Blog - Page 79
A collection of 2,459 blog posts
When I started at Buffer, I was given permission to make mistakes, to ask forgiveness rather than permission, to always test everything. So I’d like to give you all some permission as well. You have permission to pick and choose your social networks. In fact, often times it may be best not to be on certain social networks, perhaps because of the time it takes to do social right or because your customer personas [https://buffer.com/library/ma
As our CTO Sunil has explained previously , we make all our product decisions based on metrics, meaning that we try to launch features early and measure how they impact all our metrics in order to decide which path to follow. We had the intuition that our current analysis tab in the Buffer for Business area could be tweaked a bit to make the user experience better. And last week Niel, one of our awe
I’m pleased to announce that Tom Redman has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s Android Developer! And I’m super pumped to announce that this means we are now 100% focused on building out our Android app! For the longest time, our Android app was on the back burner as I would switch between Android and backend development. Tom has been the man to bring Android to the forefront!In the short time that Tom has been on b
“Here I am, standing in the middle of nowhere in Poland holding a sign to hitch a ride…sweat dripping, car after car rushing by.. rain is coming in too. What the hell am I doing here…” Things didn’t look too good then. But let me tell you this story from the start: In April 2012, I bought tickets to Poland so that I could explore the country by myself, couchsurfing and hitchhiking for 10 days. Couchsurfing is the largest travel community online, allowing you to “surf” members’ couches. By th
A few months ago we started up a new Twitter chat series, #Bufferchat. So far, we’ve talked about everything from productivity to social media monitoring and lots of other topics in between. These days, we have up to 185 participants each week, sending out nearly 2,000 tweets. It’s a true delight! Along the way, I’ve been learning the ins and outs of operating a Twitter chat and testing new tools and ideas to optimize our chat even further. It’s amazing how much there is to know, both for the
Did you know that there are still a few simple hacks left that you can start right now that will make your content more shareable ? Here at CoSchedule (a social media editorial calendar for WordPress) we recently hit a milestone with more than one million headlines in our database. With this massive amount of data, we began wondering what we could learn abou
At national business magazine and website Fortune, there’s a lot of news being reported, published and shared every day by many different editors and reporters. With that much going on, a few social media pileups might seem inevitable. “The problem we kept running into was if we had three stories going up at the same time by different editors, each editor would publish a tweet and not pay attention to when last tweet occurred,” says Franchises and Social Media Editor Heather Muse. “So we’d hav
I’ve gradually realized that my day is not occupied only by tasks from my to-do list . Often, there are lots of other tasks that deserve time in my day just as much as those I have in my to-do list. Previously, I found that these extra tasks detracted massively from my feeling of productivity and happiness [https://buffer.com/resources/happiness-hacks-une
A headline can serve either as an apple pie on the windowsill of your content or as its bouncer. It’s all in the way you phrase things. Fortunately for us, many people have found headlines that work wonders, consistently, time after time. And they go well beyond the saturated listicle or clickbait. Why not take some inspiration from the best headlines of the best headline writers? The blueprints exist to get your tweets, emails, updates, and articles clicked. I collected a trove of interesti
It’s always a pleasure to see something grow. Especially when it starts out small. Content Suggestions at Buffer has enjoyed this interesting journey from small to growing, and in the span of eight months, it has quickly become one of our core services. We love helping people share to social media, and content suggestions started out with this idea in mind. How can we help users share? The Experiment One idea was to help people find fresh content. The first implementation started in the mid
Author and CEO of Social Media Explorer , Nichole Kelly, stopped by #bufferchat to share her great insights on measuring social media ROI. Be sure to check out her great book on the subject ! See the full Storify recap here! “ROI” means
There comes a point in my afternoons or evenings where I’ve just about sapped all the creativity and efficiency I’ve got. I need a break. My mind and my body—and oftentimes, my writing—make it quite clear. Do we ever get the same clues when we need a break from social media? Certainly, the subject seems a bit taboo to discuss. We’re social media marketers, after all! Taking a break from social media seems almost sacrilegious, yet I wonder how many of us have had those thoughts or feelings befo
We wrote a post awhile back about email list building, and in the course of writing that post, we got the Christmas morning jitters. We wanted to try every single idea we could. And so we did. And wouldn’t you know it, the ideas worked! I’m really happy to share with you our experience from an exciting month of email list building and the strategies we used to get more email subscribers. The hugely encouraging aspect to all this is that our simple email changes can be done by anyone. If you’r
I have a lot of ideas in my head. And for the most part, that’s where they used to stay. In my head. Where other people couldn’t see them, interact with them or build upon them. Where they were safe and untested and uncriticized. All mine. Sure, I’ve created some . Some might say I’ve created plenty. But that’s only because they can’t see what I’m not creating. For example, this very post sat dormant for at least a month while I pondered, waited and
July was a month filled with sunshine, life changes, vacations, and yes, Inbox Zeroes, too! Most of the Heroes took a few days here and there to welcome family, rest and recharge, or travel. Their well-deserved days off did have an impact on the stats, but they scheduled around each other and worked extra hard to hit zero in the inbox every day. As of this writing, we’ve hit 10 straight weeks of zeroes, at least one per day. I’m super proud of them for achieving this milestone, especially whil
One of my favorite things about social media is that it’s still such a young and new form of communication. It feels too early to take anything as a given, so we’re all experimenting, testing and learning together. Every day seems to bring exciting new studies as research shows us more about how social media is changing the way we relate to one another, share information and even form our identities. I’ve been collecting a few of these studies and thinking over how they might relate to making
We love happiness at Buffer. We’ve renamed customer support as customer happiness. Happiness is baked into our culture and values and the DNA of every person who works on the team. If there’s a smile to be had or a positive outlook to take, we’ll do our best to find it. As such, we’re always keen to test out new ways to improve on this value of happiness at work, at play, and at home. We’ve tried science-backed ways to be happier, productive ways to be happier, and lessons from historians, w
July was a month of big changes and big growth for Buffer’s small but mighty team of Content Crafters. Our blogs got a fresh new redesign that allows each post to shine a bit brighter and load faster, and the changes resulted in a big increase in traffic across the board. A few milestones: On the Buffer Social blog, we reached 35,000 total email subscribers, while Buffer Open saw pageviews topping 100,000 for the first time. Let’s take a closer look with a dive into the numbers! July stats fo
The very first time my Jawbone UP24 vibrated on my wrist, signaling that it was time to get ready for bed, I laughed out loud. I was standing in a pub in central London, beer in hand, and in practical terms, 2 hours from home. Bed time?! Ridiculous! This is the thing, though. If you want to get 8 hours of sleep , and you want to get up and start your day at an early hour [https://blog.bufferapp.com/your-bodys-bes
Admit it. Sometimes, your Twitter life is messy. You follow hundreds of people — maybe thousands. Staring at your timeline is about as intelligible as reading a stock ticker. How do you bring organization to your Twitter life ? How do you rise above the confusion, cut through the complexity, and become a superstar on Twitter ? You l
“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!” –Randy Pausch I’ve had a few email exchanges in the past with startup founders struggling with an idea [https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-produce-more-great-ideas-according-
As a CEO, I often ponder how I can help the team be as productive and happy as possible. As part of our decision to be a distributed team at Buffer, there have been a number of amazing advantages this has brought as well as it making a fun team to be part of due to the many different cultures and loca
Social media managers work pretty darn hard. You’re keeping up with all the latest changes to Facebook and Twitter (and LinkedIn and Pinterest and Instagram). You’re checking out emerging new platforms. You’re posting links, answering questions, and engaging communities all over the place. And when you’re doing all this with an ever-growing list of social media accounts, things can get kinda crazy. We wondered if we could make things a little easier for all you hard-working, multi-tasking soc
“Customer support” is something of a magic phrase at Buffer. Say it to anyone—from Happiness Heroes to Hackers and beyond—and watch eyes light up. Simply put, it’s one of our very favorite things to talk about and improve upon every day. Customer support is baked into everything we do—Buffer’s vision is to build a super-useful social media management tool with amazing support for everyone we come into contact with. So what does Buffer’s Happiness team do, exactly? And how do we keep customer