Blog - Page 75
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
For the last 2 to 3 years, about every day, I would wake up, open my laptop and type the letter “g” into the Google Chrome bar and hit enter. Chrome would auto-complete it to “growth.bufferapp.com”. It was like a daily ritual to check on Buffer’s growth numbers from a number of different angles. Revenue, new users, daily actives, monthly actives. Growing—increasing our monthly revenue, our traffic, our user base—was the No. 1 priority in my mind. It only hit me very recently, about four months
One of our favorite ways to improve our results on social media is to try new things. We dream up a new idea or research a possible change in strategy, we test it out, and we see what happens. The testing phase is one of the most important stages for us—not only the “what to test” but also the “how to test.” We’re grateful to have learned some helpful lessons about testing best practices as well as a host of ideas of what to test in our social media marketing. I’m happy to share with you what
We find that self-improvement and reading go hand-in-hand. Many of the books we seem to grab at Buffer tend to be related to our current tasks, our new ideas, our passions and pursuits, or even just a nice sampling of good writing and entertaining topics to keep us tuned in and engaged. We end up reading a deep and wide assortment of inspiring stuff. As a team, we read 656 books in 2014. I’m happy to share the 19 most popular ones from our reading list. Note: One of the neat perks we have o
Hey there! Since this post was published, we’ve updated the Buffer values. See the updated values here. There are a few things I can count on when I tell someone about what it’s like to work at Buffer. If I stick to talking about what our social media scheduling tools do, I know I’ll probably have a fun conversation about the triumphs and challenges of social media. If I talk about Buffer’s culture and values a bit, a whole different conversation emerges. I’ve gotten a wide variety of r
You want to be the world’s best online writer, a David Ogilvy of the blogs, a Shakespeare of the social media. Or maybe you just want to be good enough to get by on freelance writing. Where do you get your education? How do you improve? I’ve faced these same questions, and I still face these questions as I aim to keep improving as an online writer. I majored in journalism in college. There wasn’t a content marketing course back in the day. Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught. And I
“So, when is this content marketing thing supposed to kick in, exactly?” As a marketer, you’ve likely heard about how great blogging and content marketing is for driving leads and results. So you dive right in: you work hard, brainstorming and writing article after article, hoping that it has some effect, that it’ll move some needle somewhere. Content marketing can be hard. It takes time and you might make a lot of mistakes along the way. The good news: You get to learn from those mistakes an
About 3 months ago, we made a very exciting change at Buffer. Upon exploring our current setup as a company, and after Joel’s discovery of a truly transformative book titled Reinventing Organizations, we decided that we wanted to reinvent Buffer taking some inspiration from the book. At its core, we’ve switched to a fully self-managed, self-organized team. There’re no managers or bosses and everyone on the team is encouraged to work freely on projects they are most compelled to work on, that th
I have a lot of things I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. Some of them are really small things (like learning to make hashbrowns, a breakfast food that has confounded me for years) and some are really big, like learning to live a more minimalist life. In the past, I have begun each new year with great intentions but found following through really difficult—like many of those who create goals for the new year. I think that’s because change is hard. We all want to improve and become bett
The end of each year is always one of my favorite times. I love the reflection that comes along with the close of a time period, and the hope that comes with looking ahead. I also really enjoy all the best-of lists that tend to accompany the end of a year. Browsing through them, I realize how many things I’ve missed throughout the course of the year. It’s great to have a chance to catch up! If you’re afraid that any of Buffer’s most useful social media marketing blog posts might have slipped b
One of the best ways I’ve found to learn new things on social media is to try new things. We experiment, we make mistakes. We succeed, and we fail. And we get a better feeling for how things might work and the best strategies, ideas, and experiments to try next. I’ve had the privilege of trying out a number of these new strategies and experiments this year, learning tons about the best way to share on social media. I’d love to share with you what I’ve learned! Keep reading for my list of the
Social media expert Rebekah Radice joined us for Bufferchat to look back at social media trends in 2014 and look ahead for the best tips for your 2015 strategy. Check out the full Storify recap here! Why is a social media strategy important? From Rebekah: * A social media strategy allows you to be intentional and strategic, giving you focus and purpose. * Strategy m
Templates and tools can help you work smarter and save you time and help your efforts go further. Buffer’s Kevan Lee shared his best tools, tips and tricks for his blogging and social media strategy at our weekly Twitter chat, #Bufferchat. Check out the curated Storify recap here! What tools or apps do you use on a daily basis? From Kevan: * Buffer to create and schedule social media posts. WordPress and Canva to create blogposts. * I’m always keen to try new things! SpruceApp has been a
A lot of thought, scheduling and tools go into making sure we give each Buffer customer and community as happy an experience as possible. Right now, there are a total of 7 Buffer Happiness Heroes and Weekend Warriors (plus our Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn) all across the world helping customers nearly 24 hours a day. And we’re looking to grow the team! That’s in addition to all our other team members, who usually devote at least a few hours each month to diving into delivering some custome
When I can find the time to do so, I love to plan ahead. I’ll write out tomorrow’s to-do list. I’ll add ideas to our content calendar. And I’ll schedule the next day’s social media updates—or even the next week’s, if I’m feeling ambitious. Maybe some day I’ll get to the point of scheduling a month or even a year ahead! Scheduling part of your social media content in advance is well worth it. And I’ll be happy to share with you some strategies, tips, and tools that can help you get organized a
There are days when I spend loads of enjoyable time writing new blogposts, creating images to share, and checking analytics, and then when I’m just nearly ready to close the laptop and sign off, I remember: I need to schedule social media posts for the next day. Or, I need to follow-up with mentions. Or, I need to curate some content. Or, I need to do one of the myriad tasks of a social media manager, and wouldn’t you know it I’m just about out of time. Saving time on social media is a big goa
You’ve likely heard the advice to add visual content to your blogposts whenever possible. Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media. So I added images to blogposts. And I learned there’s quite a bit more to it than that. Adding images to blogposts is a great start. You’re likely to see increases in social sharing and time on page. Images just make everything more readable and shareable. Adding images also brings with it another checklist of things to look
One of the things we’re incredibly excited about at Buffer is transparency. A big part of that is because being transparent simply feels like the right thing to do, intuitively. That by itself, seems reason enough to pursue it. We’ve seen some incredible things happen since we started to focus more on transparency in the last few years. Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork. To put things into perspective, here are a number of things that we’ve made transpare
“Those that get up at 5 a.m. rule the world.” – Robin Sharma Those who know me, know that I love my morning routine. I’m always making adjustments to it, and at its core it revolves around waking up early (before sunrise), working on something important for 90 minutes, and then hitting the gym. I recently shared my most recent routine in a blog post about creating new habits. Today, I want to share a couple of things about my routine that I’ve neglected to mention in previous articles. These t
When it comes to hearing great social media advice, I seem to have a bit of a preference: I quite enjoy finding the advice that fits my questions specifically. And wouldn’t you know, my questions are likely to be different than your questions and yours different than the next person’s. Social media is a brilliant puzzle to solve, and we often seem to be working on different parts of the picture. So what are social media’s biggest questions? To find out, we asked. We solicited feedback and qu
Integrating your visual strategy and social media strategy is more important than ever for marketers. To give some essential design advice to social media marketers, Dustin W. Stout stopped by #bufferchat. Check out the full Storify curation of the chat here! Why should marketers know basic design principles? From Dustin: * “The same reason they to know basic fashion principles. If you look a mess you’ll be perceived as such.” * “People want to share things that make them look good. Why w
With a distributed team of 26 (and growing!) and 1.5 million amazing customers across the globe, a vast majority of our interactions are online and through a variety of apps and tools to keep connected. In addition to all these amazing ways to connect online, we’ve hosted several Buffer meetups. For the same reason our team bounds off for international working retreats every five months, we have found in-real-life meetups with our fantastic community members to be invaluable. Meetups (or if or
Important update: We’re retiring the Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… One of the coolest things about working at a true startup like Buffer is how many jobs each of us gets to do in the course of a day or a project. I joined Buffer thinking that most of my time each day was going to be spent writing, and then I discovered that I could also be working in search optimization, paid ads, conversion optimization and lots more on any
When you’re just starting off on social media—whether as an individual or a brand or a company or otherwise—the potential of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all the various other social media channels can be hugely exciting. And for the social media pros, the questions exist, too. What to do first? Where to click? What to upload? What to share? These are questions I’ve had each time I’ve started on social media with a new venture. Where to begin? And what resources will I need to take
To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, social media moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. That’s why from time to time we like to offer an overview of all the recent changes to some of the major networks in social media. There’s always something new to learn, study or experiment with in social media, and even the biggest social media networks aren’t exempt from this rule. Here are 14 of some of the most recent changes to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, L