Blog - Page 87
A collection of 2,507 blog posts
I’m thrilled to announce that Dave Chapman has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Weekend Warrior! Chats with Dave are one of the things I look forward to all week. He approaches his work, his teammates, and his self-improvement efforts with a level of passion that is simply inspiring. Since he has come on board for Buffer Bootcamp, he has read several books, run more every week than the last, se
Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer. We really stepped up our game on the security front. We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked * Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features * No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups * 1 new offer made, an
Last week Buffer had the great pleasure of co-hosting a webinar with Twitter (yes, THAT Twitter!) During the webinar, I talked with Jimmy Hang of Twitter for Small Business about how to make your Twitter content work harder for your business, focusing on three major areas: * Writing great tweets * Timing it right * Measuring and testing If you weren’t able to make it but still want to write must-click content on Twitter (and really, who doesn’t?), here’s your guide! (Psst: You can scroll t
April was a really exciting month for Buffer’s content marketing efforts. We tried some new things on both of our blogs, published a lot of content that seemed useful for people and—as always—had a lot of fun learning and experimenting. Let’s take a dive into the numbers! Quick summary of the Buffer blog In April we saw nice steady growth over March’s totals . (Full disclosure: Since April has only 3
Recently, I religiously tried to follow a new routine I created for myself: a 7-day work week routine. The idea was quite simple: I would work 7 days a week, rest 7 days a week, go to the gym 7 days a week, reflect 7 days a week. This was less about working lots, much more about feeling fulfilled every day, feeling stretched during the day but also rested. I aimed to work less each day, and replace two hours of work with a long break in the middle of the day. The biggest thing I wanted to do
Heads up! This is an older post and we’ve since retired the Buffer bootcamp. Feel free to see the latest information here, including all the reasons why we made this change! We’re Retiring The ‘Buffer Bootcamp’ Period For New Teammates – Here’s Why Some call it a trial. Some call it a probationary period. We call it the Buffer Bootcamp. Our intro period for new hires is something we often reference in our monthly updates and hiring reports, but we’ve yet to really take you inside how this pro
A lot of things go into a person’s decision to purchase a product , and social proof is certainly one of those important factors. Studies show that 70% of consumers say they look at product reviews before making a purchase, and product reviews are 12x more trusted than product descriptions from manufacturers. Product reviews [ht
Among the many superpowers I wish I had, one that would be quite useful is the ability to understand social media metrics. I know enough to get by, and I love learning the new techniques to get more from these numbers—and to make sure I’m seeking the right numbers in the first place. In an effort to understand the little bits I can, I’ve done some research into all the many different social media stats you might track and which ones are worthwhile. Wouldn’t you know it, social media stats aren’
At the core of how Buffer schedules posts is one line of a cronjob configuration that hasn’t been touched since the very start when Joel founded Buffer. We still rely on that single cronjob that runs every minute of every day. While this configuration is the same, everything else around it has evolved. Today, Buffer schedules on average 300 posts per minute and over 432,000 posts a day. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and iterations we’ve made to the core of what we do—schedu
What are we really talking about when we’re talking about conversions? Persuasion, right? Influence. When we talk about conversions, we are—most of the time—discussing ways we can be more persuasive, more influential. We’re interested in meeting the needs of customers, fans, and followers and doing so in a way that truly speaks to them. So how can you persuade—i.e., convert—better? Perhaps not surprisingly, the hacks for conversion and persuasion begin with psychology. Understanding why some
One of my favorite “happiness hacks” has been to attempt to remove the word “actually” from my vocabulary. This has been remarkably hard to do, and I still have to struggle not to let it past my lips or fingers. At Buffer, we have found that there is a small band of words that takes away from your message, and “actually” is their leader. It almost doesn’t matter how good the news is; if it comes after “actually,” I feel like I was somehow wrong about something. Consider these two sentences:
Few social media practices escape the arm of experiments here at Buffer. We love testing, iterating, and testing again to find ways to boost our metrics and explore new ways to interact better with our audience. Now Google+’s turn has finally come. We have made pushes on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to grow our numbers, and most recently we’ve been trying out some new tactics with Google+. And while doing so, we noticed that many others are talking about and testing out Google+ right alongs
I’m thrilled to introduce Kevan Lee as Buffer’s newest Content Crafter—but for those of you who frequent the Buffer blog, he hardly needs an introduction. So many of you have already grown to know and appreciate Kevan from his thoughtful, thorough and impeccably researched posts on the Buffer blog over the past 6 weeks. Thanks to his open, personable and honest writing, we’ve all watched as Kevan grew his Twitter account from newbie status [http://blog.bufferapp.
Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning schedules customized just for you * Track and measure repins, likes, and comments Anyone can try out this fun new feature! Authorize your Pinterest account now and try scheduling to Pinterest for 7 days free: What should I be d
I’m so excited to announce that Dan Farrelly is Buffer’s next engineer! Dan now lives in San Antonio and has been tremendous in helping us further our front-end. The thing that amazes me the most is how Dan is completely self-taught. He started in Civil Engineering, previously working in construction management and made the switch to web development. He worked at Slated, a startup that connects independent filmmakers with investors, before joining Buffer. In Dan’s short time at Buffer he’s
The line between a beginner Twitter user and a seasoned pro is a fine one indeed. The distinction changes daily—sometimes hourly—for me. One minute I feel like I’ve got this Twitter thing figured out and the next I find myself overwhelmed by how little I really know. When I dove headfirst (or feetfirst? either way my eyes were closed) into Twitter, I tried just about everything to find the best strategies for a beginning tweeter. Now I’m ready for the next step. Seeing how much the Twitter e
Imagine that you’ve written a blog post that can help thousands of people solve a really painful problem. You’ve written the post, edited it, looked it over a few times to make sure that you didn’t miss anything important, and hit ‘publish.’ You send the post out to your list, share it on all of your social networks, and settle in to see what happens. And then… Nothing. Sure, you get some traffic. Maybe even a comment or two. But nowhere near the level of response that your breakthrough pro
In August I was given the amazing opportunity to join Buffer as a front-end developer. At that time I was living in Taipei teaching English. Buffer is a distributed company so while I coded for them I was able to continue teaching. At the end of October, I left my teaching job because I just couldn’t do both jobs for much longer. It left me exhausted with no time for side-projects. With quitting the teaching job, my girlfriend and I couldn’t stay in Taiwan anymore due to work visas, so we plann
Banana Republic and Susan’s Neighborhood Shirt Shop could be using the same social networks—Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.—but their marketing plans and their marketing tools are likely quite different. Enterprise solutions are great for the big guys, but the rest of us are in the market for something more our size. Small businesses are eager to find valuable tools that take a lot of the time and trouble out of social media marketing and that do so without costing an arm and a leg. I think we
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. For me, one of the most exciting parts of the culture we’ve developed at Buffer is our international retreats. Three times a year (for now) we gather the whole company together. Previously, we took a team of 10 to Thailand and we’ve just returned fr
I’m happy to announce that Steven Cheng is Buffer’s first growth engineer! Steven—who lives in Taipei, Taiwan—works on all things growth at Buffer, building out the growth dashboard, analyzing experiments and other data, and making recommendations to the product team. Steven has a ton of startup experience under his belt, spending 4 years at security startup Amorize Technologies through its acquisition 2013. He then worked in Beijing on a location startup, before joining Buffer earlier this ye
Change is coming to your Twitter profile. Big, beautiful change. Twitter is currently rolling out a profile redesign to all users, a redesign that puts an even greater emphasis on the great Twitter content that you share and one that provides some bonus opportunities to make a branding splash. Visual content will get a big boost. Top tweets will get a bump. And we’ll all be scrambling to find out what works best on this extreme makeover of our Twitter homes. While you wait your turn to find yo
Recently I dug into all the research I could find about headlines for a Mozinar on The Science of Writing Must-Click Headlines on Social Media. I found plenty of data about what words are used in the most shared headlines and social media posts, how long headlines should be and more. What was especially interesting was to dig into the psychology behind some well known headline formulas to begin to understand what makes them so irresistibly clickable. Here’s an overview of what I discovered—8 w
We’re excited to share with you an inside look at Buffer’s revenue and growth stats for the last month. If you read our monthly overview , you likely have an idea of the big-picture progress of Buffer, and we hope the revenue and growth stats here illuminate some of the finer details of our journey. Our revenue is earned primarily through two subscription sources: Awesome Plan and Business Plan. In the charts below, you can see how each o