Blog - Page 88
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
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 This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes.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. Al
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 what we do—schedu
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
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 before, and how to write a great one. One of the most counterintuitive but effective methods I’ve found for increasing my producti
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—has found that there are certain times of day when the body is just better at performing certain activities. Eat breakfast no later than 8:00 a.m. Exercise between 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Read Twitter from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. (your fellow tweeters are more upbeat in the morning). Turns out our optimal ti
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
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 ex
“I’m delighted to admit that I’ve failed at more challenges than anyone I know.” — Scott Adams A friend told me recently about a colleague who is entirely open to feedback. When she’s told that she did something wrong, my friend said, she just starts over. She doesn’t take feedback personally, and she doesn’t feel upset about getting anything wrong. When I heard that story, I thought to myself, “I wish I took feedback that well.” I can’t imagine anything better than an attitude like that, espe
Although there are some people who advocate for dropping all your goals or focusing on systems instead of goals, I’ve never managed to fully give up on setting goals for myself. In fact, I just finished my monthly review today, where I looked at how well I did on the goals I set for myself last month and set some new ones for the month ahead. As I was doing this, I started to wonder whether I was doing myself any favors by reviewing my progress monthly. I had a look into the science of measuri
Of the many email statistics that blow my mind, I think this one wows me the most: Email reaches three times more people than Twitter and Facebook combined. That’s a lot of people! (3.6 billion or so.) Clearly email marketing deserves your time and attention. And like any aspect of marketing, there can be a learning curve to discover the ins and outs and best practices. Hopefully these answers to ten of the most common and important email questions can make the learning curve a little less st
Every day it seems like we feel hundreds of different emotions – each nuanced and specific to the physical and social situations we find ourselves in. According to science, it’s not that complicated by a long shot. A new study says we’re really only capable of four “basic” emotions: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted. But much like the “mother sauces” of cooking allow you to make pretty much any kind of food under the sun, these four “mother emotions” meld together in myriad way
I’ve noticed that the way I spend my lunch break affects how productive I am for the rest of the day: how quickly I get started once I get back to my desk, how effective I am in the first hour after lunch, and how I feel throughout the afternoon. Luckily, we’ve been writing about ways to improve your day for a while now: from tips on making your environment more conducive to creativity to pushing through writer’s block. Why shouldn’t the humble lunch break get the same treatment? I gathered th
Ready to feel kinda old? Facebook has been around for 10 years this month. (I KNOW.) And on the occasion of the social network’s big decade milestone, it seems appropriate to take a closer look at some of the changes that have been taking place at Facebook since our last roundup. But first, let’s look at how the social media giant has evolved over time with this infographic from DPFOC: Facebook has come a long way in a short decade. Now, let’s take a look at some of its most recent evoluti
Constraints can seem like the last thing you’d want for a creative project, but they’re actually beneficial when it comes to doing good work. If you’ve ever faced the common writer’s hurdle of the blank page, you’ll know what it’s like to be paralyzed by innumerable opportunities. What restrictions do is take away some of the choices available to us, and with them, the paralysis of choice that stops us from getting started. We love trying things that seem counterintuitive at Buffer, but we espe
Social media is a crowded place. You need every competitive advantage possible to stand out. Luckily, giving your social media posts a little something extra doesn’t have to mean to a lot of extra work for you. In this post, we’ll go over some simple tricks and best practices of social media formatting to help you create unique, stand-out posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest, along with some tools to help you create memorable blog tidbits worth sharing. Let’s get starte
“We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate.” – Seth Godin It’s easy to be vague, broad, and to never commit to a particular direction. It’s frightening to be specific. One of the key things I’ve learned in the last two years of doing startups is that to make real progress, it’s important to be specific. I think this applies beyond email, but with a specific exa
Having a job in social media is sort of weird. There are still lots of people who might think you’re just “on Facebook” all day while in reality you’ve got a big job: figuring out your social media strategy, perfecting the right times to post, understanding your analytics and building strong connections with your community. That’s why it’s nice to be able to take some time to connect with others who have the same challenges as you. Luckily, there are lots of great social media conferences wort
Today’s post was supposed to be about how to have an effective brainstorming session. Unfortunately, when I started researching brainstorming and what it’s really all about, I nearly put myself to sleep. I’ve never come across so much talk of meetings and rules and conference rooms in a topic that supposed to be creative. Then again, that’s part of the problem: brainstorming was actually designed to be a method for solving problems. Creative ideas might be needed to solve problems but generatin