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A collection of 2,607 blog posts
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
Every single day, 4.75 billion posts go up on Facebook. To put that number in perspective, there have only been 129 million books published since the beginning of time, with an average word length of 64,000 words. That means we are publishing more content (by number of words) every single day on Facebook than is contained in every single book published since humans have existed! For us marketers, it’s our job to stand out in that absurdly large crowd of content. One way to do this is to have a
This may sound crazy, but here it goes… Building your email list isn’t as hard as you think. Really. In fact, when you know what to do and how to do it, list building is pretty darn simple. How do I know? I struggled with my blog’s conversion rate (1.4%) for over a year. That is, until I discovered the 5 secrets that I’m going to reveal to you in this post. After implementing these 5 simple techniques, my blog’s conversion rate skyrocketed by 134.85%. And today I’m going to show you exac
In February, my husband and I jumped head-first into urban farming — starting our summer garden from seeds. It then developed into an even larger endeavor when we added 13 chicks into our home. And then four ducks. And then three more chickens… The past several months have been a blur between brooding chicks, building coops, free-ranging, fixing fencing, gardening and finding eggs. As I look back upon these summer months, several distinct themes come to mind — and boy, do they ripple beyond ou
In August I think we really found our stride in a lot of ways, and hitting $4M is a huge milestone. At the same time, our MRR growth the last two months has been a lot lower than we’d like – 5% or 6% is not ideal for us. I’m confident with our hard work and new teams set up we can pull that up. (I also want to share some of July’s numbers—I went on vacation right at the start of the month and let the update slip by.) Traction update July * New users: 65,712 (Total: 1,663,761, from 1,598
My world at Blinkist revolves around books: self-help books, psychology books, books on business and marketing and persuasion. They’re full of colorful anecdotes and tried-and-true strategies for making just about anything in life easier or better. While having multiple options for mastering a skill is a nice luxury, too much of a good thing is still just that. At Blinkist, we condense nonfiction books into 15-minute summaries; even so, if you tried to read the entirety of the library, the onsl
I’ve got several go-to moves when I’m playing basketball. The crossover. The fadeaway. The tear drop. I’ve got several go-to moves when I’m writing social media updates, too. Title case. Text only. Signatures. I imagine you’ve got your own favorites, too. Combined, there are a litany of ways to compose, style, and organize a social media update, even in just the words we use in our updates. I’m always on the look out for new experiments to try with the way I write a social media update. My la
Jason Keath from Social Fresh Conference joined us this week to discuss all the social media tools needed for social publishing, blogging and more! Check out the highlights of the chat on Storify here! Here are some of the tools covered in the chat (though some might fit into multiple categories). Daily Social Publishing * Tweetdeck * Coschedule * ClicktoTweet * Buffer * WordPress * Photoshop * Mention * Hootsuite * SumAll * BuzzSumo * Twitter * YouTube * Facebook * Daily app
When I first set foot in Disneyland, I race to the most famous rides first—Splash Mountain, the Matterhorn, Indiana Jones, all the biggest and best. Little do I know there are just as many hidden gems and overlooked attractions that I’ve likely missed in my sprint for the headliners. Social networks are a little like Disneyland in this regard. There’s so much to see and so much to do that some of the fun stuff is bound to slip through the cracks. Which features of Facebook, Twitter, and the ot
Five or more hours of sedentary sitting, according to Dr. David Agus, is the health equivalent of smoking a pack and a quarter of cigarettes. Yikes. Yet, sitting around is something we get plenty of practice at. Reading and writing and creating on a computer makes for big chunks of sedentary time. If you’re reading this post right now, are you sitting down? How long have you been sitting? It’s a topic that I think of often. We’ve all kind of taken a shining to it on the Buffer team, being more
I’m so happy to announce that Mike San Román will be joining our team as our next web developer! Mike will be focusing on our Buffer for Business offering. In the short time Mike has been working with us, he’s accomplished quite a lot. Mike focused on understanding our Business customers through survey forms and running various experiments. He’s also implemented some key performance improvements including client side caching with IndexedDB. Since launching our Business offering last December,
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 tweet? What if a photo and article summary could travel alongside every post of your content? And what if you could do all of this for free, right now? Twitter cards offer all this p
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 quicker, more succinct, right to the point.” @Kevanlee * “ Writing for the
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
