Blog - Page 89

A collection of 2,459 blog posts

ReportsFeb 5, 2014
Buffer January Update: $3,900,000 run rate, 1,320,813 users

I’m delighted to share a strong update for our first month of the new year. I wanted to take a second and publish the email I just sent to our investors this morning. I hope you enjoy the insights into what we’ve been working on at Buffer in the last month and the results we’re seeing. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have any thoughts or questions about what we’re up to! If you want to read about how December went, you can take a look here [https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-d

Tips / How ToFeb 5, 2014
How to Write a Professional Bio For Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & Google+

Talking about yourself is hard. Doing it in 160 characters or less is even harder. That’s probably why so many of us end up stressed about crafting the perfect professional bio for Twitter – or LinkedIn, Facebook or other social networks. It has to set you apart, but still reflect approachability. Make you look accomplished, but not braggy. Appear professional, with just a touch of the personal. Bonus points for a bit of humor thrown in, because hey, social media is fun! All that in just a fe

ReportsFeb 5, 2014
The January Engineering Report at Buffer: Growing the Team, Security Changes, Hiring and more

As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer.  We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing.  As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer!Let’s start off with a brief summary: * We had 355 people apply for engineering positions at Buffer * 2 new engineers joined the team and 2 more offers were made * We launched 1 new Open Source project with Share.JS * There were

Self-ImprovementFeb 5, 2014
Work Harder on Yourself Than You Do on Your Job

This is the 7th article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel , CEO here at Buffer . You can grab all posts here . “Work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” – Jim Rohn A long time ago, I came across the amazing quote above, which was said often by Jim Rohn. It stook in my mind, and as the years have gone on, I feel

Life HackingFeb 3, 2014
How The “Big Five” Personality Traits in Science Can Help you Build a More Effective team

I was reading an excellent book recently when I came across the concept of the “Big Five” personality traits. I’d never heard of these before but I found them fascinating. You’ve probably taken personality tests in the past—the Meyers-Briggs test is a popular one. The Big Five are more often used in scientific circles for personality research, so I think they’re handy t

ReportsFeb 3, 2014
How Buffer’s blog developed in January: 654,126 Uniques, 18,497 Email Subscribers

January has been an incredibly exciting month for the Buffer blog. We managed to increase our overall traffic by 32.6% compared to December. We expanded the team and we’re working more closely with the growth team to make the blog more data-driven. Let’s dig into the details! :) Quick summary In January, we had 654,126 Unique visitors (32.6% growth over December). There were 839,846 total visits, resulting in 1,061,032 page views. We had a total 59 Buffer for Business trial starts resulting

OverflowFeb 1, 2014
The January Engineering Report at Buffer: The first one! Looking forward to a great 2014

As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer.  We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing.  As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer! Engineering Goals One of the first things Joel and I did at the start of this month was reflect back on how 2013 went and set down some key goals for 2014.   At a high level, here are the most important ones. Transparency As a

Tips / How ToJan 30, 2014
17 Tips, Tools and Tricks to Improve your Pinterest Marketing Strategy

Have you heard the good news? You can now share, schedule and measure your Pinterest Pins through Buffer ! Buffer Awesome and Buffer for Business customers can: * Pin from anywhere on the web, or upload your own image * Create a variety of unique daily Pinning

ResourcesJan 29, 2014
The Habits of Successful People: They Have a Growth Mindset

This is the 5th post in our series discussing The Habits of Successful people, written by James Clear and Joel Gascoigne . You can read them all here. It was my freshman year of high school and our basketball team had started the season with a losing streak. One day at practice, as our team was struggling to find some confidence and get our first win of the season, our coach pulled us together and said somethi

ToolsJan 28, 2014
14 Great Tools to Create Engaging Infographics and Images for your Social Media Posts

It wasn’t long ago that Twitter added inline image previews to its official apps, including the web view. Now, Twitter is including more image focus in the latest redesign. On the left-hand side of Twitter’s new web view, your profile and header images are now visible. We’ve done tests on our own Twitter account previously that showed images make a huge difference to engagement: Images aren’t just useful for Twitter, either. Facebook and Google+ posts look great with images in them, and Pinte

Content MarketingJan 27, 2014
6 Ways I’ve Improved My Writing In the Past 6 Months You Can Try Today

In the past six months that I’ve been a Content Crafter at Buffer, I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve also been trying to write regularly on my own blog and for my startup, Exist. That’s a lot of writing. During this time, I’ve also been experimenting with small changes in my workflow, my writing process and the types of content I produce. The result has been an improvement in my writing and a better understanding of how I work best. Hopefully you’ll find some of these things helpful in improving yo

Online MarketingJan 24, 2014
How We Increased Landing Page Conversion by 16%: Lessons Learned from Redesigning the Buffer Home Page

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to design a totally new landing page for Buffer . I had the green light to get creative and to try something new, even if that meant throwing everything away and starting from scratch. So that’s exactly what I did. The Experiment This experiment, for me, was all about learning. Learning what people care about, learning what imagery tells a story, learning about how visitors examine a landing page, and learning how they decide whethe

ReportsJan 24, 2014
The December Happiness Report at Buffer: New Focus on Monthly goals and 2013 in Review

I just hit send on the following email to the Buffer team to give them a glimpse into what the Happiness Team worked on and achieved in December! Hi guys! December was an awesome month of focused efforts on goals, syncing up as a team and individually a lot more, and some personal bests. Here are the highlights. 1. We launched LiveChat! On December 18th, we launched “live chat” as our third tool (with Olark). In order to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, we kicked off with no set

Tips / How ToJan 23, 2014
6 Random Social Media Tips to Help You Improve Your Marketing Today

When it comes to helping you out with Social Media, we often like to categorize things. For example, we’d write about the optimal timing of your posts , or how to come up with the best headlines , and the like. What happened over the last few weeks though is that we collected a number of awesome ti

Life HackingJan 22, 2014
The Secret to Creativity, Intelligence, and Scientific Thinking: Being Able to Make Connections

When we shared this image from the @buffer Twitter account a while back, it got me thinking. The Tweet resulted in over 1,000 retweets, which seems like an indication that it resonated with a lot of people. There’s a key difference between knowledge and experience and it’s best described like this: The original is from cartoonist Hugh MacLeod , who came up with such a brill

Tips / How ToJan 21, 2014
9 Ways to Counteract Facebook’s Big Algorithm Change

Facebook’s ranking algorithm decides which posts get shown to each user in their News Feed. The algorithm has gone through some major changes in the past , but the most recent one has thrown a lot of social media marketers for a loop. An Adage article [http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-admits-organic-reach-bra

OpenJan 21, 2014
Two more Happiness Heroes join the Buffer team: Mary and Adam

I am thrilled to share that Mary Jantsch and Adam Farmer have both recently completed their Buffer Bootcamps and have accepted offers to come on board with us as official, full-time team members. These two have made such a massive difference at Buffer that we can barely imagine life without them now. Here’s a bit of background on each. Mary is from Spokane, Washington. (This means she spends most of her time on the West Coast,

Self-ImprovementJan 20, 2014
10 Years of Silence: How Long It Took Mozart, Picasso and Kobe Bryant to Be Successful

How long does it take to become elite at your craft? And what do the people who master their goals do differently than the rest of us? That’s what John Hayes, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to know. For decades, Hayes has been investigating the role of effort, practice, and knowledge in top performers. He has studied the most talented creators in history — people like Mozart and Picasso — to determine how long it took them to become world class at their

Online MarketingJan 17, 2014
How to Name Your Startup

This is the sixth article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel , CEO here at Buffer . You can grab all posts here . Choosing a name is one of the parts of a startup I find the most difficult. It’s also something you can easily get hung up on. We all know that the key thing is to move on to actually building [http://joel.is/post/28

Online MarketingJan 16, 2014
People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves

There is the famous story about Steve Jobs when he invented the iPod and everyone in the news and the rest of the tech industry scratched their head a little. MP3 players had been around for quite a while, what was so different about the iPod? Of course, people argued many things were different, but one of the key aspects was how Jobs marketed and presented it: “1,000 songs in your pocket” When ever

ReportsJan 16, 2014
The Buffer Awesome Plan Report for December 2013: $178,792 Revenue and 2.7% Growth

Here is a first for a report we’ve never done before. We started publishing our Buffer for Business metrics for a few months now, however we’ve not done this for the Buffer Awesome Plan (our $10/mo, more consumer focused pricing plan). This is by far also still making up the biggest chunk of our monthly revenues, at roughly 76% coming from the Aweso

News and TrendsJan 15, 2014
10 Big, Recent Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Changes You Should Know for a Better Social Media Strategy

Social media changes so fast that we often miss the small differences on each platform we use. Every now and then I find it really useful to do a roundup of what’s been changing on the big networks lately. Here are ten changes I found that took place in the last couple of months, which could be useful for you

Content MarketingJan 14, 2014
5 Ways to Get Through Writer’s Block or Content Marketing Fatigue

When you’re facing a blank page with no idea what to write, it’s hard to imagine how you’ll ever get to the other side of a finished piece. I’ve gone through this a few times, so I thought it might be helpful to share the methods that have worked for me. 1. Be honest & work your struggles into your content This is actually the method that inspired this post. I was working on a post about Google Analytics [https://buffer.com/resources/the-content-marketers-guide-to-google-analytics-how-to-extract-num

Self-ImprovementJan 13, 2014
Why Positive Encouragement Works Better Than Criticism, According to Science

I’ve written about positivity before, in terms of cultivating a positive outlook for yourself. What I want to write about today is cultivating positivity in your workplace, particularly if you’re a leader. By focusing on positive interactions with your employees and encouraging an upbeat emotional state as often as possible, you’ll be more likely to have a happy, productive and efficient team. How positivity affects our brains To start with, let’s look at how positive and negative emotions wo