so interesting? Is it possible to replicate this kind of remarkability, or is it entirely unpredictable? The truth is there is compelling science behind the success of shareable content. The stuff that gets people talking isn’t quite as random as you might think.
If you feel challenged by Facebook marketing these days, you should know you’re not alone. In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice. In fact, brands are now responding to plunging organic reach on Facebook by posting more content to Instagram than they are to Facebook, according to a report by research firm L2. But don’t despair; there’s plenty of life left in Facebook yet. We’ve been scouring the web to find out what’s
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. The short history of how social media developed is still nothing short of incredible. When Facebook started in 2004, strictly for colleges, and Twitter in 2006, mostly for techies in the Bay Area, it was all about individuals connecting with each other. About a decade later, a lot of that has shifted. Wh
One of the first things I do when I join a new social network is to upload a profile picture. But which profile picture should I choose? Is there a best one? Profile pictures have always been a bit of a gray area for me inasmuch as I post a picture I think looks good without knowing its actual effect on my audience . Is there such thing as a perfect, best profil
Back when I started my career in SEO, content marketing didn’t exist—at least not in the way it exists now. We used strategies to boost traction and traffic to websites through the creation of great content—it was content marketing before the term even existed. And it worked. I’ve carried the lessons with me ever since. And I’d love to share them all with you—everything I’ve used to successfully help hundreds of companies benefit from content marketing over the past five years. Here are 37+ t
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. Rodolphe Dutel, Buffer team member and founder of Remotive, recently joined us to discuss remote working. Rodolphe has spent many months traveling and working from all corners of the globe and has even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. He brought many of his lessons learned, tools of the trade and general advice to #bufferchat! Catch all the great tweets fro
Kim Reynolds is a key part of the team behind the yearly Social Media Marketing World event hosted by Social Media Examiner – and she stopped by #Bufferchat to share some of her expertise in using social media to publicize an event or product release. Check out a the full recap here! What are the most important things to know when first pr