Blog - Page 91
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest piece on how relationship marketing drives sustainable growth. Growing a newsletter for your company blog is tough. Creating content that drives passerby traffic is always easier than maintaining a company blog that keeps people coming back. It might work for BuzzFeed, but creating list posts with .gifs won’t work for you if you want to build a loyal
Through-out 2013, there were a number of posts here on the Buffer blog that you and others simply found more useful than any other posts. How do we know? We looked at all our past post through a simple Google Analytics analysis and this is what we found. Since we recently launched Buffer for Business, we thought of putting together a complimentary guide of the best resources for you to make the most of Social Media in 2014. In case you missed any of these, or need a refresher, here are the top
This is the fourth 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. Something I’ve found difficult to completely embrace, but which understanding has been super important, is the idea that there is a ratio for everything. I’ve started to call this Ratio Thinking, and I’ve found myself describing this to quite a number of people recently. The law of averages I think we all understand that
Admission time: I don’t know much about Google Analytics. In fact, I generally gloss over when I read anything about it, since I usually find it all quite overwhelming and hard to understand. And not that much fun, to be honest. But, being a content marketer, I can’t afford to ignore Google Analytics. It’s a great (free!) tool that helps us keep track of our goals for the Buffer blog and understand where we can improve. If you’re in a similar situation to me, hopefully this post will highlight
Hi there! We’ve updated our transparent salary formula since this post originally was published. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here. When we first established the Buffer values that we wanted to have as the center of our company culture, we knew that sticking to these ideas would be an incredible challenge. Especially since we’ve seen before that these values can easily end up being little more than a set of words written on a piece of paper. In ou
This is the third 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. It’s a long time ago now, however I still remember it very well. When I first went about creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for Buffer, there was something I kept very clear in my mind. When I came across Eric Ries and his work on the Lean Startup while working on my previous startup, I tried to read almost everythin
Here is something I realized pretty quickly: Getting started with any type of online paid advertising can seem overwhelming. Yet, there are two online platforms you just can’t avoid: Google and Facebook. With over 1 billion active users, Facebook is one of the most important social networks for advertisers, and whether you like it or not, it’s something every small business should attempt to master. In fact, according to a study from Pew Research Center [http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the
I’ve been reading some advice from successful writers lately and exploring what their routines are like to see what I can learn about Here are six of the most common pieces of advice I came across that have helped me a lot improving my writing here at Buffer . It also features actionable t
I wanted to just write a brief post to share a team change we’ve decided to make here at Buffer. I chatted recently with Carolyn and Sunil and they both expressed that Åsa, Andy and Colin have crushed it in recent months and have been super loyal to Buffer during good times and tougher times. I completely agreed and think that Åsa, Andy and Colin have been incredible examples of the Buffer culture and of the volume of work which can be done. In addition, Andy and Colin have always upheld the c
Today we’re thrilled to tell you about the next big thing we’ve been working on here at Buffer: Buffer for Business. It’s a brand new Buffer product, geared towards small, medium and larger businesses to make social media publishing a whole lot easier! It comes with the same, simple and intuitive Buffer user interface, that so many of you have come to enjoy. On top of that, we’ve also added considerable power for you to help your social media management take off. Here is a quick overview of w
Finding the right time to post on social media can be tricky, especially when each different social network has its own audience to think about. And we’ve written a few different articles here on the Buffer blog that touched on how to come up with the best time to Tweet. And yet, we never quite dedicated a full article to the topic. There are a few different ways to help us decide what timing we shoul
This is the second 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. Recently 37signals published an article titled Some advice from Jeff Bezos. This wasn’t your usual advice, and I found it interesting to read and how familiar it felt as I read each next line. The post was all about “changing your mind”. The way I would describe the overall theme, is “inconsistency”. Here’s the key part of
In November, we’ve seen some interesting developments for Buffer for Business . I’ve recently sent this email to the whole team and also included some thoughts and projections for the next month. I hope you’ll find them interesting! For reference, here are last month’s numbers . Revenue Monthly Recurring Revenue from June & July : $2100Monthly R
We’re starting a new series on the Buffer blog today with great tips and insights from Joel, CEO here at Buffer. Joel will share his ideas and insights about lifehacking, building a business and working on company culture. Here is #1: Today it’s a little over three years since I first had the idea for Buffer, and with the year and a half before that which I worked on my previous startup, I’ve started to notice a few patterns amongst the ups and downs that come with building a startup. One of t
One of the key parts of our culture at Buffer is a focus on self-improvement. We each pick an area to improve on each week and share our daily progress and challenges, making it a social, supportive way to adjust, create or change our habits. There’s still a lot of work to be done for self-improvement to be effective, though. I’ve been through a bunch of different improvement focuses in the last few months, including positivity, running, reading more and learning French. Each one has been fun t
Below is the monthly update email I have just sent this morning to all our investors. I hope you enjoy taking a read about the full details of our work on Buffer in the last month. I’m excited to hear from you in the comments if you have any questions about what we’re up to! If you want to know how October went, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users: 66,000 (Total: 1,18
I just hit send on an email to the Buffer team with all of the numbers and trends for November. November was super exciting as we were still recovering from the October hack, and we brought on 2 really talented new heroes. Here’s the full report! :) Statistics: Emails via Help Scout : Customers helped: 4,614 (a 21% decrease from October) Total Email Replies sent: 6,855 (a 22% decrease from October) Note: this month stays on the trend of a general increase from mont
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how marketing is evolving, and marketers need to keep up. I’m still not sure of the exact definition of “growth hacker,” since everyone seems to be putting their own spin on the term still, so I’ll use the term “technical marketer” in this post to mean someone who works in marketing and uses technical skills (e.g. programming) to enhance their work. To start with, let’s see what people are saying about this idea of marketers getting technical and why i
Quick Summary In November we had 529,184 unique visitors, a little less than in October. We published the same number of posts (15), and had 3 times as many posts republished elsewhere. How did the blog do overall? * Total uniques: 529,184 (-3% from Oct) * Total posts published: 15 (10 in-house, 5 guest posts) * Total posts republished: 12 (TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Business Insider) * Top 3 referral sites: Facebook (70,173 uniques), Fast Company (12,596),
When I joined Buffer, one of the things I was most excited about was seeing how we can get a lot done with a distributed team. I knew that Buffer was specifically set up to work this way and I was curious about seeing that play out. It turns out, this is possible mostly because of the great tools we use. We’re continually testing and adding new ones to our arsenal to make sure we’re all on the same page and are looking after our customers as best we can. Here are some of the products and servi
Before I became an entrepreneur, I went to business school. While studying for my MBA, there was one lesson that I learned which has proved to be useful over and over again in my life. I was sitting in a marketing class and we were discussing ways to design a wonderful customer experience. The goal was not merely to provide decent service, but to delight the customer. Behavioral scientists have discovered that one of the most effective ways to create an enjoyable experience is to stack the pai
You may have heard about the recent security breach that affected many Buffer users. This is something we would have hoped to never face in our lives. And yet, through the experience of the hack, we’ve had a unique opportunity to learn about security and safety on a level that we would have likely never explored before. On top of that, we were incredibly amazed by how supportive our customers (you!) were through the whole process of recovery. With all that trust given to us, despite the big m
Reposting the same content on social media can be quite a controversial topic. Some people don’t like it at all, while others advocate it strongly. For Buffer’s social media accounts, we regularly do this. We found this to work surprisingly well and thought it might be interesting to explore the topic in a more analytical way. Here is some interesting data around republishing your content multiple times on social media. Simply looking at the latest social media stats, there seems to be good ca
My co-founder Leo has had quite a few different roles throughout the lifetime of Buffer, and he’s had a large impact on lots of different areas. Until now Leo’s title has been CMO, however he’s working in the trenches of business, on marketing with Belle, as well as doing BD and also admin tasks (like organizing the retreat!). Looking backwards, his real strength has always been in getting things done and moving things forward, regardless of which area of Buffer. We