Blog - Page 88
A collection of 2,461 blog posts
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 [https://buffer.gho
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 evolut
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 [https://buffer.com/resources/the-big-list-of-100-tools-tips-and-tricks-to-work
“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 prog
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
Ready to do something really groundbreaking and revolutionary in social media marketing? I’ve got just the thing: customer service. We talk a lot at Buffer about customer happiness, and it’s because we truly believe in it. Here’s how our Leo Widrich puts it: “Customer support is the very rare opportunity to connect to your customers on an emotional level. You can’t do that in any other way.” And while there are a growing number of other awesome companies who feel the same way we do, there’s
“Routines are important, but only if you make them your own. Simply copying someone else’s routine probably won’t work.” — Jeff Goins Although I’ve researched daily routines and habits often, I still find myself constantly coming across great ideas from other bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurs about how they manage their time and productivity. Productivity and using time wisely is always on our minds at Buffer as we develop our social media management tools. In fact, “work smarter, not hard
One of the things I love about the culture at Buffer is the emphasis on working smarter, not harder. Our team is all about getting plenty of sleep, exercise and recreation time so that our time spent working is as productive as it can be. Working harder can be an easy habit to slip into, though. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off at the end of the day, or to take time out on the weekend and stop thinking about work. With a startup of my own to run, I find this even harder to manage lately. Whene
You don’t have to know everything about SEO to start reaping the benefits of it. There are some small but important search engine optimization changes you can make right away. Here are 5 simple things you can do today to improve your SEO. 1. Sign up with Webmaster Tools On-site optimization (making sure all the technical details of your site are how they should be for both search engines and searchers) can be complicated. Luckily, both Google a
I know exercise is good for me . I know it’s important for my health and happiness and that it’s necessary for general fitness. That part’s easy — we hear about how we should exercise more all the time. What I didn’t realize was how being inactive is really detrimental to the brain and body. I didn’t understand all of the specific ways regular activity
“The best things we know and love started as tiny things.” — Joel Gascoigne Buffer’s CEO, Joel, wrote a post not too long ago about the importance of starting small with new projects. He makes some great points about how easy it is to see the finished product of someone else’s hard work and forget about how long it took them to get to that point: “It’s difficult to understand how
I have some really exciting news to share: Brian has become our Product Manager. He’s been in this role for 2 weeks now and even after 1 week he was doing a better job running Product than I ever managed to do. It’s been incredibly fun to work with him and help him thrive in the role, and now it’s time to make things official. How the idea of stepping away from Product came about During our retreat in Thailand I had a chance to spend some time thinking on a hig
I’ve written about how creativity works in the brain before, and I found it really useful to understand this process. Or, I should say, multiple processes. There’s so much going on in the brain during creativity that science is still trying to pin down exactly how it all works. What we do know is which three parts of the brain work together to help us create and come up with new ideas: The Attentional Control Network helps us with laser focus on a particular task. It’s the one that we activat
In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), that’s what Brailsford was asked to do. His approach was simple. Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as the “1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area re
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in January. With the fantastic responses to previous reports on in revenue , customer happiness and content , we thought we might be able t
Aren’t shortcuts just the best? While everyone else takes the long way, you and your shortcut get to breeze right through, skipping a few steps and feeling pretty smart doing it. Finding a good marketing shortcut feels especially great, considering all that we marketers have to do in a day. That’s why I went hunting for the top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing
In August I was given the amazing opportunity to join Buffer as a front-end developer. At that time I was living in Taipei teaching English. Buffer is a distributed company so while I coded for them I was able to continue teaching. At the end of October, I left my teaching job because I just couldn’t do both jobs for much longer. It left me exhausted with no time for side-projects. Wi
I’ve noticed lately that my mind has been wandering a lot so I wanted to see how attention works and how to manage it better. It turns out a lot of us have wandering minds and struggle to stay focused. In fact, when we’re reading, our minds typically wander anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time . Voluntarily keeping our attention on one thing continuously can take a lot of effort, so it’s not surprising that I struggle with this sometimes.
One of the most fun and useful things I’ve been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers. Luckily, there are lots of tools being created lately to make automation much easier for those of us without a solid understanding of how our computers really work. Sometimes repetition is good for us [https://buffer