Blog - Page 95
A collection of 2,492 blog posts
Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of September. It features our latest thoughts, ideas and questions about content and the Buffer blog. Since we default to transparency with our culture, we thought making this public could be useful for others too. Quick summary In August we published 18 posts on the blog, 6 of which were guest posts. After July’s 59% increase in traffic, August blew that away with a 118% increase. Our top post for the month hit
Update: We looked at 4.8 million tweets sent through Buffer to find the best time to tweet for clicks, retweets, favorites, and more. See the results for your specific time zone! This post was originally published in August 2013. We’ve updated it here with new research and visuals. We’re pretty keen on optimal timing for social media here at Buffer, and I figured it was high time I collected all the information we have about online communication into one place. I’ve collected research and stat
An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next. It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone. Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+
Here at Buffer, we strive to track our progress toward our vision of setting the bar for great customer support. And, since we probably have a lot of the same goals and challenges as other customer-facing teams out there, we’d love to share how we’re doing each month and what we’re trying next. It would be awesome to hear from you, too. How Support Works at Buffer Our current set-up includes three members of the Happiness team, some help from the rest of the Buffer team and the following tools,
Recently, I’ve been following a simple rule that is helping me crush procrastination and making it easier for me to stick to good habits at the same time. I want to share it with you today so that you can try it out and see how it works in your life. The best part? It’s a simple strategy that couldn’t be easier to use. Here’s what you need to know to stop procrastinating once and for all… How to Stop Procrastinating With the “2–Minute Rule” I call this little strategy the “2–Minute Rule” a
One thing that I noticed immediately when joining Buffer was our emphasis on cultivating positivity. If you take a quick look at our culture deck , you can see the high priority we place on this. Since I joined the team, positive thinking is something I’ve focused on a lot, and it’s been fun to see how spending time with positive thinkers rubs off on me. At the moment, some of us are experimenting with sharing one great moment we had at the
One of the big things over the next couple years will be getting the computer on enough desktops that we’ll actually communicate using what’s called electronic mail – Bill Gates It turns out that Bill Gates was more on target with this statement than he would have probably ever imagined. Today, we send so much email that we’re almost constantly looking for new ways to organize our inboxes and keep them under control. Email has grown into such a large area of our lives and our workdays that I w
Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about 12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice. It always seemed to be so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me. More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what huge benefit it can have for my day to day happiness. As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two minute per day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habit
Over a century ago, a lion tamer named Clyde Beatty learned a lesson that is so important that it impacts nearly every area your life today. What was that lesson? Keep reading to find out what a lion tamer can teach you about how to focus, concentrate better, and live a healthier life. The Lion Tamer Who Survived Clyde Beatty was born in Bainbridge, Ohio in 1903. When he was a teenager, he left home to join the circus and landed a job as a cage cleaner. In the years that followed, Beatty quic
Since social media is changing so often. It can be really hard to keep up with stats and trends that affect how you use it. I quite often forget the facts that I’ve read, or I use Twitter based on stats that are outdated now. In fact, when I recently looked at some of the latest social media statistics, it hit me that the fastest growing demographic on Twitter is is the 55–64 year age bracket. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s changed. In case you’re in the same boat wi
A while back I did a big post that lays out what you need to know about the science behind sleep and sleeping better. But if you read it, you’ll probably ask the same question I do: Hey, does this really work? I don’t post this research so we’re all better prepared for Jeopardy. If it’s stuff that only works in a lab, well, I don’t live in a lab. So I’ve been testing a few things. Like any mad scientist, on myself. Here’s what I learned: Seeing Trends Can Tell You A Lot By using a cool li
For a long time I had a certain idea about what makes an introvert or an extrovert. I had always thought that it works something like this: * Extroversion relates to how outgoing someone is * Introversion is the same as being shy. That was kind of my general perception. Doing just a little bit of reading made it clear very quickly – my thinking was way off! Recently I dug into some of the full-on research about introverts vs extroverts and I think I’m much closer to understanding what the t
I have a link to Facebook in my bookmarks bar, so I can visit it with just the click of button, but the link doesn’t go to facebook.com. It’s actually a link to one of my closest friends’ profiles. So my Facebook landing page is actually her profile page. It’s been this way for about a year now. Here’s why: I stopped spending a lot of time on my Facebook News Feed, because I found that the posts I was seeing weren’t too interesting, and I thought I didn’t have any control over that. But it tur
“A large state does not behave at all like a gigantic municipality” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb What does this statement make you think? Disagree at all? When I first read that line, I thought “Oh really? Here are some reasons why a large state could in fact behave like a gigantic municipality...” I was inclined to find fault with the statement even if there is some merit. But it’s not the author’s fault: persuasion is hard. Here are some of the most fascinating studies, that if we just glance at
Today we welcome Belle Beth Cooper to the Buffer team. I just hit sent on an email to let the whole team know that Belle has accepted our offer and is now on board full-time at Buffer. Belle had recently crossed her 45 day mark in the intro period.* Belle is joining the Buffer team from Melbourne, Australia. Belle will continue to write amazingly awesome blog posts as she has so far (this one got 41,000+ likes [http://blog.bufferapp.com/10-scientifically-p
The below was originally an email that was sent out to the whole Buffer team So, powered by one of our 9 Buffer values – “Default to transparency”, we wanted to do the same here and be 100% transparent about our blog traffic in July Quick summary In July we published 16 posts on the blog, 4 of which were guest posts. Our blog traffic jumped by 59% from June, and our top post hit almost 30,000 unique views
Understanding the psychology behind the way we tick might help us to tick even better. Many studies and much research has been invested into the how and why behind our everyday actions and interactions. The results are revealing. If you are looking for a way to supercharge your personal development, understanding the psychology behind our actions is an essential first step. Fortunately, knowing is half the battle. When you realize all the many ways in which our minds create perceptions, weigh
Have you ever walked away from talking with someone that you’ve just met and thought to yourself “Wow, this was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had!”? I’ve recently had one of those and at first I quite selfishly concluded “Wow, I’m a great communicator”. But then I realized, hang on a second, I think this other person was the reason I felt so good about this talk, how did he do that? I started to think about a few of the things this person did, that made me feel so comfortable and open
Running a blog is so much more rewarding when you know people are reading, enjoying and sharing your work. If you’re managing a blog as part of your business, you probably want people to find and buy your products through your blog, as well. So increasing subscribers is an important task for bloggers. These are some fairly simple hacks that you can implement without too much fuss, which should boost your subscriber numbers. 1. Lower your bounce rate – here is how Cameron Chapman explained in
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it. I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by sci
Our biggest aim at Buffer is to help you share content on social media in better ways. I wanted to look at ways we can help you with this entire process, from finding the content to sharing it, to analyzing your social media posts. So I’ve uncovered some cool ways to do these things that you might not already know. Why find and share great content? Maybe you’re wondering why we focus so much on discovering and sharing awesome content here at Buffer. There are a few reason
Change is hard. You’ve probably noticed that. We all want to become better people — stronger and healthier, more creative and more skilled, a better friend or family member. But even if we get really inspired and start doing things better, it’s tough to actually stick to new behaviors. It’s more likely that this time next year you’ll be doing the same thing than performing a new habit with ease. Why is that? And is there anything you can do to make change easier? How to Be Good at Rememberin
Since joining Buffer last September, it’s been so amazing to see how much we’ve grown in just under a year. This is the first time any of us on the team has built something that’s achieved this level of scale and in doing so, we’ve learned so much. I want to share a general overview of Buffer’s scale, and the technology stack that we’ve built to fulfill it. Some Quick Stats about Buffer’s Scale * 2 backend engineers, Colin and Sunil [https://twitter.com/s
Making decisions is something we do every day, so I wanted to find out more about how this process works and what affects the choices we make. It turns out, there are some really interesting ways our decisions are affected that I never would have guessed. Luckily, we can take action to improve most of these. What happens in your brain when you make decisions Obviously lots of things take place inside your brain as you make a decision. What I found really interesting were the various things that