Blog - Page 87
A collection of 2,569 blog posts
Many people around me have a pretty good artistic side: Music, painting… they are crafters of all sorts, they can truly create things out of thin air! As for me? Well, I’m not a gifted artist. I shouldn’t be allowed to sing outside my shower and I still struggle to draw a smiley face. For a while, I thought the artistic road wasn’t something for me, period. Yet, the thing is, even though I can’t create very much, I still have pretty strong opinions about what I like. Curating creativity It t
We love to make decisions and form strategies based on statistics. It’s why we A/B test and how we change directions on our social sharing. Who doesn’t love a good statistic, especially one that has an actionable next step? You’re likely to find a sea of statistics for social media—I know I’m amazed at how many are out there. My favorite finds are those that are just a bit surprising or unique or even counterintuitive. I’ve saved some of the best social media stats I’ve found over the past fe
During the journey of building Buffer , I’ve had some truly fantastic moments. I’ve reached some defining milestones. New doors have opened for me, and it has been great. Looking back to when I started Buffer , even though I had learned a lot from my past startup experiences, I truly didn’t know what I was doing and I approached everything with that mindset. I was out there to learn an
Our second weekly #Bufferchat focused on personal improvement . Thank you to everyone who was able to participate! Here’s a brief overview of the amazing discussion: Some personal development goals of attendees * Leverage natural talents and strengthen discipline to work smarter * Improve video production skills [https://t
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Being a distributed team as Buffer is has a few special challenges, many of which we’ve talked about here on the blog. :) Working out our office perks isn’t one we’ve
If you’ve been to any of Buffer’s social media accounts recently (take Twitter, for instance), you may have noticed that the lion’s share of stories we share come from us. We tweet our own stuff. We toot our own horn. It would certainly seem that we are in the minority with this strategy. There seems to be a a fine line between sharing enough of your own stuff and sharing too much. Most people would rather err on the side of just enough (or even less) in their social media strategy. We all wan
If you’ve ever tried to work on a few different elements of your life at once (say, exercise, eating well and learning a new language) you’ve probably found that it’s a delicate balancing act. Some days you’re really rocking one category while the other takes a backseat. Some days all are making incremental progress. And some amazing days, you make big strides in all your areas of change. Self-improvement can be like one big game of Whack-a-Mole that
May was a huge month for the Happiness Team at Buffer. We began the month answering 50% of emails within 1 hour and finished it answering 80% of emails within 1 hour. This results in a palpable difference in the happiness of our customers. Huge congratulations to the Happiness Team! How we keep in touch as a distributed team (meaning: no all-hands meeting) We each enjoy the luxury of living in the place that makes us the happiest , and we u
One of the most fascinating things about social media is its ability to clue you in to things that you might otherwise have had no idea even existed—there are tons of conversations, communities, articles and so much more just waiting to be discovered online. The trick is: How do you find all of the information online that’s relevant to you and your interests and bring it back in such a way that you can make use of it all? The answer, for many brands and individuals, is social media monitoring.
Reading is a part of the lifeblood here at Buffer — it’s engrained in our focus on self-improvement and a huge part of the employee perks . From Day One as a Buffer team member, you’re given access to a free Kindle Paperwhite and all the free Kindle books you like. Amongst the team, we love seeing what everyone is reading as new books are posted into our Hipchat room and Facebook Group. Many t
How would you like everyone on your team to see every email that you send? At Buffer, we love it! Our value of transparency extends all the way to the inbox. Every email is public within the team. Every bit of communication gets shared. Everyone knows everything. There are no secrets. If this seems like a radical idea, well, it kind of is. I came from a traditional office environment where email was as standard as it comes: You emailed only those people who needed to know. You cc’ed folks some
Daily by Buffer is Buffer’s new content suggestion app available for iPhone, allowing you to add content suggestions to your Buffer each day through a simple interface. This is how it was built. While updating Buffer for iPhone for iOS 7 we launched content suggestions within our web app, which give users a variety of posts each day that can be added to their Buffer queue to help it stay topped up. Towards the end of developing the iOS 7 update a few of us developed the idea of building a simil
Notice anything different about your Facebook page? Facebook is in the process of rolling out a series of changes for all business pages , tweaking the design and layout in a number of small but significant ways, giving opportunity to marketers to make the most of what’s new. So what is new
On Wednesday, June 11, we kicked off a new weekly Twitter chat called #Bufferchat. In the past, our COO, Leo, hosted #toolschat and found great advice and tools through those Twitter chats. It was definitely time to bring back a Buffer-hosted Twitter chat, and our goal behind #Bufferchat is to further bind our incredible community and create amazing, helpful discussions. We’re aiming to do this weekly and explore a variety of topics that will help all Buffer fans and users! This week’s focus w
We have dozens of ways to measure a successful blog post or social media update , and I’d imagine you’re familiar with all of them. You can track blog traffic by digging into analytics . You can view engagement data on every update you send. The measurable aspects [https://buffer.com/library/the-ideal-length-o
I wrote previously about why programming is a part-time job, where I extolled the virtues of having breaks to allow time for my brain to think about problems I am working on. It seemed to resonate pretty well with people, and it is definitely relevant to fields other than programming. In fact, it’s probably valuable for all knowledge workers to have quality thinking time. But how do you make the time to step away from the computer? How can you force yourself to think about things without commit
Last week we introduced y’all to Buffer’s weekly improvements on the blog for the first time. This week we’ll dive right in to see what each Buffer team member is working on! (We love chatting about each other’s improvements, too. See all of our comments here.) We love hearing your improvement goals, too—tell us about them in the comments so we can c
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie Once in Hong Kong I took a trip to the barber, since my hair was getting a little long. It ended up being one of the most fascinating times I’ve had my hair cut. The last few times I’ve been to this barber, they’ve always washed my hair in the sink before I’ve had my hair cut. The way they did it was to turn the chair arou
How do you choose which social media networks to participate in? Certainly, there’re a ton to choose from. Are you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn? Are you on Pinterest and Tumblr? Instagram and Vine? How many social media networks can you handle? Instagram makes a strong case, if you’re interested in raw numbers and unique appeal. Instagram has 200 million active users and provides a huge asset for visual content, which we all know is driving social like none other. It’s one of t
In late October 2013, Buffer suffered a major security breach. As a startup of 8 people at the time, I’ll admit, security wasn’t a top priority on our minds. Our approach when it came to security was to checkmark the basics like setting up proper firewalls, enforcing SSL, and salt+hashing passwords. Going through a security breach changes your perspective on this. We made a huge mistake by doing the minimum. Since that fateful day we’ve completely revamped how we approach our application securi
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Being part of a remote team has special opportunities and challenges. In this video, hear Joel and Leo talk about how Buffer started remote working, as well as all the different tools we use at Buffer to work closely together even though we’re physically far apart. Want a little more info on those tools? Here’s a deeper look at some of the products and servic
Six in ten of us are visual learners : people who learn best when information is delivered through the eyes; by looking at images or videos, or reading. That’s just one of the reasons why visual content is so important in today’s content marketing world. Another is i
What an interesting month May was for Buffer content marketing! We did a lot of learning, brainstorming and evaluating this month (in addition to writing a lot of content!) As a result, some of these metrics may look different when we do this report next month. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a dive into the numbers! Buffer’s social media blog Our biggest content “hit” this month was 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts, followed by The Big List of The 61 Be
Recently Apple announced iOS 8 and along with it many features that will be hugely useful for Buffer for iOS. Here are my initial thoughts on what you might find in our iOS 8 update this fall. Buffer sharing via App Extension We’ve sometimes struggled to get Buffer integrated in other applications, with requests coming in almost hourly for us to integrate in X & Y. With App Extensions we’ll be able to provide a composer that is available in all applications that use the Action Sheet. Sneaky pee