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A collection of 2,598 blog posts
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
One of my favorite “happiness hacks” has been to attempt to remove the word “actually” from my vocabulary. This has been remarkably hard to do, and I still have to struggle not to let it past my lips or fingers. At Buffer, we have found that there is a small band of words that takes away from your message, and “actually” is their leader. It almost doesn’t matter how good the news is; if it comes after “actually,” I feel like I was somehow wrong about something. Consider these two sentences:
Few social media practices escape the arm of experiments here at Buffer. We love testing, iterating, and testing again to find ways to boost our metrics and explore new ways to interact better with our audience. Now Google+’s turn has finally come. We have made pushes on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to grow our numbers, and most recently we’ve been trying out some new tactics with Google+. And while doing so, we noticed that many others are talking about and testing out Google+ right alongs
I’m thrilled to introduce Kevan Lee as Buffer’s newest Content Crafter—but for those of you who frequent the Buffer blog, he hardly needs an introduction. So many of you have already grown to know and appreciate Kevan from his thoughtful, thorough and impeccably researched posts on the Buffer blog over the past 6 weeks. Thanks to his open, personable and honest writing, we’ve all watched as Kevan grew his Twitter account from newbie status [http://blog.bufferapp.
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 schedules customized just for you * Track and measure repins, likes, and comments Anyone can try out this fun new feature! Authorize your Pinterest account now and try scheduling to Pinterest for 7 days free: What should I be d
I’m so excited to announce that Dan Farrelly is Buffer’s next engineer! Dan now lives in San Antonio and has been tremendous in helping us further our front-end. The thing that amazes me the most is how Dan is completely self-taught. He started in Civil Engineering, previously working in construction management and made the switch to web development. He worked at Slated, a startup that connects independent filmmakers with investors, before joining Buffer. In Dan’s short time at Buffer he’s
The line between a beginner Twitter user and a seasoned pro is a fine one indeed. The distinction changes daily—sometimes hourly—for me. One minute I feel like I’ve got this Twitter thing figured out and the next I find myself overwhelmed by how little I really know. When I dove headfirst (or feetfirst? either way my eyes were closed) into Twitter, I tried just about everything to find the best strategies for a beginning tweeter. Now I’m ready for the next step. Seeing how much the Twitter e
Imagine that you’ve written a blog post that can help thousands of people solve a really painful problem. You’ve written the post, edited it, looked it over a few times to make sure that you didn’t miss anything important, and hit ‘publish.’ You send the post out to your list, share it on all of your social networks, and settle in to see what happens. And then… Nothing. Sure, you get some traffic. Maybe even a comment or two. But nowhere near the level of response that your breakthrough pro
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. With quitting the teaching job, my girlfriend and I couldn’t stay in Taiwan anymore due to work visas, so we plann
Banana Republic and Susan’s Neighborhood Shirt Shop could be using the same social networks—Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.—but their marketing plans and their marketing tools are likely quite different. Enterprise solutions are great for the big guys, but the rest of us are in the market for something more our size. Small businesses are eager to find valuable tools that take a lot of the time and trouble out of social media marketing and that do so without costing an arm and a leg. I think we
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. For me, one of the most exciting parts of the culture we’ve developed at Buffer is our international retreats. Three times a year (for now) we gather the whole company together. Previously, we took a team of 10 to Thailand and we’ve just returned fr
I’m happy to announce that Steven Cheng is Buffer’s first growth engineer! Steven—who lives in Taipei, Taiwan—works on all things growth at Buffer, building out the growth dashboard, analyzing experiments and other data, and making recommendations to the product team. Steven has a ton of startup experience under his belt, spending 4 years at security startup Amorize Technologies through its acquisition 2013. He then worked in Beijing on a location startup, before joining Buffer earlier this ye
Change is coming to your Twitter profile. Big, beautiful change. Twitter is currently rolling out a profile redesign to all users, a redesign that puts an even greater emphasis on the great Twitter content that you share and one that provides some bonus opportunities to make a branding splash. Visual content will get a big boost. Top tweets will get a bump. And we’ll all be scrambling to find out what works best on this extreme makeover of our Twitter homes. While you wait your turn to find yo
Recently I dug into all the research I could find about headlines for a Mozinar on The Science of Writing Must-Click Headlines on Social Media. I found plenty of data about what words are used in the most shared headlines and social media posts, how long headlines should be and more. What was especially interesting was to dig into the psychology behind some well known headline formulas to begin to understand what makes them so irresistibly clickable. Here’s an overview of what I discovered—8 w
We’re excited to share with you an inside look at Buffer’s revenue and growth stats for the last month. If you read our monthly overview , you likely have an idea of the big-picture progress of Buffer, and we hope the revenue and growth stats here illuminate some of the finer details of our journey. Our revenue is earned primarily through two subscription sources: Awesome Plan and Business Plan. In the charts below, you can see how each o
A good tweet peaks at 18 minutes. An evergreen blog post lasts for years. It’s crazy to see the disparity between two pieces of content that we all create on a regular basis. It’s a little reassuring, too, that some things we make online have a chance to endure. Having this long-lasting content on your blog and in your archives is a boon to traffic, social sharing, and more. Chances are good your site already has some evergreen articles, whether you intended to make them evergreen or not. Thes
March was an incredible month for the engineering team at Buffer. Looking back, it’s pretty exciting to see what all we’ve accomplished for moving the ball forward and how we’ve executed on some of our engineering goals. Here are some stats and tl;dr for March: * 1 person converted to full-time (yay Dan Farrelly !) * 6 “5 whys” conducted * 1 new open source project started * 15 minutes of system wide downtime * Switched to New Relic for platform monitor
It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in March. The team is currently 20 people, compared to 17 in February . Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas: Applications overview We saw an incredible amount of 1,944 applications come in in March, which has been absolutely, positively overwhelming. Here is a breakdown of the different areas: Engineering Happiness Commun
Nowadays, when I endeavor to check my Facebook statistics, I do so with the window open, birds singing, a pint of ice cream at my desk, and party jams playing on my jambox. I must balance the bad news with some good. Checking Facebook statistics has been bad news for a lot of us lately as we wrestle with declining numbers and shrinking reach. As the Facebook algorithm continues to change and adapt, we continue looking for answers. Why can’t we reach more fans with our updates? What kind of con
Ever since we established the Buffer values that are at the heart of our company culture, we’ve been continuously on the lookout for new ways to live those values every day – particularly our important value of defaulting to transparency. Last year, Buffer shared all of our salaries and the formulas behind them. We