Blog - Page 77
A collection of 2,569 blog posts
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
If someone were to ask you about your happiest moment yesterday, would you have an answer? How about your happiest moment of 3 months ago? I’ve got an answer for at least 100 of my recent days – and a new perspective on gratitude, thanks to the 100 Happy Days project. The challenge couldn’t be simpler: Take a photo of just one thing that makes you happy each day for 100 days . I knew a bit of what was in store for me once I began chronicling my moments of happy beca
Starting a new social media presence from scratch can feel like a big challenge. As I launch my own side project right now, I’m poring over my Buffer analytics as I start at the very beginning to build a following everywhere. Things look very different in these early days as compared to what it must feel like for big, established names who have thousands or millions of fans. Here on the Buffer blog, we’ve written about some great strategies to get your first 1,000 followers that I’ve been foll
The bookshelf in my office holds a single shelf of paperback books that are very special to me. Amidst the nearby clutter of boxes and miscellany (I find the bookshelf is seldom used for books anymore) sits a row of my favorite writing books and reference guides, stacked chronologically from the time I bought them, each one brought down once a year or so for a fun refresher. Some folks read the same novel multiple times for fun. I tend to read the same writing books [https://blog.bufferapp.com
Over the course of the last few years, I’ve come across a huge number of articles that list “The Best Marketing Blogs of 201X” or “Social Media Blogs You Cannot Miss Out On!” I find that a variety of the blogs that I would really like to see on these lists often get overlooked. Often, a fair amount of the mainstream blogs and their content is meant for those starting out in the marketing industry. That’s not a bad thing. These are important lessons, and there are plenty of social media market
A while back, I met with a great founder who’s really hustling. We spent some time discussing his idea and I shared some of my experiences with Buffer. When we’d almost finished our 30-minute meeting, he had one last question: “Plan vs build. Where do you stand?” I thought it was a fantastic question. Clearly it’s not a binary choice, yet I think it’s also good to ponder which of the two you should focus on. What does it mean to plan? I believe planning is an essential part of making progre
It started out innocently enough. A busy week of errands and a particularly fun weekend filled with dancing, and there it was: A 7 day “streak” of hitting my goal of taking 10,000 steps per day, according to my Jawbone Up. (The Buffer team + family members all get a Jawbone Up as a gift, and we share our steps and sleep stats with each other. I love this because I think it is an amazing way to be super transparent and share our self-improvement efforts with each other. These are two of Buffer’s
At any given moment, any one of Buffer’s staff of nearly 30 could be on our social media accounts chatting with customers, answering questions or scheduling posts for the days or weeks ahead . Thanks to Buffer’s social media management tools and the many other awesome tools that help us out, social media is a team effort here. Maybe it’s
As a teenager I had a period of many years where I stopped reading books completely. I even remember a time where I couldn’t imagine reading books at all. After I graduated and started to be interested in business and startups, I realized the immense power and knowledge contained within books, and I started reading more and more. Today, I can’t imagine even a couple of days passing by without some time spent reading. As an introvert, I’m a reflective person. Sometimes that can be a challenge, s