Blog - Page 83
A collection of 2,569 blog posts
Imagine that you arrived at your local movie theater this weekend to see a show and the options featured were “The Final Destination,” “Inglorious Basterds,” and “District 9.” If none of those movies sound familiar to you from recent buzz, that’s because they topped the box office charts in 2009—the year Brian Halligan and I released the first edition of Inbound Marketing: How To Get Found Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since the 1st
I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to jump on board the path of building a startup. Having hit upon a product that solved a key pain for many people, Buffer has grown rather fast. The team is now 25 people and we’ve just crossed $4M ARR. When I reflect on how quickly things happened and what it has required of me, the first thing that comes to mind is Paul Graham‘s essay entitled How to Make Wealth. In particular, this part resonates with me: You can think of a startup as a way to compress
Here’s a riddle: When is a tweet more than a tweet? We’re all pretty familiar with Twitter’s 140 characters—and of course, a photo is always an eye-catching addition . But what if your Twitter audience could sign up for your email list without ever leaving Twitter, or directly download your new app straight from a
Content Crafter Kevan Lee joined us for #Bufferchat to talk about the unique nature of writing for the web. Check out the full Storify recap here , and continue reading for 32 web writing tips from Kevan and the community about how to write successful blogposts, tweets, status updates, and more. What makes writing for the web different than print? “We have less time to grab attention on the web. Web writing is
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I learned to tie my shoes. It came up because of a tweet from my friend Jeff. I thought of a study that I remembered from college; kids who were told that it’s hard to learn to tie shoes persisted longer than the ones who were told it was easy. Jeff’s point, of course, directly relates to customer service , which is where I spend a lot of
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer a unique opportunity to get close to people who are hundreds of miles away. You can share anything with anyone at any time. You can share. Does this mean that you should share? I’ve come up against this question many times, hovering over the Send button on a status update or considering what’s okay to share and what’s too private (or uninteresting). Where should the line be drawn? Should there even be a line? I’m happy to offer some of my th
Imagine you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self a bit of advice on investing in the creative process , coming up with new ideas, and producing good, fun work. What would you say? I’ve thought a bit about this topic lately, as I reflect on how I’ve changed from the person I was in my twenties to the person I’ve become in my thirties. Creativity has become more and more important to me, both at work and at play. And the lessons I
You know the feeling. You’re sitting there, staring at your hands, at the keyboard, at the screen, at the ceiling. You’re supposed to post something on Twitter, but you have no idea what to post. I’ve been there before. I think we’ve all been there. Everything that comes to mind seems lame. Slogans, links, articles, quotes, pictures—you have no clue. So you sit there wasting your time. We’re all too busy to afford this wasted time. Social media shouldn’t be a time waster. It should be a money
I’m pleased to announce that Michael Erasmus has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is now on board full time as our backend/full-stack developer focused on growth at Buffer!Michael has been such a pleasure to work with. His recent passion lies in data science, and he’s been leading the exploratory analysis that our growth team is doing at Buffer. He also built out what we call ’seamless’ experiments. Seamless is a way for us to conduct A/B tests
I’ve realized I am very much in a bubble. Everyone I know is building a company. Amongst my circle of friends, that is the norm. This, however, is mostly out of choice: I believe, in agreement with Seth Godin , that to be an outlier is an inefficient way to make progress: The easiest way to thrive as an outlier is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers. Surround yourself with p
I know you don’t want to take a break right now. Why? Because you’re too busy. This post is probably one of more than a few tabs you have open on your browser or phone. Your to-do list is likely close by and packed with tasks. Sometimes we know there’s a better way to do things, but we’re just so busy we don’t even think we have the time to find it—so we keep going like we always have. That’s how I saw things, too. And then I discovered the power of taking breaks at work. They made me happier
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
Social media marketer and founder of Think Digital Academy , Justin Wise, joined us for our #bufferchat to discuss the importance of conferences, online academies and general learning within the digital marketing realm. Check out the full Storify recap here ! Here is an overview of some of the great discussion! Why is continued learning so important in digital marketing? A1: One word
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