All posts - page 75

A collection of 2,607 blog posts

ReportsJul 14, 2015
Hiring at Buffer in June 2015

We’re bringing back the hiring report! The last time we reported on hiring was April 2014. Back then—15 months ago—Buffer had 20 team members. Fast forwarding more than a year later, the team now has 34 full-time team members and three new teammates who will be starting their Buffer bootcamp shortly. New team members Just this last month, Danny and Kat both graduated from Buffer’s bootcamp and have accepted to join us full time, hooray! In June, we also made four offers to candidates to

OpenJul 13, 2015
Buffer in June 2015: Fastest-Ever Team Growth, $6.6M ARR

We’re officially halfway through the year. Very excited to share the latest update for Buffer: Key metrics 2,511,292 total registered users (+3.2%) 206,464 monthly active users (+1.5%) 52,229 average daily active users (+6.2%) $550,529 monthly recurring revenue (+3.4%) $6.61m annual recurring revenue (+3.4%) $2,578,881 cash in bank 34 team members across the world 25 cities, 10 countries, 4 continents Here’s a graph of our MRR growth over the last 3.5 years: The change in trajectory around

OpenJul 10, 2015
Closing Down Buffer’s Suggestions Feature: Here’s Why and What’s Next

Being a part of a company that is run according to a specific set of values brings a great amount of clarity into everything we do at Buffer. Looking to our values becomes particularly important when there’s a challenging decision to make—for example, how to move forward with a feature that hasn’t yet found its fit. When we practiced this reflection with Buffer’s Suggestions feature recently, we decided that they’ve reached the end of their journey. Beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off

OpenJul 8, 2015
Kat Zien Has Joined Buffer As a Back-End Developer

I have some great news: We’re welcoming Kat Zien to the Buffer team as a back-end developer. Kat is based in Bristol and has been helping out with all things engineering, including some cool stuff with oAuth and retweet with comment (coming soon!). Here’s how she described her bootcamp experience: “I love the team and how helpful and friendly and positive everyone is! It makes me smile a lot throughout the day :) I wish I could spend all day reading the Open blog and so many personal blogs of

ResourcesJul 8, 2015
Got 60 Seconds? Learn Something New in These 25 Short & Sweet SlideShares About Social Media

Slide decks exist somewhere near the intersection of visual content and written content, a hybrid form of information and consumption perfect for bite-sized bits of learning. If you’ve not got time to read through a 2,000-word article, you might have a moment to flip through a SlideShare. We’ve been excited to experiment with the process of building slide decks around the Buffer content we have here on the blog, and in the course of doing so, we discovered a trove of wonderfully succinct and v

The 4 Biggest Pinterest Marketing Mistakes We Made (And How You Can Learn From Them)

I’m a bit embarrassed to share my early Pinterest Pins. But here they are anyway. A pin loaded with hashtags, a really odd-sized image, an image with a one-word description, a Pin with no description at all. I’ve made a lot of mistakes with Pinterest, both in the Pins I’ve created and in the strategies and plans I’ve set forth. And I’ve come to discover that Pinterest is wholly unique from Twitter and Facebook, and that I’ve had things quite wrong from the start. All these mistakes have bee

AdvertisingJun 30, 2015
The 7 Hidden Factors of the Most Effective Social Media Ads

I’ve resisted social media advertising for a long time, believing that there are a host of free tools and free strategies that can help your business grow on social media organically. What I’ve come to find out (and I’d imagine many of you have discovered this already) is this: If you’re spending money to advertise online, social media ads may very well earn you the biggest returns. (In some cases, it’s the cheapest way to reach people.) There are so many inspiring digital marketers who are

Online MarketingJun 29, 2015
19+ Free Tools to Start Your Podcast From Scratch

Hey there, podcast fans! We recently launched a new podcast of our very own, Buffer CultureLab! We’d love for you to check it out and share any thoughts, feedback or ideas with us! You can listen on iTunes here or Google Play here. ? OK, now back to the post! “Slack is starting a podcast for some reason.” That was the headline of a recent Fortune.com article. Author Tom Huddleston, Jr. wondered why Slack, “a hot Silicon Valley company with a fast-growing valuation,” would “make the most of i

OverflowJun 26, 2015
We Built a Diversity Dashboard for Buffer; Here’s How You Can, Too

This post is co-written by Julian. At Buffer, we’re trying hard to be mindful of diversity within our team, as well as doing as much as we can to improve diversity of people in our industry. In an effort to understand diversity across our team as well as people who apply to work at Buffer, we started started collecting diversity data via questions in an anonymous survey. Once we had some data trickling in, we starting graphing some of the data and eventually decided to write a dashboard to sha

OpenJun 24, 2015
Building a More Inclusive Startup: Introducing the Diversity Dashboard

“What gets measured, gets managed.” This well-known quote is often applied to business situations like marketing or product creation. But the basic truth is applicable to almost any situation: When we really want to focus on something, we pay close attention. We want details that can help us make good decisions. And at Buffer, we want the details that can help us grow as an inclusive and diverse team. We want to be conscious of how we grow: With a focus on the values that guide us, and with a

Online MarketingJun 23, 2015
How to Choose the Right Stock Photo for Your Next Project

You’ve likely got a great way to search the web for the best free stock photos. And once you know where to look, how do you decide which photos to choose? Should you go with abstract or specific? What is the best color profile? What is the best orientation? There are so many great sources for free photos. I find myself asking these questions most every time I pick a photo—how to identify the right stock photo for a project. There’s a good bit of research and advice out there on how to make

Online MarketingJun 22, 2015
7 Top Marketing Podcasts and the Lessons They’ve Taught Me

Hey there, podcast fans! We recently launched a new podcast of our very own, Buffer CultureLab! We’d love for you to check it out and share any thoughts, feedback or ideas with us! You can listen on iTunes here or Google Play here. ? OK, now back to the post! As someone who’s motivated by self-improvement and achieving more, I’m constantly trying to learn as much as I can. Books are naturally one of my main go-to sources of knowledge. But there’s also a wealth of information to be consumed i

Online MarketingJun 18, 2015
Can You Run a Marketing Program With Zero Goals?

So much of marketing, it seems, is geared toward growth and traction, particularly when it comes to startups and technology. We are pressed on all sides by tracking metrics, pivoting, learning, and growing—a sort of exponential growth mindset that envelops, well, everything: content, social, email, community. If you haven’t measured it, then it doesn’t count. If you can’t measure it, you’re better off without it. We’re surrounded by this movement at Buffer, kind of like a stone is surrounded by

OpenJun 17, 2015
Why Not to Outsource your Startup (Even If You Can’t Code)

One of my favorite things to do is to help others who are at an earlier stage of the startup journey. I had a lot of false starts before Buffer. I enjoy sharing my lessons from those failed attempts, and I also enjoy getting my mind back into those early days challenges, now that Buffer is almost 5 years old. In the past few weeks, I’ve had 5 sessions (typically around 30 minutes, in person or via Hangouts) where I’ve tried to help someone. I was surprised to hear the same challenge came up in

Self-ImprovementJun 17, 2015
The Psychology of Selfies: Why We Love Taking and Viewing Photos of Faces

How many photos of you are on your phone right now? These days, humans take almost 1 trillion photos a year. (To put that into context, that’s more photos every few minutes than in the entire 19th century.) And lots of these photos are selfies—self-portraits, usually taken with a smartphone. As of this writing, nearly 300 million Instagram photos had been tagged with the selfie label. We love getting into the “whys” of social media psychology, so in this post I set out to discover why we love

Tips / How ToJun 16, 2015
Social Media for Non-Profits: High-Impact Tips and the Best Free Tools

Whenever we have the chance to chat with folks about social media stats and marketing strategies, we are amazed at the many unique ways you all go about charting a path to social media success. Every industry and niche—every social profile, even—is unique. Non-profits are a great example of a segment of social media with its own unique elements and expectations. The non-profit structure—donation-backed, humanitarian-focused, member-based—presents an opportunity for some really neat ways of put

OpenJun 15, 2015
Buffer in May: $6.4M ARR, Product Advancements and Self-Management Work

In May, we continued our strong revenue growth, and we’re also growing the team faster than ever before. Here are the latest insights and numbers about Buffer: Current Buffer metrics * 2,432,382 total registered users (+3.4%) * 203,449 monthly active users (+1.7%) * 49,202 average daily active users (-1.1%) * $532,350 monthly recurring revenue (+4.6%) * $6.39m annual recurring revenue (+4.6%) * $2,267,067 cash in bank * 34 team members across the world * 25 cities, 10 countries, 4 co

ResearchJun 15, 2015
Why You Should Share to Social Media in the Afternoon + More of the Latest Social Media Research

I love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media. If it’s research-backed or numbers-driven, sign me up. These actionable tips are what drive a lot of our experiments at Buffer as we’re keen to see if the best advice from these studies meshes with our experience, too. And there’s a lot of new info to go off of. I’ve collected 10 of the latest surprising, revealing studies on social media here in this post, with takeaways and insight into social media timing, Instag

OpenJun 12, 2015
Changes to Buffer for Facebook: Here’s What You Need to Know

Starting early this week you may have noticed some changes around how posting to Facebook works through Buffer. We could’ve been a whole lot more mindful around this and are so sorry for the confusion we’ve caused. Today I wanted to briefly give an update around these changes and create a place where we can keep you posted with any updates. A little background Earlier this week we were notified by the folks over at Facebook that a few flows within Buffer around how we suggest post content wer

AnalyticsJun 12, 2015
Our Latest Experiments With Medium, Instagram, and More: Buffer’s Social Media Report for May

It’s been an amazing month at Buffer working on some fun social media strategies and thinking ahead to some big new ideas. What’s a good Medium strategy? How can we gain more followers on Instagram? What might a Buffer podcast look like? I’d love to share with you what’s been on our plates recently, along with all the social media stats from our Buffer accounts. It’d be great to hear your thoughts also on the content we can write that would be most helpful for you! Inside Buffer’s social m

AnalyticsJun 11, 2015
The 5 Most Meaningful Google Analytics Reports for Social Media Marketers

We have Google Analytics installed on all the Buffer blogs (Social, Open, Overflow, and certainly also Happiness in the future). I imagine you might have it installed, too. And though I could be in a much better habit of checking GA often, I am grateful to know that all the stats are there for me, whenever I choose to look. The next question, then: Where should I be looking for helpful social media stats in GA? There’s just so much to look at, with so many new and unusual titles. I’ve done my

The Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started With Video Content Marketing

If you find yourself intimidated by the concept of creating video content, you’re not alone. Every minute of the day, YouTube users alone upload 72 hours of new video content, not to mention uploads to Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion or Wistia. With all that noise, making your video stand out, increasing engagement and finding ways to add value is a mammoth task; which makes doing it right even sweeter. Fortunately, there are tons of great blueprints for creating valuable, meaningful video cont

OpenJun 8, 2015
Digital Nomad Diary: The Highs and Lows of 11 Cities in 3 Months

In December, my friend and co-worker Brian casually mentioned to me that he would love to explore Asia. I love Asia. I lived in Japan as a kid for 3.5 years, and I lived in Hong Kong for 6 months in 2012. It was a no-brainer for me to jump on the opportunity and travel around Asia with Brian. I had been in San Francisco about a year and was craving exploring again, having done a lot of travel in the 4.5 years since starting Buffer (which even contributed to us becoming a distributed team). I

15 New Social Media Templates to Save You Even More Time With Your Marketing

Imagine having a quick and fast way to get up to speed with social media or to get your work done in less time (and with more confidence). When I’m in a pinch or into something new, one of the first places I turn is toward a template. I’ve built a stash of headline formulas, social media updates, and more to help organize my mind when it comes to working fast and learning something new. Templates can be a lifesaver and a time-saver. Once you’ve got your templates, we’d love to help schedule