Blog - Page 94

A collection of 2,567 blog posts

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

Self-ImprovementJan 10, 2014
A Simple Guide to Better Coaching and Feedback in Your Company

This is the fifth 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. I’ve written in the past about the evolution of our culture at Buffer. One of the things we started to do at around 6-7 people as part of the culture is that everyone has a 1:1 session with either myself or their team lead at least every 2 weeks. On top of that, I personally have a 1:1 session with Leo, Carolyn and Sunil (th

Buffer NewsJan 9, 2014
Introducing Powerful New Buffer Analytics: Google Analytics support, Tracking of Social Account Growth and More

We recently launched Buffer for Business and have been really excited to see how people are using it to manage social media for their businesses. Our aim is to make it the most robust tool for managing social media, while maintaining its simplicity. Today we have some great additional features to announce as part of our social media management for business plan. Google Analytics integration First up, we’re excited to offer Go

ReportsJan 9, 2014
How did Buffer for Business do in December 2013: 156% revenue growth, 222% user growth

We’ve had one of the most exciting months for Buffer for Business . In it’s first month of public launch, which we’ve been lucky to have seen received so well , Buffer for Business already grabbed 23.9% of total Buffer revenue and all other metrics have also grown substantially. Here is an insight in all our numbers

Case StudiesJan 8, 2014
How the Founder of Buffer Tweets: The System and 5 Types of Tweets to Keep Your Followers Engaged

Our CEO Joel recently changed the way he thinks about sharing on Twitter, and I really like his new approach. And if you just take a brief glance at his Twitter account , you’ll what an engaged following Joel was able to build over the past. Fortunately, I could just go ahead and ask him about the changes he made and the system he uses, which I thought of sharing with all of you today here. And just a glance at the stats belo

Life HackingJan 7, 2014
6 Powerful Communication Tips From Some of the World’s Best Interviewers

Everyone knows that particular feeling of dread that accompanies a lull in conversation at a party, networking event or even a job interview. You’ve already covered the usual small talk and then – oof – you hit a dead end. What now? Even the most extroverted among us know that being a good conversationalist doesn’t always come easy – but there are some experts who have had more practice than

ReportsJan 7, 2014
Buffer December Update: $2,819,000 run rate, 1,249,000 users

Another exciting month (and year!) has come to an end at Buffer and I wanted to take a moment to share the latest update I have just sent this evening to all our investors. I hope you enjoy reading 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 November went, you can take a look here [https://buffer.com/resources/buffer-november-update-2347000

ResearchJan 6, 2014
10 Awesome Infographics to Guide Your Marketing Plan for 2014

Infographics seem to be getting more and more popular lately. They’re certainly fun to look at, and they convey useful information in a format that’s fast and easy to digest. One thing to keep in mind with infographics is that they’re generally static—unlike blog posts, they’re rarely updated as new information becomes available. To help you get your 2014 marketing strategy off to a great start, we’ve rounded up 10 infographics with useful stats, information and suggestions about online marketi

ReportsJan 6, 2014
Buffer blog stats and ideas for December 2013: 493,253 Uniques, 16,518 Email Subscribers

It’s been a very interesting month for the Buffer blog in December, 2013. We’ve  made a few changes to the content we publish, how we work as a team and are hiring a new content crafter right now. Let’s dig into some of the most exciting things happening: Quick Summary In December we had 493,253 unique visitors, a little less than in November. Overall, that’s been an interesting trend to observe, which we’ve documented a bi

Content Creation Lessons from Growing 41,231 Newsletter Subscribers

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 w

Guides & CoursesDec 31, 2013
The 10 Most Popular Social Media Marketing Guides of the Buffer Blog to Kickstart 2014

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

ResourcesDec 30, 2013
The Habits of Successful People: Thinking in Ratios

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

AnalyticsDec 19, 2013
The Marketer’s Guide to Google Analytics: How to Extract Numbers That Drive Action

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