All posts - page 88
A collection of 2,598 blog posts
Do you measure the return on your social media investment? It seems blasphemous not to, yet that’s exactly the direction we’re experimenting with at Buffer. We’ve recently shifted our focus toward email list building along with continued traffic growth. These metrics are common enough; it’s what we’ve stopped measuring in lieu of email that is most unique and notable. We no longer focus on social media ROI. It’s strange but true. We’re a social media blog that does not emphasize social media
Not only do we strive for personal improvement every week at Buffer, those of us who work on the blog here get the opportunity to dig into the science of self-improvement in many different areas. Here are a few resources for improvements that might be on your list: • 6 Research-Tested Ways to Improve Your Memory • 8 Ways to Improve Your Morning Routine • 6 Ways I’ve Improved My Writing In the Past 6 Months • 8 Scientifically Proven Ways to Maximize Your Lunch Break • 6 Ways to Improve Your Will
Important update: We’re retiring the Daily app and Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… Buffer’s mission has always been to do one thing really well: make it super easy to share great content. We think our web app and mobile app make it pretty easy to share, so what about the second part of our mission? How can you stock up on great articles and photos to share? Finding great content—the kind that moves you, makes you think, or st
I’m excited to share the details for Buffer’s progress in May. If you want to read our update from April, you can take a look here . I’ll keep it short this month, just wanted to give you an update on our latest progress. Traction update • New users: 60,000 (Total: 1,537,000, from 1,477,000: +4.1%) • Daily active users: 40,000 (last month also 40,000) • Monthly active users: 156,000 (down from 157,000: -0.6%) • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $283,00
Where do blog post ideas come from? This one came from someone else’s headline. We are constantly inspired by the amazing work of others, and we owe a lot to the deep thinking and amazing resources that are readily available within the industry. How can we get more ideas more consistently? There’s inspiration everywhere. We’ve just got to keep our eyes open. Copyblogger gave us the inspiration for this post. One of their recent headlines mentioned “idea curation,” a new-to-us term that really
How do you balance the necessity of highly secure passwords with the utility of easily recalling them all? It’s a question I mull each and every time a security breach happens. When the Heartbleed vulnerability was discovered last spring, the mandate was for everyone to change all their passwords right away. It’s still on my to-do list. I cringe at the thought of getting hacked, and I also cringe at the thought of taking the time and mental energy to do a complete overhaul of my favorite passwo
If you’ve been struggling with Facebook lately for your brand page, don’t think you’re alone. Between changes to the layout of brand pages, News Feed algorithm adjustments, and countless other tweaks and changes, marketers are constantly on their toes anticipating what’s coming next. A current issue that many are facing is the decline of a post’s organic reach. Marketers have had their organic reach cut by more than half with their Page’s published posts. This change is caused by a deeper und
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
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 and I knew that the only way I was going to progress was to adopt a very open mind. I’m writing this post because
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 mentioned yet—but come to think of it, it is a little tricky. Typical startup perks are pretty much off the table. Long-distance Ping Pong is kinda tough. And Buffer doesn’t share a kitche
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 way. As you read over our improvements wee
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? And how can you optimize your page to get the most value from what’s changed with the Facebook Page redesign? I collected the changes and differences from this Facebook page to the last, including all the
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 of an ideal blog post and social update are substantial. What about the immeasurable elements? These are the elements that you can’t really quantify, which might be why they don’t receive the same emphasis. It’s hard to pitch a story t
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 cheer you on and learn from your goals! Here’s what we’re working on this week: Niel– I ran my first 10km (trail run!) the past Sunday which was