Blog - Page 95
A collection of 2,452 blog posts
One of the most unchanged elements of our life today is our optimal work time or how long we should work – generally, every person I’ve spoken to quotes me something close to 8 hours a day. And data seems to confirm that: The average American works 8.8 hours every day. At least, those are the official statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: And yet, for most of us it is obvious that knowing how long the average person works every day has little to do with how efficient or productive th
Ever since I’ve started blogging about topics on social media and especially Twitter, one of the questions that I have by far heard the most often is the following: “When is the best time to Tweet for me to reach more followers?” A lot of this requires a lot of data-analysis and whilst a ton of tools exist out there, they aren’t always terribly accurate. That’s why we’ve come up with this: We couldn’t be any more excited to have teamed up with the folks from Followerwonk [https://follower
Growing up, we all heard the expression “practice makes perfect” from our high school coach/music teacher. Then Malcolm Gladwell went on to popularize the research that expertise developed over “10,000 hours” of deliberate practice. But how does that really work? In this post, I’ll share what science knows about learning and how special type of brain tissue called myelin, plays a key role in helping us a
This article appeared in full form on OnStartups and you can read the post “The Pitch Deck We Used To Raise $500,000 For Our Startup ” there. When Joel and I first arrived in San Francisco around 2 years ago, we had absolutely no idea about fundraising. Even the term “pitch deck” was something copmletely new to us. One lessons, that we quickly learned, however, was that it’s a big no-no to
We all like novelty in one way or another. In fact, our brains are made to be attracted to novelty. And it turns out that it could actually improve our memory and learning capacity. Having just moved to a new country, I’m currently surrounded by novel sights, sounds and experiences. It’s an overload of new for my brain. However, after only being here a week, I’m surprised how ordinary my house and my street seem. After walking the same route to the train station three or four times, it quickly
You don’t have to be ‘the boss’ to take on a leadership role. I learned that quite quickly while working with my startup—in many instances, if you have the most experience within a certain skill, you’ll have to become the ‘leader’ during some key moments and guide the rest of the team. What I happen to find fascinating is that numerous psychology studies tend to make a connection between this ability to lead when necessary and the achievement of professional success—especially for men. The c
Let’s say it’s your birthday. First, happy birthday! We got you a cake. We’ll come back to the cake in a moment. Second, we have a question for you on your special day. Your friends want to give you the celebration you deserve, but they’re stumped. They can’t decide whether to a) let you plan your perfect evening, from the first stop through the main event, or b) plan the perfect evening for you, leaving you with just one responsibility: to enjoy. Which would you pick? For myself and a surp
At Buffer, we’ve been experimenting quite a bit with the support/engineer relationship. A high bar for support is one of the key pillars of Buffer. We have three full-time ‘happiness heroes’ for a team of 10 and answer 60% of emails and tweets within the first hour. Where we get slowed down are with the more technical issues that are reported, which require deeper investigation. For a few months we had established ‘the 5 veggies rule’ where it was highly encouraged that each developer did fiv
Out of all internet users 67% are using social networks. And which kind of demographic uses which social network has been forever interesting for marketers. Some of the latest insights from Pew Research centers reveals the latest stats. Twitter is still used more than Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Also, African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to use Twitter than Whites, according to the study. Most of the findings are in line with what you might expect and some are truly surprising.
This is a guestpost by Mikael Cho , the co-founder of ooomf . More about Mikael at the bottom of the article. Palms sweaty. Heart racing. You know the feeling. Whether it’s five people or fifty, public speaking is a gut-wrenching experience for most of us. Before co-founding my startup, I had a huge fear of speaking in public. Any time I had to present something in front of more than a handful of people, my stomach would turn to knots and my thro
We’ve all heard what makes us more productive. To be more productive, get: Better sleep, better food, better work environment, etc. And I think these tips are amazing and a great focus to have. Heck, we even wrote about most of these and the science behind it here on the Buffer blog. And yet, today, I thought of changing it up dramatically. It goes nicely with Tim Ferriss’ moto: “To do the impossible, you need to ignore the popular.” So with this article, I tried to really step aside from the
Body language is older and more innate for us as humans than even language or facial expressions . That’s why people born blind can perform the same body language expressions as people who can see. They come pre-programmed with our brains. I’ve always been incredibly fascinated with body language and how it helps
“I like to go with my gut!” is something I’ve told myself many times in the past. “Yes, all those other people need to track their social media metrics, I don’t, I’ve got a good intuition.” That was probably one of my biggest mistakes for a long time. Tracking things all the time and developing a data-driven mindset is one of the most important things I’ve learnt in the past 2 years. And there is still a long way to go. Here are some of the social media metrics worth your time and what I’ve di
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve started to cover a lot of heavily scientific articles recently here on the Buffer blog. And judging by the spread of them, they have been really well received. One thing struck me though. What about simple things we can do? A friend recently told me she has added a 20 minute window in her day where she tries to go for the “quick wins”. I thought that’s a brilliant idea! So I went ahead and looked up 7 simple things all of us can do today to get more productiv
Today is an exciting day at Buffer. We’re now a team of 11 people working full-time on the product, and we are preparing to grow the team towards 15 people fairly rapidly (our first step is to find someone to write great content for our main blog ). With this growth, my co-founder Leo and I started to think about some changes to our leadership structure which would help us to be best placed to both move faster day-to-day and
Why did the Mona Lisa become one of the most famous paintings of all time? That’s a question an incredible amount of people have asked themselves in the past. And one possible answer is this: because of her unique smile. The smile is is the “the symbol that was rated with the highest positive emotional content” concludes scientist Andrew Newberg. And for me personally, I’ve been very reluctant before embracing smiling. Only a few years back, when one of my teachers told me: “Why don’t you smile
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” goes one of the most famous quotes in business. And this line has also been one of the biggest problems in doing great customer service. “But you can’t measure it!” is the response I receive from a lot of budding entrepreneurs when it comes to chatting about customer support. And to be honest, it is tough to measure it. Yet the reason we place such huge importance on customer support as we develop Buffer’s social media management suite [https://buff
One of the first things I’ve learnt, close to 2 years ago when taking the plunge into Social Media with Buffer, was that things aren’t yet very defined. There guiding metrics and studies are really just in their beginning phase and a lot is still quite vague. To help make things a tiny bit more clear, I thought it might be helpful to collect 10 of the most interesting social media studies and see what we can best learn from them. So without any further ado, let’s dig in and talk about the most
Learning how to say no is one of the most useful skills you can develop I found, especially when it comes to living a more productive and healthy life . Saying no to unnecessary commitments can give you the time you need to recover and rejuvenate. Saying no to daily distractions can give you the space you need to focus on what is important to you. And saying no to temptation can help you stay on track and achieve y
“Manage your energy, not your time.” – Tony Schwartz This is the quote that made Tony Schwartz famous. And it is one, that I believe best represents a truly efficient lifestyle the best. And yet, living in a way where you “manage your energy, not your time” is incredibly hard, at least for me. It probably took me around 1 year just to fully grasp its meaning. Since then, I’ve turned my life upside down and changed my routine dramatically. As we develop tools for better social media management
One of the things I fuss about a lot (especially at Buffer) are words—very simple words, in fact. Should it say “Hi” or “Hey?” Should it be “cheers” or “thanks?” How about “but” or “and?” There are many occasions when Joel and I sit over one line and change it multiple times, until we feel it really sits right. This is partly to improve our metrics for click rate and others. It is also to simply create the right emotion. The one key question we ask ourselves is: “How does this make you feel?”
There is no doubt that you have heard about the uproar on Twitter and the blogosphere: Google Reader is shutting down. As of July 1, 2013 Google will discontinue Google Reader and shut down the site. A lot of people, who have been using Buffer with Google Reader got in touch with us yesterday asking if there is any way to keep reading their RSS feeds whilst sharing their articles with Buffer. And most importantly a Google Reader alternative to be safe after the site shuts down. And fortunately
“I’m not really a creative person”, always struck me as an odd sentence. Could it really be that some of us are born to be more creatively gifted than others? If so, I thought at first, that’s definitely a downer. In school, what was considered “being creative”, like writing or drawing nice pictures was never my strength. It bugged me for a while I have to say. For today, I finally decided to research and read up on the latest studies of creativity and the science behind it. The truth, which I
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 resource, the complete guide to customer service training. Although delighting your customers (like Buffer) is an important part of creating a business people love, the “evangelists” out there always seem to focus on fluff, and rarely address the far less glamorous side of implementation. That’s because it’s easy to talk the talk, but hard to put gre