All posts - page 77
A collection of 2,598 blog posts
Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says: “Blue is the richest color for me; I can see all of blue.” Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions. After all, the visual sense is the strongest dev
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
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 who can gain value from it. Over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot from content promotion experts and am starting (slowly) to work som
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. * CRO is the act of increasing the performance of your marketing by uncovering ways to
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 some really interesting pearls of wisdom. There are some headlines that just keep collecting clicks no matter how many times we
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
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 well be worth a deeper look for digital marketers and first-time bloggers. We’ve enjoyed experimenting with the best way to use Medium here at Buffer
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 a
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
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 twee
Social media automation, when done with care and the right strategy, is awesome. It can amplify your great content while freeing up your time to create more of it! We’ve talked before on the blog about automating some processes through services like If This Then That and Alfred, and in this post I wanted to share some of our favorite uses of another fantastic automation tool: Zapier. Zapier integrates with more than 400 different web apps, which means most marketers are bound to be able to fin
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. I discovered bitcoin in early 2011. At first it was something that felt like play money and almost surreal. I didn’t fully understand all the details back then, but a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency was just too crazy and I became intrigued. Over the years I started diving deeper and deeper into bitcoin. Along the way, the true power of
Digital marketers—like you!—are all stars. You have your hands full with all the many ways to reach your audience. At any given time, you may need to be fluent in email, content and social media because your audience is cross-platform. Few people make buying decisions anymore based on information from a single medium. So when marketers focus all their energy on one channel, they could be missing out on other opportunities and the natural rhythms of the buying cycle. So how can you keep on top
For gaining more engagement, clicks, retweets, and replies, Twitter images work. Our own research has helped us see the value of Twitter images as being eminently click-worthy and shareworthy. There are a whole host of different ways to add these engaging images to your tweets. I’d love to round up a list of 10 favorite ways that we’ve tried with Twitter visuals (plus hear any ideas you’ve got as well!) The Data Behind Shareworthy Twitter Images Our early research into Twitter visuals for th