Blog - Page 85
A collection of 2,569 blog posts
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 m
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
Most companies have meetings of some sort. Many startups have daily standups . As a fully remote and distributed team with members in a variety of countries, continents and time zones , Buffer meetings have to be a bit diff
My first post on my personal blog was one where I pondered whether exercise is a requirement for sleep . The post was actually triggered by my inability to sleep, and I wrote it in the middle of the night. Since then, I have made a number of adjustments and I now sleep much better, so I’d like to share what I’ve changed. Why create a
Since visual content arrived on the scene back in 2012, it has showed no signs of stopping. Best practices on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter always reference images and videos as key elements for driving engagement. Graphics and visuals on blog posts are one of the best ways to get the most value and deliver the best experience for your content. Visuals are a big deal. If you need any more convincing, or if you’d simply like to hear the argument in a beautiful visual form, I roun
June was a great month, here’s the latest: Traction update * New users: 60,530 (Total: 1,598,049, from 1,537,519: +3.9%) * Daily active users: 39,752 (up from 39,559: +0.5%) * Monthly active users: 158,894 (down from 160,241: -0.8%) * Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $303,000 (Annual: $3,636,000 up from $3,396,000: +7.0%) * Cash in bank: $715,000 (last month: $653,000) * Team size: 25 people across 5 continents We’ve been super happy to keep up consistent MRR growth, with 7% growth ag
I have a lot of stuff. That’s not really meant to be a brag—far from it. More just a statement of fact. Amazon deliveries arrive all the time. Knickknacks and little gifts and random tchotzkes take over spaces. I can’t stop buying art. And plants. And why do I have so many nail polishes? It’s one of life’s mysteries. You probably have a lot of stuff, too. When did life start to feel so overstuffed? When I discovered The Minimalists recently via an interview
Selling is tough. It can be scary. It can be intimidating. But if you wanna succeed in this life, you’ve gotta learn how to do it. As the founder of Hustle Con, the startup conference for non-technical founders, I’ve been throwing conferences for a while now—and that means the team and I have done a TON of selling. Whether it’s a $10,000 sponsorship or 350 tickets to a conference, we’ve learned the tactics to convince people to act. In this post, I’ll show you 4 step-by-step methods that use s
Whenever I find myself doing research for new social media tips, the studies and resources I find are always fascinating. Not only is the intense depth of academia inspiring, the methods that researchers use for collecting information are so intriguing. I often wish I could be involved in studies like these, just so I can take the tests, try the quizzes, and see how I’d be evaluated. Some of the most fun ones to consider are those that involve different types of social sharing. They seek to pr
Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, we all start our day at some point. And we all seem to start it differently. Some of us hop online to check social media, others dive in to email, still others eat breakfast, exercise, or pack lunches for the kids. There’re a million different ways a morning could go. Which morning routine might be best? While there’s probably not an ideal morning routine that fits everyone, we can learn a lot from the morning routines of successful people as we
In this week’s #Bufferchat, Lee Odden , CEO of Top Rank Marketing and expert on all things marketing, joined us to share his thoughts and lead a discussion on “What’s next in digital marketing?” Inspired by the voices of experts in Lee’s post on Top Rank Online Marketing Blog, “21 Digital Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2015 ,” the #Bufferchat reflected many of these predictions and spurred
Escaping into a good book is one of my favorite activities, so I could hardly believe it when I learned that working at Buffer meant a free Kindle and the license to grab any book I wanted, anytime! (In fact, I snagged two today.) You’ll notice that reading shows up again and again in our improvements—fiction and non-fiction, business books and pleasure reading. Why? Because we know that reading makes us better writers [http://blog.bufferap
One thing I’ve learned at Buffer is that being open to not knowing things seems to be the best way to learn quickly and teach others at the same time. So many of our biggest hits on the blog have come from saying, “We don’t know the answer. Let’s find out!” On many matters, we haven’t any authority. Is this an OK way to get by? We’ve found great success in not knowing, and there’s no reason why you can’t, too. While we can certainly see the value in establishing yourself as an authority in yo
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. Earlier this year, Buffer had a job opening for a position we (at the time) called “Life Saver.” That person, we thought, was going to work in lots of different and important areas to help keep Buffer running smoothly—things like helping to plan our multiple annual retrea
I just booked a flight for a vacation to Cancún, Mexico, and it got me pondering the relationship between work and rest in a startup. One reason I’m building a startup is to gain control over many aspects of my life. I like to hack my productivity, and I’ve found I don’t necessarily thrive by followingnormal working hours or only working from an office [https://buffer.com/resources/distrib
If you have ever wanted to pop an escape hatch or teleport to distant worlds just to get out of a meeting, take heart. There are ways to hold a better meeting. Forward-thinking companies have found creative ways to get their teams together, and their lessons and structure can be easily duplicated in meetings anywhere. These creative methods aren’t just clever for cleverness’s sake: Most of them are science-backed and all of them are grounded in successful experience. With just a handful of ha
Is creating the next viral hit on your marketing to-do list? If you’re in the marketing or social media industry, the answer is probably “Yes!” (and if you’re not, and the answer is probably still “Yes!”). Campaigns that succeed are those that carefully consider what makes content go viral , including ea
A saying you’ll often hear around Buffer’s content team is,”There’s probably a plugin for that!” We’re often chasing new ways to work smarter, faster, and more productively—and the same is true of our Buffer blog. We’re quick to grab any and all WordPress plugins that can give the blog an extra edge or can wire up a feature we’d love to test. Whenever we dream something up to try on the blog, the first place we turn is WordPress plugins. We’ve collected quite the list of favorites. How about y
One night, I got a Facebook message about the 100 Happy Days challenge. So I clicked through and here’s what I read: “While the speed of life increases, there is less and less time to enjoy the moment that you are in: Every day submit a picture of what made you happy!” OK, fair point, we don’t take time to appreciate things anymore… I was about to click away and get on with my life, when I read that next sentence: “71% of people tried to complete this challenge,
We talk about “steps” a lot at Buffer-how many we’re aiming for every day, how many we’re getting and how we’re making changes to get more. That’s because each member of the Buffer team gets a free Jawbone UP (among other neat perks) when they join us full time. Why? Not only is general self-improvement part of Buffer’s core culture, exercise pops up quite often as a specific form of self-improvement for many of us. Here’s how Buffer founder Joel puts it: In the last three years, I’ve gone fr
Update – we launched Respond a social listening tool and customer service tool Respond displays your community’s tweets in a real-time tweet inbox. The list of new messages—both tweets and DMs—runs down the left column. Each particular message opens into the panel on the right. This intuitive layout gives the Twitter stream an inbox feel where you can reply, archive, keep track of conversations, and—excitedly—reach inbox zero! We’d love for you to experience the real-time support experience w
When I meet with outstanding first-time entrepreneurs, I can really feel the passion and determination they have, and I know that if they will just continue there is every chance that eventually they will be very successful. Often a topic that comes up in these conversations is the timing of raising funding as a first time founder. I’ve had entrepreneurs often talk to me with just an idea or a very early prototype with no traction and tell me that they want to raise funding. We closed our $450K
Just the other day someone introduced me to a blogpost that could have fit right in on the pages of KISS Metrics or HubSpot. Instead, it was published on a brand new blog. And I started thinking, how might this blog get from unknown to well-known if it’s already got quality figured out? Provided we’ve got the goods, what’s to help you or me stand out from the crowd? Quality, in many ways, has become a commodity—a mass-produced, ubiquitous good in large supply. Social media marketing and conten
At Buffer , every product decision we make is driven by quantitative metrics. We have always sought to be lean in our decision making, and one of the core tenants of being lean is launching experimental features early and measuring their impact. Buffer is a social media tool to help you schedule and space out your posts on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin. We started in late 2010 and thanks to a keen focus on analytical data, we have now
