Blog - Page 98

A collection of 2,567 blog posts

OpenSep 5, 2013
Brian M. Roff is part of the Buffer Team

This week we welcomed Brian M. Roff (BMR) to the Buffer team! I just hit send on an email to let the whole team know that BMR has accepted our offer and is now on board full-time at Buffer. BMR has recently crossed his 45 day mark in the intro period.* BMR is joining the Buffer team from Massachusetts. BMR has become a core part of the Happiness team serving customers with speedy and delightful responses to emails and Tweets. He also has paved the way on some rece

Life HackingSep 3, 2013
How Stress Can Change the Size of Our Brains and What We Can Do to Lower It

Stress is something I’ve been intimately acquainted with since I was a teenager. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to perform to a high standard, and often end up losing sleep due to stress. Since I’m working on decreasing stress in my life, I thought it would be interesting to look into how it actually affects our bodies and our brains. Here’s what I found out. Stress is normal, and sometimes even good for us Stress affects pretty much all of us at some point in our lives. The funny

ReportsSep 3, 2013
How Our Traffic Grew by 118% in 1 month: The August Stats From the Buffer blog

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

ResearchAug 29, 2013
A Scientific Guide to Posting Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails, and Blog Posts at the Best Time

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 c

Buffer NewsAug 28, 2013
Introducing Buffer for Google+: The Easiest Way to Post to Your Google+ Business Page

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+

ReportsAug 28, 2013
Buffer Happiness Report: July 2013

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,

ResourcesAug 27, 2013
How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the “2-Minute Rule”

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” and

Life HackingAug 26, 2013
How To Think Positive Everyday: 4 Simple Steps to a Happier Life

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

ResourcesAug 22, 2013
18 Tips and Tools for Managing Email Successfully

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

Life HackingAug 21, 2013
What is Meditation and How It Affects Our Brains

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

Life HackingAug 20, 2013
A Simple Guide to Better Focus and Concentration: Lessons From a Lion Tamer

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

ResearchAug 19, 2013
10 Surprising New Twitter Stats to Help You Reach More Followers

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 brac

Life HackingAug 16, 2013
How I Experimented on Myself: Here are 4 Things That Helped Me Sleep

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 wh

Life HackingAug 15, 2013
22 Tips To Better Care for Introverts and Extroverts

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

Guides & CoursesAug 13, 2013
The Beginner’s Guide to EdgeRank: How Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Actually Works

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, an

Life HackingAug 12, 2013
The Science of Persuasion: How to Get People to Agree With What You Say

“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 t

OpenAug 12, 2013
Belle Beth Cooper is part of the Buffer Team

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

ReportsAug 12, 2013
How Our Traffic Grew by 59% in 1 month: The July Stats From the Buffer blog

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

Life HackingAug 9, 2013
6 Powerful Psychological Effects That Explain How Our Brains Tick

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

Life HackingAug 8, 2013
5 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators

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 ope

Online MarketingAug 7, 2013
7 Simple and Proven Tips to Increase Your Blog Subscribers

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

Life HackingAug 6, 2013
10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science

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

Guides & CoursesAug 5, 2013
The Complete Guide for Finding and Sharing Better Content on Social Media

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

Life HackingAug 2, 2013
Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals

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