Blog - Page 95

A collection of 2,567 blog posts

OpenDec 19, 2013
Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries

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

Online MarketingDec 18, 2013
5 Things That Seem Essential That We Launched Buffer Without

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 some

AdvertisingDec 17, 2013
The Complete Guide to Getting Started with Facebook Ads

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

Self-ImprovementDec 16, 2013
6 of the Best Pieces of Advice from Successful Writers

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

OpenDec 15, 2013
Åsa, Andy and Colin are now Senior members of the Buffer team

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

Buffer NewsDec 12, 2013
Introducing Buffer for Business: A Simpler and More Powerful Social Media Tool

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

ResearchDec 11, 2013
How to Find Your Best Time to Tweet: The 4 Most Accurate Methods

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

ResourcesDec 10, 2013
The Habits of Successful People: Be Inconsistent

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

ReportsDec 8, 2013
How much revenue did Buffer for Business generate in November?

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

ResourcesDec 6, 2013
6 Simple Things You Can Do Every Day to Be Consistently Happy

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 f

Life HackingDec 5, 2013
The Science of Self-Control: 6 Ways to Improve Your Willpower Today

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

ReportsDec 5, 2013
Buffer November Update: $2,347,000 run rate, 1,189,000 users

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

ReportsDec 4, 2013
What we have learned about weekends and how fast to hire: The November 2013 Buffer Happiness Report

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

Online MarketingDec 4, 2013
Why marketers should become more technical and 6 tips to get started from the experts

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

ReportsDec 3, 2013
End-of-year planning for the Buffer blog and our most recent stats

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),

Online MarketingNov 28, 2013
8 Helpful Online Tools To Keep Your Company On Track

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

ResourcesNov 27, 2013
The Habits of Successful People: They Do The Painful Things First

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

Buffer NewsNov 26, 2013
Introducing 2 Step Login for Buffer: The safest social media publishing on the web

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

Why You Should Share Your Blog Post More Than Once on Social Media: The Case for Reposting Content

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 [ht

OpenNov 22, 2013
Kicking Buffer into a higher gear: Leo is COO

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

Life HackingNov 20, 2013
8 Surprising Ways Music Affects and Benefits our Brains

I’m a big fan of music, and use it a lot when working, but I had no idea about how it really affects our brains and bodies. Since music is such a big part of our lives, I thought it would be interesting and useful to have a look at some of the ways we react to it without even realizing. “Without music, life would be a mistake” – Friedrich Nietzsche Of course, music affects many different areas of the brain, as you can see in the image below, so we’re only scratching the surface with this post,

Life HackingNov 19, 2013
The power of ignoring mainstream news: Why reading the paper is low quality food for your brain

How much time do you spend consuming information that you have no intention of taking action on or that you don’t care deeply about? For example: the nightly news cycle of local crimes, the endless stream of Facebook and Twitter updates, celebrity gossip, reality TV shows, Buzzfeed articles. The list goes on. In this age of information overload, your life can be filled with irrelevant or unnecessary information in an instant. And here’s the main problem: After a while, these information sour

ResearchNov 18, 2013
8 Simple Copywriting Tips, Backed By Science

I’m pretty lucky to have Leo around, because there are lots of times when I’m stuck on a title for a post, or the perfect word for something I’m writing. Fortunately, we’re pretty keen on experimenting and testing here at Buffer, so I can try lots of different ideas and see what works best. Even better, though, is having some data to give me a rough guide on where to start. I found some really useful data about crafting the perfect blog post or copy, and hopefully you’ll find it useful too.

ResearchNov 13, 2013
How Twitter’s Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets and Favorites [New Data]

I recently covered some big changes that Twitter has made, and here is another one. Twitter just added inline images to tweets so that you don’t need to click a link to see an attached image, but rather the Tweet itself expands. This only works with images uploaded directly to Twitter, which use a pic.twitter.com URL. If you Tweet a Vine video, you’ll also see this inline on Twitter.com or in the official Twitter apps for iPhone and Android. On top of that, you can easily post any image you fin