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A collection of 2,617 blog posts
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 man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” – Thomas Jefferson Around two years ago I stopped watching and reading mainstream news. I don’t read a single newspaper, offline or online, and I don’t watch any TV at all. I mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook, and it created a lot of discussion, so I wanted to expand on my thoughts and experiences. When I first started ignoring news, I felt that I was simply making an excuse, that if I had
In most industries, including the tech world, “support” is a piteous word. Posts like this one, while written in jest, enforce the stereotype that working in support essentially sucks. We are known for getting abused by ranting, angry customers. We can’t take a day off, because the emails never stop flowing in. We must just be doing this to get trained with the company, right? Well, I’d like to offer a slightly different view into the world of customer service. While we do occasionally bear t
Can one ever have enough Twitter tips? I know I can never get enough of them. Twitter is a constantly evolving, constantly challenging place to experiment, enjoy, and discover, and we all have a unique approach to the way we get things done with our tweets and followers. I’ve shared some of my favorite tips before—both for beginners and for intermediates—and we thought it might be fun to tap you all to share your expertise! Below you’ll find some tips from the Buffer community, as well as a f
Web apps are great. Really they are – I’m a big fan! Using web apps has been a huge step forwards in so many ways. Productivity has sky-rocketed. Writing web apps is terrible. There’s so many things to think about that, to be honest, you don’t really need to think about and shouldn’t really be thinking about at all. But, when you spend an hour just trying to sign up for a web host to put your new world-changing app, you get time to think about other things that would also be amazing to do. An
I’m excited to share the details for Buffer’s progress in April. Last month was an incredible time for Buffer with our third Buffer retreat, some huge product announcements, and continued MRR growth. Here is the update I just sent to our investors. If I can answer any questions or if something comes to mind, please share in the comments. :-) If you want to read our update from March, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users
How do we know what features to work on next for Buffer? A few months ago, we had the opportunity to test out a method of investigating which types of social accounts Buffer users would be most interested in using next. Here’s the tool we used to find out which type of account was most-wanted, and how we followed up with everyone who sent us a request. What we did Here’s our current Connect page: The Connect page didn’t always look like this, however. Just a few months ago several of these
Do you know what you’re posting, sharing, and blogging this Thursday? How about two Thursdays from now? Thursday of next month? Thursday of next year? We don’t have things figured out quite to that extreme here at Buffer, but we do have some idea of what’s ahead. (Those of you who are yearly planners, our hat’s off to you!) Planning content far into the future is a common element of many marketing strategies, and the erstwhile content calendar—in its many shapes and forms—fits this role perfec
April has been a very interesting month. MRR growth has slowed to around 7.08% increase, which is the lowest over the past few months. What’s interesting is that most of the growth came from Business plans, which grew MRR by 15.6% in April. Awesome plan MRR growth slowed to 4.6% in March, and was 8.3% in the month before. At the same time, churn has decreased by almost 2 percentage points to 5.28% on the Awesome plan (compared to 7% in March) and also to 5.99% on Business plans. Awesome numbe
Picture this: It’s your first month on the job as a Customer Happiness Hero. A core piece of your company’s app stops working. And 16 of the 20 team members of the team are on flights across the world. That’s exactly what happened to our newest two sweet, unsuspecting Happiness Heroes when Buffer stopped shortening links for a few days in April. (Both new heroes have since completed Buffer Bootcamp and come on board despite this. :) Sorry about that, Patrik and Dave! Lesson learned about all tr
I manage the family budget with speed and efficiency. My spreadsheets are slick, my workflow is fast, and I’ve learned enough tricks along the way to shave hours off my process. I’ve also never bothered to teach anyone else how I do what I do. Don’t worry, this post isn’t about money management. (Phew!) Rather, I find that it can be hugely helpful to share the tools, tips, and tricks that make the things we do on a regular basis as efficient as possible. Using Buffer for social media managemen
I’m thrilled to announce that Patrik Ward has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Happiness Hero! One of the most immediately noticeable qualities about Patrik is that he seems to exist with a laugh always just under the surface. Even when focusing, he is one conversational shift away from splitting into a huge, encouraging grin that spreads to every face and lifts every nearby spirit. It has an ef
Being a columnist means something a bit different to me than it did growing up. When I started down my writing path, I adored magazines and newspapers and the superheroes who wrote weekly or monthly columns in the op-eds or the back pages. Now, I adore those who write at my favorite blogs and websites. The back page of Sports Illustrated has become, for me, the featured spot on Huffington Post. And the most amazing news of all is that being a columnist online is a dream that anyone—you, me, yo
Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer. We really stepped up our game on the security front. We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked • Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features • No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups • 1 new offer made, and 6
I’m thrilled to announce that Dave Chapman has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s newest Weekend Warrior! Chats with Dave are one of the things I look forward to all week. He approaches his work, his teammates, and his self-improvement efforts with a level of passion that is simply inspiring. Since he has come on board for Buffer Bootcamp, he has read several books, run more every week than the last, se
Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer. We really stepped up our game on the security front. We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked * Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features * No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups * 1 new offer made, an
Last week Buffer had the great pleasure of co-hosting a webinar with Twitter (yes, THAT Twitter!) During the webinar, I talked with Jimmy Hang of Twitter for Small Business about how to make your Twitter content work harder for your business, focusing on three major areas: * Writing great tweets * Timing it right * Measuring and testing If you weren’t able to make it but still want to write must-click content on Twitter (and really, who doesn’t?), here’s your guide! (Psst: You can scroll t
April was a really exciting month for Buffer’s content marketing efforts. We tried some new things on both of our blogs, published a lot of content that seemed useful for people and—as always—had a lot of fun learning and experimenting. Let’s take a dive into the numbers! Quick summary of the Buffer blog In April we saw nice steady growth over March’s totals . (Full disclosure: Since April has only 3
Recently, I religiously tried to follow a new routine I created for myself: a 7-day work week routine. The idea was quite simple: I would work 7 days a week, rest 7 days a week, go to the gym 7 days a week, reflect 7 days a week. This was less about working lots, much more about feeling fulfilled every day, feeling stretched during the day but also rested. I aimed to work less each day, and replace two hours of work with a long break in the middle of the day. The biggest thing I wanted to do
Heads up! This is an older post and we’ve since retired the Buffer bootcamp. Feel free to see the latest information here, including all the reasons why we made this change! We’re Retiring The ‘Buffer Bootcamp’ Period For New Teammates – Here’s Why Some call it a trial. Some call it a probationary period. We call it the Buffer Bootcamp. Our intro period for new hires is something we often reference in our monthly updates and hiring reports, but we’ve yet to really take you inside how this pro
A lot of things go into a person’s decision to purchase a product , and social proof is certainly one of those important factors. Studies show that 70% of consumers say they look at product reviews before making a purchase, and product reviews are 12x more trusted than product descriptions from manufacturers. Product reviews [ht
Among the many superpowers I wish I had, one that would be quite useful is the ability to understand social media metrics. I know enough to get by, and I love learning the new techniques to get more from these numbers—and to make sure I’m seeking the right numbers in the first place. In an effort to understand the little bits I can, I’ve done some research into all the many different social media stats you might track and which ones are worthwhile. Wouldn’t you know it, social media stats aren’
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
What are we really talking about when we’re talking about conversions? Persuasion, right? Influence. When we talk about conversions, we are—most of the time—discussing ways we can be more persuasive, more influential. We’re interested in meeting the needs of customers, fans, and followers and doing so in a way that truly speaks to them. So how can you persuade—i.e., convert—better? Perhaps not surprisingly, the hacks for conversion and persuasion begin with psychology. Understanding why some