Blog - Page 77
A collection of 2,517 blog posts
“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
“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. Read below Atomic Reach’s tip
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 to have—and a feature ripe for experimentation. What are the best practices for pinning a post to the top of a Facebook page or a tweet to the top of a Twitter profile? How much extra e
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 be conquered. Coming up with an endless supply of blogging and writing ideas would be great, right? Fortunately there is a solid list of useful strategies, techniques, and questions that can always keep a