Blog - Page 91
A collection of 2,568 blog posts
Great news: Courtney Seiter has joined the Buffer team full-time as Head of Content Marketing! Courtney, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., wrangles the Buffer blog and Open blog, making sure they’re always full of useful content for Buffer’s audience. I remember when I first came across Courtney’s writing through her Marketing Land column over a year ago and I loved reading and following her posts there. In fac
Hey team! I’m excited to share a few bits of awesome people and numbers news this month. Let’s dig in. :) Numbers We set our sights on a big jump this month. :) It’s been really fun crashing toward these new highs! Goals set for March: * 76.5% within 1 hour (February was 64%) * 91.5% within 6 hours (February was 84%) * 189 live chats (February was 105) Actual numbers for March: * 67% within 1 hour (Missed the goal) * 93% within 6 hours (Exceeded the goal!) * 1% over 24 hours (Forgot t
Subway has this sandwich with Fritos on it. I know this because their commercials play constantly on my TV and computer such that I nearly have the ads memorized. Every time their commercial airs, Subway is flirting with the fine art of frequency. How often is too often to share with your audience? Social media marketers face the same dilemma. We want to connect with followers without driving them away. We aim for the perfect balance of sharing and listening. I end up guessing a lot, trying
The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent
From the moment you join the Buffer team, you are encouraged to read. In fact, the welcome email implores you to read early and often, and you receive a Kindle Paperwhite and free Kindle books just to make sure there are no obstacles to reading as much as you want. (Sound like something that might interest you? We’re hiring! ) And once you are part of the team, you continue to see the deep impact that reading has on the goals and improvements of all of us. When we s
We recently realized that we have been miscalculating our true monthly and annual recurring revenue. I wanted to write up some of the details around this and also apologize for accidentally misleading as a result of getting it wrong. With our commitment to transparency (and the fact we’re rare in sharing our revenue numbers at all) I felt it’s even more important to share our error. We’ve always reported “Annual revenue run rate” and “Revenue” for the month in our investor updates [https://buff
It is a great day in the land of Buffer. Daniel Feeney has completed his Buffer Bootcamp and come on board as our very first “Weekend Warrior” Happiness Hero, answering customer questions and keeping track of product feedback (not to mention impressing us with his biking) on Fridays through Tuesdays. Daniel has pioneered the “Weekend Warrior” position for us. Several months ago, we determined that customers weren’t having a very happy or consistent experience when they needed help on the weeken
Buffer runs seven days at a time. Many of our improvements, metrics, experiments, and tasks fit into one-week slices, which helps us to move quickly on new ideas and to revisit our results right away. Instead of it being early April around here, it’s just Week 14. This weekly perspective has some big advantages across all our departments, including marketing. Reviewing and improving our marketing metrics week over week, for the blog and our social media accounts, lets us quickly experiment, tes
We analyzed over 10 million posts sent via Buffer, looking for a common theme among the most shared content. Our findings surprised us as much as they might surprise you. The clear winner: pandas. Panda content—photos, GIFs, and stories—made up nearly 18 percent of the top 500 posts sent through Buffer. These posts received an average of three times more clicks and 10 times more retweets than content without pandas, and the gap between panda content and the next-highest viral ingredient, monkey
As I was brainstorming ideas for my last post on the Buffer blog, I started reflecting on what I’ve personally learned during my time at Buffer. My writing process is considerably different today than it was when I joined Buffer nine months ago, so hopefully you can find some nuggets in the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned that might help you as well. Slow beginnings When I first joined Buffer, Leo had been running the Buffer blog pretty much on his own: he wrote or sourced th
It’s with very mixed emotions at Buffer that we bid farewell to Belle Beth Cooper , Buffer’s first Content Crafter. Today her final post appears on the Buffer blog. We’re happy because she’s going on to something really special: her own startup, Exist – a quantified self app that digs up insights from hidden connections in your data. (You can learn more about Exis
When Buffer was in its very early stages, just a couple months after the product launched, we applied to be part of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program. We were rejected. Since then, we’ve been keenly aware that this experience is one that many fellow startups have encountered and one that many more will eventually face. When Karen Cheng, CEO of GiveIt100, shared the story of her Y Combinator rejection, it struck a chord with readers. Rejection stories don’t get told nearly often
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
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