Blog - Page 87
A collection of 2,462 blog posts
UPDATE: See a newer, updated version of this post with a brand-new infographic . Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much? I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media [https://buffer.com/library/the-complete-guide-to-social-media-formatting-make-your-co
When I was in elementary school, my wardrobe was fully automated. I had a certain pair of sweatpants for Mondays, jeans for Tuesdays, Zubaz for Wednesdays, and so on. It was quite the system for a fourth-grader! Automation has been a big part of my life ever since. I love to find helpful ways to work smarter—anything to shave an extra few minutes off my day. Automation, when done right, scratches this itch perfectly. The same holds for automation of one’s social media marketing. There are huge
The word “audit” deserves more love than it gets. When I hear the word, my mind goes straight to tax season and the manila envelope crammed with receipts and forms that I keep stashed away in the closet. Audits seem to equal anxiety, which is too bad – because not all audits are created equal. A tune-up at the garage is essentially an audit for your car, a check-up at the doctor is an audit of your health. You can learn a lot from regular reviews like these.The same holds true for an audit of
I often get asked about my research process for the Buffer blog. For my science and life hacking posts in particular, I rely heavily on scientific research to back up my points, so there’s a lot of research to be done. Unfortunately there’s no secret sauce or magic bullet when it comes to this process. It’s mostly just a matter of time and practice. I do have a few tips to share about where and how I find the sources for my research, though, so hopefully you’ll find these useful. Finding the
We at the Buffer blog can vouch for LinkedIn’s growth as our blog has experienced a swell in LinkedIn referral traffic over the past year, up 4,000 percent from last year at this time. Part of that has to do with our emphasis on updates and sharing at LinkedIn, another part has to do with the popularity of LinkedIn contributing a larger audience and more eyes to our content. Together, these factors have made LinkedIn a great source of visitors for our blog, and I’d imagine you might see a simila
When you have a goal — whether it’s starting a business or eating healthier or traveling the world — it’s easy to look at someone who is already doing it and then try to reverse engineer their strategy. In some cases, this is really useful. Learning from the experiences of successful people is a great way to accelerate your own learning curve. But it’s equally important to remember that the systems, habits, and strategies that successful people are using today are probably not the same ones th
We’ve written about creativity a few times on the Buffer blog, but it’s hard to keep track of everything we learn about it. One day I’m adjusting the temperature in my workspace, and the next I’m trying to put off creative work until I’m tired. If you’re in the same boat, and you find it’s difficult to remember what will improve your creativity and when you should do your most creative work, hopefully this list will help you get it all straight. 1. Your brain does better creative work when yo
While this is a bit overdue, I am still so happy to share that in February, Zach Flower has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp and accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time! Zach lives in Boulder, Colorado and in the past has worked at Mocavo and PhotoBucket. In such a short time Zach has had a huge impact on the Buffer backend. He has improved our internal metrics framework, implemented real-time Twitter analytics for our business customers using Site Streams [https://dev.tw
There is no one way to create viral content. So many different variables go into a viral post—timing, emotion, engagement, and so many others that you cannot control. There is no viral blueprint. The greatest chance we have to understand viral content is to study the posts and places that do it best, figure out what worked for them, and try it for ourselves. Thanks to some incredible work by the team at Ripenn, we have access to headline analysis from four of the top viral sites on the web—w
We’ve looked at a few different strategies to help remember the names of people you meet on the Buffer blog before, but there’s lots to say about memory. It turns out that science is continually finding new connections between simple things we can do every day and an improvement [htt
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. A lot of people have asked us how we hire at Buffer and how to go about getting an interview for one of our open positions. I hope I can shine some light on it here! The best candidates for us, we’ve found, have all four of these attributes: I’d love to share a bit more about each of these 4 attributes. The 4 qualities that create a match 1. Alignment wi
Psychological theories often feel a bit too complicated for me (I’m sure there’s a theory that explains why that is) but I’ve come across a few that are simple enough to understand and that I think of often, particularly when dealing with other people. I thought it might be fun to take a brief look at a few psychological theories that are especially relevant for business, marketing, leadership and overall communication skills. Keep in mind I’m no professional psychologist, so if you’re keen to
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 wha
Important update: We’re retiring the Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… Overcoming writer’s block. Curating great content. Sharing on social media many times a day for better engagement. These are topics we talk about often on the Buffer blog, where our daily focus is making you smarter and more productive. So when we realized that Buffer could go one step further and actually begin to solve these challenges for our customers, w
I get a particular thrill from finding little-known restaurants that serve amazing food. My greatest hits list includes elk tacos at a highway diner, cinnamon rolls at a downtown hole-in-the-wall, and – perhaps my greatest discovery of all – barbecue from a trailer in a parking lot. (Seriously, it’s good barbecue!) The discovery process for great content has a similar thrill. How great does it feel to share a bit of awesomeness that few others have found? Without a doubt, sharing great finds o
February was an exiting time for the engineering team at Buffer. Here are some of the numbers at a high level. * 2 new engineers joined the team (1 Growth Engineer, 1 Front-end) * 10,243,834 updates were posted to social networks in February * 0 mins of system wide outage (woohoo!) * 10 minutes of web dashboard outage * 405 ms: Our average api response time SSL and other security improvements We continued with our momentum with our security improvements in February. The Hall of Fame [htt
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in February. The team is currently 17 people, with 3 new people who have started their bootcamp in February. There were also 3 more offers made in February and all 3 have accepted their offers and will join us in March. Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas: Applications overview We saw an awesome amount of 2,024 applications from some truly amazing candidates come in in February for the 10 positions we’re current
I wrote a post recently about ways that you can work smarter, not harder . As I worked through the list of techniques I’d collected, the post became so long that I had to split it in half. Here are even more suggestions to help you make your day more productive without putting in extra hours. 1. Limit your to-do list I’ve written about the history of the to-do list [https://buffer.com/resources/the-origin-of-the-to-do-li
I’m happy to share our update for February which I just sent to Buffer investors. I hope the insights into our progress and processes are useful. Just leave a comment if you have any questions :-) If you want to read our update from January, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users: 62,000 (Total: 1,383,000, from 1,321,000: +4.7%) * Daily active users: 36,000 (up from 35,000: +2.9%) * Monthly a
We had a fantastic February, reaching exceeding our goals due to the very hard work from the Heroes. Read on for some of the changes we made and lessons we learned! Numbers Speed Our goals for February were to hit 55% within 1 hour and 80% within 6 hours, a sizable but feasible improvement from January. At the end of the month, we reached: • 64% of emails within 1 hour • 84% of emails within 6 hours Volume We sent 9,800 replies in February, roughly the same as January, in order to assist 5,40
What does your ideal day look like? Would you believe there’s a scientifically correct answer to the question ? Research into the human body—its hormone allotment , its rhythms , and its tendencies [https://buffer.com/resources/5
February was a month of big transitions for the Buffer blog. Our overall traffic decreased 8% compared to January (read on for our theory as to why) as Leo trained the new girl (that’s me!), Belle cut back on her posting schedule as she works on her own start-up and we worked on expanding the team further – more on that in a minute. Let’s take a look at the details!
At Buffer we have a focus on self-improvement. We share what we are working on each week and get encouragement and tips from other members of the team. Here is a recent example. One of my improvements recently has been to get a software side project up and running. As I’m a programmer by trade, this shouldn’t present any particular difficulty—but software has this uncanny knack of making things slightly more complicated than they really should be. This is the story of the last few weeks—the e
The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and and I found it amazing how this book, which has now sold over 15 million copies, originally started: “I prepared a short talk. I called it ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ I say ‘short.’ It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes.” After giving this talk for some time, Carnegie found that the attendees started discussing their e