Blog - Page 82
A collection of 2,517 blog posts
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 nitpicked at it. Because the riskiest, most
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, then 10 p.m. is apparently a sensible bed time. I’m not that well known for sensible bed times. At the same time, the core p
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 learn these 14 Twitter hacks. Once you pick up on these power user features, you’ll become a Twitter pro in no time. Exclusive Resource: Get a free, 30-page ebook
“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. Often they’ve been working on their idea for a while, and they have found some things haven’t played out a
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
Funny, we’ve had the Facebook Like button along the side of every Buffer blog post for the past several years. And I don’t think I’ve ever clicked it. I’ve hoped that others would, of course. I hope they click all the share buttons. But until now, I’ve never known what that experience was like for the end-user. What’s it like to actually share a story to Facebook? And how can I make it a better experience? We talk a lot about reversing the decline in organic Facebook reach and succeeding wit
How many browser tabs do you have open right now? While writing this post, I had 18 tabs open. I’d like to say they were all for research, although I’m pretty sure one or two slipped down a YouTube wormhole. Does this sound familiar? It seems like my multi-tab madness is right in line with the status quo. We all love to have multiple tabs open at once, adding more and more as we find new articles to click and sites to visit. Pretty soon, it’s likely we’ve forgotten what we were online for in
💡Start Page by Buffer is a free, fast, and simple way to build beautiful landing pages. Build your page (in 60 seconds) here. OK, let’s be honest. While this may be a pretty darn good guide (if I do say so myself), it’s not going to be the last thing anyone ever writes about landing pages. So what’s with the “ultimate guide” stuff? Well, it’s part of what brought you here—which makes it one component of an effective landing page. You are, right this very minute, looking at a landing page. Te
A question I hear from time to time when I introduce myself and my title here at Buffer is, “What is a community champion?” Well, that’s a great question! My immediate response is, “I send out love to our customers all day.” But it’s so much more than that. The typical community manager role (though this role truly varies from company to company) often includes social media management and engagement, content marketing and networking and connecting with customers. At smaller companies, the com
One of my favorite visual social networks—and one that probably flies under the radar compared to other visual spots—is SlideShare. Browse through the featured slidedecks, and you can find big ideas and helpful strategies condensed into a couple dozen simple, succinct slides. There are few better ways to consume killer content so quickly. In writing about how to create a SlideShare presentation that gets results, I ran across a number of presentations that inspired me, educated me, and wowed me
I have a blog post to write. This blog post, to be exact. And in the course of researching, outlining, writing, editing, and writing some more, I also have other hats to wear. Email marketing. Social media strategy. Blog promotion, blog design, and anything else that should happen across my plate. I’m sure you wear a lot of hats, too. How do you find time to put them all on? One of my tasks that I’m currently optimizing is implementing a social media strategy at Buffer. In the midst of writi
Last year I decided to sail across the Atlantic. I previously had spent 3 months learning how to sail in South Africa and figured that learning should be put to good use–otherwise there’s no point, is there? After some quick research, I decided to join the 270 boats crossing the Atlantic with the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) in November 2013: “Every November since 1986 the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) has set sail from Las Palmas, bound 2,700 nautical miles westward across the Atlan
When I look back on the times I’ve done the most productive work on my startup, it has always been when I’ve had a great balance of work and rest . It has also been at times when I have genuinely been enjoying the moment . Steve Jobs suggests that in order to do great work, we should love doing t
A few weeks ago, we tried a little experiment. We tested two different headlines for one of our blog posts. The first used a headline that teased the post’s content: The second used a similar headline, but we made it clear that the post was backed by data: The results were more than a bit surprising: Now, I admit, we expected the variant that mentioned research to win. But we didn’t expect the delta to be more than 40%! For us, that small test shaped a new way of thinking about what makes
We tend to read a lot of content at Buffer. And I mean a lot. Inside the Buffer product, we aim to solve the problem of “what should I share next?” by providing the content suggestions for you—25 of them, each and every day, hand-picked by Courtney and our suggestions team. We share 25 stories per day. We read even more that don’t make the cut. Where do we turn to find so much shareable content? I’ll be happy to let you in on our not-so-secret sources—some of our favorite newsletters, tools,
Awesome news: 490 people saw a tweet I sent out this week! Awesomer still, 16 people either clicked the link, left a reply, or favorited the tweet. And as for the other 474 people? I couldn’t tell you. Did they enjoy the tweet? Did they notice it? Did it delight them? Did it—eep!—offend them? And perhaps most importantly, what can I learn from these quiet observers so that, when I send my next tweet, those 474 followers find a reason to click, reply, retweet, or favorite? Meet social media’s
We’ve talked in the past about how often exercise and reading pop up on our self-improvement lists at Buffer. Another element you’ll almost always spot on our goals list is sleep—getting more sleep, getting to sleep earlier or getting into a better sleep routine are a few popular variations on the theme. Curious why sleep matters so much to us? It goes back to one of Buffer’s core values, one of which is “Live smarter, not harder.” I take a lot of inspiration from that top point about “waking
What are the best ways to generate fresh content to keep feeding the blog or social media stream? This week’s #Bufferchat discussed just that with Courtney Seiter, Buffer’s head of content marketing. We were so excited to have our largest attendance yet—197 contributors and 1800 tweets—and to see so many new, bright and shiny faces! Check out the full Storify curation here. Here’s a look at some of the tips and tools highlighted in the chat! What is the best way to find out what content yo