Buffer in 2016 from A to Z
A
for Airplanes
We've been fortunate to do a lot of travel as a team. This year we've been on 880 flights! Many of our teammates choose to work from different cities throughout the year, and once a year we all fly to the same city for a retreat.
B
for Babies
We welcomed 6 Buffer babies to our family in 2016. We love seeing them pop up in our video meetings and seeing them in Buffer onesies!
E
for Emojis
Top three emojis used by Bufferoos: 😃 😊 👍
Top three emojis used by customers: 😍 ❤
We're all huge emoji fans at Buffer — and it's neat to see our customers love ‘em, too! In the last 90 days alone, Buffer customers have sent 129,000 😍. Wow!
F
for Family
122 family members of our teammates
There are 54 significant others at Buffer, and we love having them as part of team activities. We even had 12 partners and 3 kids come on this year's retreat to Hawaii! Just recently, we created a Buffer Family and Friends Slack Channel and already have 86 people in it!
H
for Happiness
182,792 customer support emails sent by our Happiness team
We love hearing from our customers and getting the chance to help out, learn from, and celebrate their social media success. We were delighted to know: for the 182,792 support emails we sent, customers were kind to give us 94% positive feedback!
I
for Inclusivity
7 inclusivity events
Inclusivity and diversity are values we all feel very strongly about at Buffer. We dove in deeply this year to focus both, creating the role of our first-ever Inclusivity Catalyst and getting involved with 7 events that actively promoted diversity, including sponsoring #WOCinTech photoshoot and 2020Shift's More Than Code program.
K
for Kindle books
Over 1,366 Kindle books read by our team!
With our focus on self improvement, we encourage lots of reading on the Buffer team by gifting each new teammate and their significant other a Kindle and unlimited books.
In total, the team read 1,366 books on their Kindles this year! 📚 That's about 17 books per person!
L
for Languages
We speak 20 languages as a collective team — English 🇺🇸, Spanish 🇪🇸, Mandarin 🇨🇳, Afrikaans 🇿🇦, just to name a few. Plus, we write two dead languages (ancient Egyptian 🇪🇬 and ancient Greek 🇬🇷)! We work and live distributed across 17 countries and 50 cities.
N
for Networks
Being up to date with emerging networks is important to us at Buffer, that's why we are so excited to have added Instagram in 2016. Since the launch in July, 161,492 people have connected an Instagram profile.
Read more about our Instagram announcement
O
for Offices
2016 marks the first full year we've been without an office at Buffer! We're a fully remote team of 78 — some people work from home, others from coworking spaces and coffee shops, and others choose a life of being a digital nomad. We even have someone working from an RV driving across the United States! 😃
Read more about our choice to go office-lessP
for Podcast
This year has been a year of experimentation with podcasting for us. As a team of podcasting fans, we were pumped to launch two of our own this year. We kicked off the work with CultureLab and have since started the Science of Social Media. We're grateful to have seen a total of over 154,007 downloads this year!
Listen to the latest podcast episode
Q
for Queue
261,419,836 posts sent through Buffer
The queue is at the core of the Buffer product and where you store social updates before they're posted for you. There has been a lot of Buffering in 2016 — over a quarter of a billion posts total! Here's the breakdown by social network:
Twitter: 154,931,876
Facebook: 58,427,048
Google+: 21,622,057
LinkedIn: 17,126,024
Instagram: 6,724,039
Pinterest: 2,588,792
S
for Swag
17,159 pieces of swag!
br />We. love. swag. This year, we've sent: 1,294 cards, 530 t-shirts, 15,000 stickers, 254 Moleskines, 62 pairs of socks, 17 water bottles, 2 pizzas with the Buffer logo, a pack of Jolly Ranchers, and a bowling set!
T
for Transparency
This year we launched our Transparent Product Roadmap, our Social Blog editorial board, and (re-launched) monthly reports on our blog about each area within Buffer!
See all of our transparency projectsX
for Xmas
The merriest (and slowest) day of the year for Buffered posts.
With folks enjoying the holidays, we historically see 38.4% fewer posts sent via Buffer on December 25! We're so happy to see that people are spending time being present around the holidays. ❤ We'll be doing the same — this year, for the first time, we are closing Buffer's virtual doors for two days on December 26 and January 2.
Y
for Years
This year, we celebrated Buffer's 6th birthday on November 30th! We're so grateful to have the incredible support of our community and team these past six years to make Buffer possible.
Read more about learnings from starting BufferZ
for Zoom
1,517,344 minutes on Zoom.
We use Zoom to have virtual meetings for standups, syncs, and saying hi. In 2016, we spent over 1.5 million minutes on video calls! We've also created 3,136 threads on Discourse — a forum tool we use instead of company emails.