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A collection of 2,604 blog posts
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 and can even change how we act in life. For lots of us, it also helps us sl
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 retreats, helping us to find awes
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 following normal working hours or only working from an office. If you’re working on a startup or have aspirations to create one, I’m guessing you can relate. By experimenting with these concepts, I’ve fou
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 grown to over 1.5 millio
June was a month of great content, curation and experiments at Buffer. We saw an amazing milestone for us Content Crafters as we made a big push toward growing our email subscriber numbers and rounded 30,000 subscribers, topping out at the end of this month with 30,289 folks on our Buffer Social mailing list! (For everyone who’s getting our emails , thanks! A
Imagine you’ve got a week’s vacation planned this summer (lucky you!), and you’d love nothing more than for your social media efforts to keep humming right along while you’re gone. No problem. There are a handful of social media tools that can assist with your out-of-office marketing. Automation techniques can help fill your queue, and the 10 tools below can help you keep tabs on your profiles, engage with your audience, and communicate with your team. Here are 10 time-saving social media tool
I was blown away by a show I saw recently which included performances by acrobats and trapeze artists. The trapeze in particular was captivating to watch. It looked so joyful that I found myself wanting to find out how to have a go! I love to try new things; new experiences make life fun and interesting. And I’m incredibly lucky and proud to work for a company that values positivity, happiness and self-development . Every week we share w
June was a fantastic, fascinating month for customer happiness at Buffer as we made great strides toward meeting goals, expanded our awesome team, and pushed forward in a number of new, exciting areas. Stats June 2014 is the first month that I know of where we hit “inbox zero” at least once per day in both email and twitter. (We use Help Scout and Sparkcentral , respectively.) It feels great to be getting closer to the point where our customers do
I believe that when you’re building a startup, it is as much about developing yourself as it is about developing your startup. Recently I’ve realised that “feeling uncomfortable” is just what I need. Why is it a good thing to feel uncomfortable? Seth Godin describes why we should feel uncomfortable using the following chart: Godin argues that most people reach some comfortable “Local Max” and then stay there, because to jump to new heights almost always involves some discomfort: “The proble
Your online reputation is your reputation. And it better be good. The way you describe yourself on Twitter has everything to do with how people perceive you online. So how the heck do you do it right? In this post, we’ll go over the 7 key ingredients of a powerful Twitter bio–whether you’re a novice or a social media pro. But before we get into that, let’s first discuss the challenges of creating a Twitter bio. Get more clicks on Twitter by scheduling your posts for the ideal time. Get sta
We’ve been working hard at Buffer to launch new features and products, improve existing product areas and build out our internal tools to help us move faster than ever. This is our first product report of the year, and I’d love to explore everything going on behind the scenes at Buffer! What we launched: New product launches in June In June we had several major launches that are helping us to move the needle of Buffer’s growth. In the web app, we’ve begun curating new topics for content sugges
I sometimes find myself getting lost in a sea of marketing advice. There’s just so much out there. We produce four to five marketing posts on the Buffer blog every week, and we are just one of many sources of social media marketing advice. Multiply our handful of weekly posts with the countless blogs, tweets, updates, and emails, and the social media tips grow exponentially. How can a marketing idea or bit of advice stand out from the crowd? We’ve certainly been eager to experiment with answe
At any given time, I have a side project running. It’s often a new blog or a Tumblr or a book or a newsletter. Sometimes I try to design WordPress themes. Other times I try photography. This ethos of new projects and new improvements runs throughout our Buffer team. We love to find ways to grow, excel, and improve through side projects and hobbies. I have yet to create the next Uber or Gmail—million-dollar and million-user enterprises that began as side projects. The good news: You don’t have
When I choose someone new to follow, when I compose a new tweet, when I share and favorite an update, I seldom think about the why. My following sessions would probably seem haphazard to an outsider, and my favoriting technique comes and goes from one strategy to another. Even so, the way I use Twitter is far less random than I thought. There is science and psychology behind the way we all tweet. Researchers have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Twitter—favori