Blog - Page 75
A collection of 2,469 blog posts
“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,
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle I’ve been obsessed with thinking about, adjusting and building upon my habits for a long time now, and working on good habits is probably one of the things that’s helped me the most to make progress with my startup. In addition, it seems like habits are now becoming popular again. This is a great thing, and books like The Power of Habit are helping lots of people. Perhaps one of the things that is rarely
Since the beginning of Buffer, we’ve always shared all of our learnings and failures. Over time this developed into a more defined goal and principle as part of the values of the company. Since we defined our value of transparency within the culture, we have found many things within the company that we weren’t being completely open about, and we put them out there for the world to see. We’ve generally found that we are sharing a lot of things that are somewhat taboo or at least unusual to be sh
Content marketing is a topic we’re quite eager to learn about here on the Buffer blog, and it seems to be one our community is excited about as well. We invited the team at Atomic Reach to share their insight in our weekly Twitter chat. The Atomic Reach team shared some amazingly useful tips on how to craft the most engaging content for your social efforts—plus dozens of their favorite content marketing blogs to bookmark! Click here to see the full Storify recap [
To help with the inevitable noise surrounding a new post on social media, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ allow you to pin a post to the top of your page or profile, giving new life to old content and providing a quick win to get your most important updates even more love. Pinning seems like a very useful feature [https://buffer.com/resources/twitter-new-prof
Having all the best blogging tools and resources , having a plan to share your amazing content on social media, having everything in place to put your marketing strategy into action still requires one thing: You must create the content to be shared, loved, and engaged with. The blank page must
In the year and a half that I’ve focused on hiring at Buffer, I’ve received more than 2,000 applications for engineering roles. Of those applicants, 70 have gone on to interviews, and we’ve grown from a team of 2 to 10 engineers. Learning how to hire great people is one of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced. I’ve iterated on our process for hiring engineers and I’m glad to have the opportunity to share my lessons. Here’s my first post on our hiring process and why we no longer have the tra
How do you define workplace culture? And how do you keep your company culture growing in the right direction? Buffer’s very own Chief Technology Officer, Sunil, and Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn, stopped by #Bufferchat recently to discuss these very big questions focusing on workplace culture. Here are some of the highlights. Catch the full Storify recap here. How do you define “workplace culture?” From Sunil: * “Tough one, it means different things. For me, it’s the *how* to go about
We had fun getting back to our customers faster in October due to a renewed focus on our goals. As we were all back in our respective timezones, this was a bit easier than September. October is usually the last “normal” month before the holidays kick off, so it felt great to focus fully on continuing to improve the customer experience during this time. We also questioned some of our processes and put an experiment into place to learn a bit about how all of our support channels interact. Let’s
When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create. So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses. Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the words you use to
When I first joined Buffer team, many hours a day were spent solo in either Australia or Sweden. This led to an obsession of scrolling through HipChat conversations to catch up on all the things happening in other timezones. As the happiness team grew, we started having regular syncs that proved to be super helpful to stay in touch and talk about bugs and customer happiness. Now it seems like we have almost added another touchpoint of communication for each new team member that has joined the t
How do your interactions differ between the online world and the offline? Away from the computer, we may have a better feeling on how to interact with one another and build relationships. Online? It’s a bit of a different world. As a distributed team at Buffer—meaning we all work from wherever we’re happiest—our interactions together and our relationships with one another take place online. The same goes for many of the connections we make on social media. So it seems worthwhile to have a bet
For as long as we’ve run Buffer, we’ve had to send new team members some form of employment agreement. We’re currently in the middle of raising $3.5m in new funding and, as part of the due diligence in this funding round, we’ve been revisited these agreements. We’ve never felt completely comfortable about the agreements we send out, and it can often be a shock and in stark contrast to the style of the rest of our hiring process, where we try to take extra steps to show that we truly care about
Most social media experts will say that the core to Twitter greatness is: 1. Providing real value and engaging with others 2. Acting the way you would act in a real life situation 3. Never spamming 4. Building meaningful relationships These foundational concepts are hugely helpful in making Twitter really work for you . And when you’re ready to build on these
We’ve talked lots on the blog about how we communicate and the tools we use to get work done as a remote team, but I thought it might be fun to give you a bit of a different view into the life of a Buffer team member. In this post, I’d like to tell you about the ways we communicate that aren’t so much about work. From GIFs in Hipchat to theme days on Sqwiggle to supportive notes on iDoneThis and even our UP apps, Buffer has a great variety of “virtual watercoolers” that keep us connected in wor
How does your audience decide what it wants to click, share, favorite, and purchase? Understanding a bit of behavioral psychology can go a long ways toward a better understanding of your audience and why they do the things they do on social media and on your website. There’s tons here for marketers to discover, and the psychology of human interaction can lead to some quick wins in the way you compose your social media updates and communicate online. I’ve collected 15 of my favorite psychologic
Buffer’s own mobile app developers, Andy Yates (iOS Developer) and Tom Redman (Android Developer) joined us for #Bufferchat to discuss mobile app development and marketing. Catch the full Storify recap here . How has social sharing changed since Twitter came out? From Andy: * “The fact you can connect with people throughout the world with short
October and September (I’m lumping them together because I did not manage to get a Crafters report done for the month of September, so sorry!) were huge months for Buffer’s small team of Crafters. So big, in fact, that much of the “way we do things” has changed immensely over the past 60 days. It’s been incredibly exciting, and I’d love to tell you all about it. But first, let’s take a quick look at the numbers! Buffer Social analytics Traffic stats Our overall numbers have stabilized from