Blog - Page 97
A collection of 2,567 blog posts
The cutthroat inbox of your standard consumer roils with marketing messages, competitive subject lines, and scores of attention-seeking emails. With over 144 billion emails sent each and every day, email marketing remains one of the elite channels for business communication. So how does the signal separate itself from the noise? To be sure, finding the key to a stand-out message is critical to your bottom line—whether that bottom line is cold, hard cash or community engagement or anything in be
The internet went nuts a couple of days ago (or at least, the SEO world of it did) when Google confirmed that it would be encrypting almost all keyword searches in the near future. The Not provided Google Analytics section has easily become the most talked about thing in the past. Various industry professionals weighed in on the change, what it means for marketers and what other options we have to inform our marketing choices. Let’s take a look at what happened exactly, and then we’ll explore
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! Traction update: * New users: 66,000 (Total: 1,046,000, from 980,000: +7%) * Daily active users: 30,000 (from 29,000: +3%) * Revenue: $174,000 (Annual: $2,088,000 up from $1,968,000: +6%) * Business revenue: $12,340 (up
The below are all the stats and actual revenue numbers from Buffer for Business. Buffer for Business was soft-launched a few weeks ago and we were lucky about the strong responses so far from users. As we default to transparency and want to try and help as many people as possible with our own learnings and failings, we thought about making these numbers public too! (Granted, this was a bit scary, but here we
The list is the origin of culture. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. – Umberto Eco When I was a kid, I read a book called The Listmaker. It’s about a young girl who uses lists to organize and make sense of her life. At the time I didn’t read any more into it besides the fact that this was an odd hobby for a pre-teen girl to spend s
Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of October. 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 September we published 15 posts on the Buffer blog, 3 of which were guest posts. Our total uniques we
What governs the way you write? Consistency in style, tone, grammar, and punctuation is essential to an enjoyable blog experience. Successfully done, these elements go unnoticed by readers who are too busy consuming the easy, breezy content. That’s the way it should be. Style guides create uniform content and allow that content to shine. Invisibility is the hallmark of a well-used style guide. You may not even notice the hundreds of subtle decisions that make browsing a blog seamless, but know
Facebook changes so fast, I often miss new features or updates to existing ones. Since there have been a few changes recently, I thought it would be helpful to do a bit of a wrap-up of what Facebook’s been up to. 1. Images are now bigger and wider – Here are the right sizes to use Some recent changes to how Facebook displays thumbnail images mean that we need to be more aware of the size and aspect ration of any pictures we post. Because Facebook will automatically resize images that don’t matc
Get ready to have your mind blown. I was seriously shocked at some of these mistakes in thinking that I subconsciously make all the time. Obviously, none of them are huge, life-threatening mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more rational, sensible decisions. Especially as we strive for continued self-improvement as we build Buffer’s social media management platform, if we look at our values, being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thin
I’m really excited to write this post today! It’s the feature I’m most excited about, and I hope that it’ll be equally helpful for you to start using it! If you’re anything like me, I’ve had this one on my Buffer wishlist for a long time. Since at Buffer we want to focus the most on helping you share better on social media and saving you time by scheduling your updates, we’re really ex
In 1966, a dyslexic sixteen-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first
Twitter hashtags are so ingrained in Twitter now that I rarely second-guess them. They seem so much a part of the service, it’s as if Twitter shipped with them in its original version, even before it had vowels in the name. But actually, Twitter’s version of the hashtag has a vibrant history which is really fascinating. Let’s take a look at the origins of the hashtag and how to use it best on Twitter. The origin of the hashtag The very ephemerality of hashtags is what makes them easy and com
Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjusting my own routine in the hopes of getting more done and wasting less time in-between tasks or activities. While it’s important to understand how your own brain works and what routine will suit your body best, I always find it interesting to see what works for others when planning something new for myself. Amazing routines of 7 successful entrepreneurs In the hopes of building
Wow! We couldn’t believe it. With all of you on board, we’ve hit the milestone we didn’t even dream about when starting Buffer: 1,000,000 people have signed up for Buffer as of today. We thought, what an incredible opportunity to reflect on the journey up until this point. To breakdown some of the core numbers about Buffer, take a look at the infographic below: Along the way to reach 1m users a lot has happened for us. Here is a brief review of the last 2.5 years: The journey to the 1 millio
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 to build customer loyalty . Why are we, as consumers, so captivated by stories of great customer service? Perhaps it’s because they serve as a much needed reminder that there are still companies out there who care about their customers. Every company says customers are their #1 priority, but st
I’m pretty well known for making mistakes. It’s kind of a known trait of mine. Just this weekend I walked into a door because I didn’t open it properly first. When it comes to social media, though, I try hard to learn from mistakes since they’re all saved for me to reflect on. Plus, I research and write about social media enough to have access to stats that make it easier to
How would you like to be able to recall the name of a client or associate you just met? How would you like to go to the bank and not fumble for your account number every stinking time? Everyday scenarios like these are classic examples of our need for memorization. The function of memory has so many more applications, too—public speaking, schoolwork, studying, research, the list goes on and on. Memorizing is a key function in so many areas. Imagine if we could be better at it. Would you belie
At Buffer, we try to be transparent about everything, and our customer support processes and successes (and failures!) are no different. Here’s a snapshot of how we did in August. August was a unique month at Buffer, because it began with the first-ever all-hands company retreat. Although this provided a unique challenge for the support team, it was absolutely amazing to have all of the full-time staff together. More on that in a bit. :) In August, we chose to focus on one key metric: response
One of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains work and how they actually do. On many occasions I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do things, only to find out that actually that’s the complete wrong way to think about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it’s literally impossible for our brains to handle 2 tasks at the same time. Recently I came acr
After announcing the addition of being able to post and schedule to Google+ pages a few weeks back, we’re super excited to bring you another one of the most popular feature requests to Buffer this week: Buffer for LinkedIn Company pages. Next to Twitter, Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn profiles, Google+ Pages and App.net
One of the thing that people often ask us is how we are running the Buffer blog here. A few of the key questions that people ask us are the ones below: * How do we come up with ideas? * How do we manage our content pipeline? * What do we use to write? * What are our goals with the Buffer blog? * How do we measure results? As we work hard on growing and improving the Buffer blog, we thought it would be fun to answer these questions and share what happens behind the scenes to keep fresh con
I’m happy to share that Brian Lovin has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp* and just accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time. I just hit send on an email to the whole team and we’re in the midst of a GIF party in HipChat :) Brian will be working out of Waco, Texas as part of the fully distributed Buffer team . Since he started working with us, he has impac
If you take a look at my bio here on the Buffer blog, my Twitter account or my website, you’ll see that my name is Belle Beth Cooper. That’s been my name for about eight months. Prior to that it was Corina Mackay. Corina Mary Mackay, in fact, since about ten days after I was born. Changing your name so dramatically isn’t something many of us do, so I thought it would be fun to tell the story of why I changed it, what the process was like and what I learned from it. Why I changed my name Changi
One of the great things about our focus on transparency at Buffer is that we get to help other people learn from our experiences. We love learning from others as well, and since we got so much out of our round-up of counterintuitive advice, we wanted to find out even more about what other people have learned from experience. This time, we wanted to learn about the darkest moments of successful and famous entrepreneurs and what their lesson has been. Without any further ado and in their own wor