All posts - page 83
A collection of 2,598 blog posts
You’ve been sharing to social media for some time now, and you’re synthesizing all the great advice out there about what to post, when to post, and how to measure. Awesome work. You’ve got the content part down pat. Now here’s the next layer: The emotion behind the social media update. What feeling does your update impart? How does someone feel when they read your update? These are big, ethereal questions, and significantly different than discovering great content and finding the best litera
One of the things that has fascinated me most about ancient Greece and Rome has always been the idea of oracles. If you’ve seen the movie 300, you might remember the scene in which Leonidas has to consult the oracle, which will decide whether the Spartans will go to battle or not. You can almost grasp the frustration of the Spartan king. He’s not in control. He has to rely on the priests and only the priests are able to understand the oracle’s advice. He feels powerless, as he has to follow wh
You compete with millions of other blogs on creating and sharing craveable content. You manage multiple social media accounts, seeking that sweet spot of targeted, valuable, engaging updates. You do this all day, day after day. Imagine having some tools on hand that make these daily activities even easier. Tony Restell understands these challenges of social media sharing like few others. As founder of Social-Hire.com, Tony works with multiple recruiting clients at a time on their social medi
You compete with millions of other blogs on creating and sharing craveable content. You manage multiple social accounts, seeking that sweet spot of targeted, valuable, engaging updates. You do this all day, day after day. Imagine having some tools on hand that make these daily activities even easier. Tony Restell understands these challenges of social media sharing like few others. As founder of Social-Hire.com, Tony works with multiple recruiting clients at a time on their social media stra
Happy October! In September, our entire team traveled to New York, NY, to work and play all together for our semi-annual company retreat. (Retreats occur every 5 months, so that they fall on a different month each time. This alleviates one of the challenges of scheduling everyone to travel. This way, if retreat falls over an important personal date or event like a family member birthday, it will change the next year.) Similarly to April, this put a big dent on our customer service numbers. We f
Erik Fisher, an author, podcaster and community manager at Social Media Examiner, stopped by #bufferchat to discuss Facebook marketing tips and engagement! Check out the full Storify recap here! What role does Facebook play in your community strategy? From Erik: * “ Most likely your largest group of followers on one social network: Facebook. You can’t ignore it even if you’re frustrated.” * “ Don’t JUST post great content on Facebook, engage with those who like, share and comment
The very first Buffer blog post—Want to Tweet While You Sleep?—was published in January 2011. Three-and-a-half years and 595 posts later, we’ve covered a lot of ground, learned a huge number of tips and tricks that make social media easier, and written a ton of helpful, actionable content. Many others have just as much—probably even more—awesome content sitting in the archives. If you’re just starting out, you’ll get to this point, too. When your archives are bursting with content, it could ve
You don’t need to ask IT whether your coworkers are on social media during the workday. It’s like asking if they are breathing. And that can be a great thing. Studies have shown that employees can post, tweet, and pin and still perform at peak levels—maybe even more productively than their less plugged-in counterparts. Instead of instilling policies to try to prevent team members from using social media at work, more and more companies are incorporating their employees’ social media enthusiasm
A few months ago, Joel discovered a fascinating book that he shared with all of us on the team. The title of the book was “The Decision Maker ” and it proposed a radically different idea to how companies are run. In short, it put traditional management on its head. Instead of higher-ups making decisions, often far removed from the real problems that
When you find yourself using a product or tool on a daily basis, you get to know the tool inside and out, including all the helpful shortcuts and little-known features. We’d love to share our Buffer secrets with you. Here are some of our personal favorite Buffer features that might have flown under your radar. Enjoy! 1. Share to multiple profiles in one click with Groups Imagine you’ve got an update to share with your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ followers. Imagine you typically share the
Social media advice seems to come in two flavors: what to do and how to do it. Take, for instance, the advice to reshare content from your blog’s archives. This strategy seems to pay big dividends for the accounts who’ve embraced it. They’ve seen more traffic, more reshares, and more engagement even though the content itself isn’t brand new. Sharing old content is awesome social media advice. So how exactly does one go about it? It’s a question I’ve been working to answer for myself as I sha
When it comes to planning where to spend your marketing budget effectively, advertising on social media is one of the most sound investments you can make. I often speak to marketers who are just getting started with online advertising, and I offer the same advice at the start of each call. Advertising is complex; it’s never a set-it-and-forget-it process. It requires testing and checking, and experimenting with all forms of advertising offers the best chance of showing you what is truly effecti
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. At Buffer, we’ve recently made a big change to how we build products and use the Lean Startup methodologies much more closely. It followed what I’d call a phenomenon that Hiten Shah, one of our closest advisors mentioned to us in a mentoring session: At Buffer, we have always taken a lot of pride
We’ve posted huge, helpful lists on social media tools for small business (61!) free Twitter tools (59!), and free marketing tools (29!). Facebook is next—though the list won’t be quite as huge. The built-in tools that Facebook offers to business pages and advertisers are robust and detailed. Hence, you’re likely to uncover a smaller stash of third-party tools than you might for a network like Twitter. Still, there are some fabulous Facebook tools out there, and they can help push your Faceboo
When I set up a daily to-do list, I often have a spectrum of tasks that need to get done. There are the big projects that figure to take multiple days to complete. There are medium-sized tasks that will require some long stretches of intense focus. Then there are the quick wins. I love the quick wins. These are the tasks that can be done in a matter of minutes. They’re super fast fixes or experiments that take little time but pay off with big dividends. And wouldn’t you know, quick wins are e
On September 10th, with all of the Buffer team members gathered in New York for our working retreat, the team of Happiness Heroes joined forces to lead a #bufferchat discussion on customer service (and cute animal gifs). Connect with the dynamic individuals offering support and smiles to Buffer’s community every day: (in order of photo, left to right) Dave , Colin (the Happiness Engineer), Adam , Nic
The other day I was discussing with my teammate and friend Carolyn how it had been months since the last time I attended a yoga class. I’ve been thinking about it occasionally and getting annoyed with myself for not practicing—almost feeling stressed. Like many other things—for example, blogging—I often ind it incredibly hard to get back to things that I “should” be doing. The stress increases and an inside feeling of pressure happens. Then I realized, yoga is in everything that I do. I took s
A while back, my co-founder Leo gave me an interesting suggestion: he said I should try disabling all notifications on my iPhone. I find this suggestion especially interesting because it is one that goes against the normal phone setup. It’s so usual to stick to how things are, and with iPhone apps the easiest thing to do is to “allow” all those notifications. It seems almost odd to even consider doing things any other way. I chose to go along with Leo’s suggestion, although I was admittedly q
Rest, and think. What does your ideal day look like? When do you wake up? Who do you spend time with? What do you do? What does your ideal work look like? What do you create? How does it make you feel? Where are you when you’re creating it? What is your ideal life? Picture it. Embrace it. Bearhug the living daylights out of it. Then go out and get it. You can be anything you want to be This seems impossible, right? At the very least impractical. People don’t just visualize what they want
We share, share, share to social media. How can we tell what works? This is a question I ask myself each week as I review the Buffer social media stats. How can I evaluate and optimize my best social media content? Where do I even start? Having asked the question myself so many times, I’ve found a few different options for analyzing how social media content performs. I’m still experimenting with which way is best, and I’m happy to share with you all the many different ways I’ve tried so far.
Note: Updated Sept. 18 based on more details from Google’s John Mueller in the comments. Thanks again, John! We’re so grateful for Google’s help and guidance in solving our mystery and fixing our errors so quickly! The month of August gave the Buffer Crafters an unexpected SEO mystery to solve. When Google announced that https would become a ranking signal, we switched our Buffer Social blog over to https—and subsequently lost about 90% of our organic traffic! Here’s a look at our organic traf
Imagine you were compiling a course curriculum for a class on online marketing. What would be your go-to resources? In digging through my bookmarks and starred articles, I noticed a growing list of awesome stories and helpful links. If I threw them all together, it’d make for quite the collection! I’d love to share with you what I’ve got so far, and it’d be awesome if you’d consider adding any personal favorites in the comments. Here is what I’ve bookmarked as my must-read social media article
The ideal length of a blogpost is six minutes and 1,500 words. So every blog post you write should aim for that golden, gooey length, right? Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. We love digging up the latest stats and best practices on how to share better on social media. And our findings are just that: General statistics and ideas on what might work best in practice. Many stats are jumping off points for you to test and iterate on what’s best individually and personally for your sharing.
Have you ever discovered a life hack just when you needed to hear it? The timing and the solution perfect, and the next step so obvious that you acted immediately and have stuck with it ever since? When it comes to health, sweeping life changes are especially difficult to implement and even harder to sustain. But in my experience, it’s the small changes you adopt, maintain, and love that add up to a meaningful long-term difference. I’ve been collecting a list of these kinds of fitness, diet, h
