All posts - page 67
A collection of 2,598 blog posts
If you’ve asked this before… “How can we get more visitors to our website?” … You’re certainly not alone, as increasing traffic is often the number one problem faced by marketers today. The bad news? Saying “get more traffic” is easier said than done. You could write guest posts (Leo wrote 150 articles in 9 months when Buffer first launched), optimize for SEO traffic, or drive visitors through social media. The options are endless. This article focuses on the latter, though. In this post, I’
Instagram is about to change in a massive way. The photo and video sharing app is taking a page from Facebook using an algorithm based timeline . This means that photos and videos shared to Instagram will no longer appear in chronological order and will instead appear based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content and your relationship with the person posting. The change could mean that if your best friend posted an image while you w
They call us “The Sandwich Generation” —the group of workforce-aged adults who are not only caring for their aging parents, but also balancing the needs of their own children. It might be hard to understand the term until you experience it firsthand. When my father-in-law had an unexpectedly difficult time recuperating from surgery last summer, I was stunned at just how upside-down it turned our lives. If you’ve been through the prolonged hospitalization (or any other intense, sustained medic
Pinterest has released a new set of advertising tools for small and medium sized businesses. These tools give businesses new ways to promote their content and advertise on Pinterest. Around three-fourths of the content on Pinterest comes from businesses already and opening up their ads product to all SMBs feels like a great way to enable businesses to get the right content in front of the right people. Pinterest users regularly save their favorite Pins (including adverts!) to their own boards,
I’ll sometimes find myself inspired by how jampacked and successful some people seem to be on social media, and I can’t help but thinking: What’s their secret? How’d they get so many leads and how can I do things exactly the same way? Well, thank you, Internet! Turns out the majority of these secrets are sitting out there in blog posts and email newsletters and everywhere else that these generous experts in lead collecting tend to share their best stuff. I’ve collected some of the best ideas
At Buffer we really value transparency. Defaulting to transparency is one of our core values , and we’ve been fortunate to have been involved in some incredible discussions about transparent company cultures as a direct result. For a quick sampler, you can check out our salaries and revenue here, and you can read about the rewards and challenges of building a fully distribu
How great would it be if customers showed up in your store or on your website with a sandwich board on their shoulders, advertising their level of interest in what you have to offer. “I’m keen to buy now!” “I’m in research mode.” “I’m totally just browsing.” Well it might not be a sandwich board, but there are some ways get a good sense for this buyer intent. Today’s marketing specialists have a great grasp on sales funnels, the way that customers move from awareness to purchase (and beyond
There you are, hunched over your laptop trying with all your might to write a catchy headline or design an engaging graphic…and you’re feeling stuck. We’ve all been there. And the truth is, more often than not, it takes a lot of effort to be creative and come up with something truly unique and eye-catching. Thankfully, there are plenty of amazing designers and artists out there to provide some much-needed inspiration, and many of them have opted to use Instagram as a place to catalogue their p
Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to publishers —of any size, anywhere in the world. This post guides you through how to connect your WordPress blog and Facebook Instant Articles. To make publishing to Facebook easier for the 25% of the web that uses WordPress, Facebook has teamed up with Automattic, parent company of WordPress, to build a free plugin for Instant Articles. This plugin enables anyone with a WordPress blog to seamlessly share their content as Facebook Instant Articles. If
Buffer got two incredible notes in our inbox over the weekend: “Hi Buffer/Pablo! I love using Pablo. I hopped on to make some graphics for International Women’s Day for my business and couldn’t find any good graphics. Please can you change this. When I typed in women and girls I got women whispering to each other, girls holding hands, and a woman in cutoff shorts fueling a gas tank. Please upload some inspiring images ahead of international women’s day. Thanks!” “I love love love your product
Google has started to experiment with an entirely new, almost Twitter-like format of search results. These results could eventually allow any celebrity or business to have a content feed built directly into Google Search results. The new results, which have been rolled out for US presidential candidates and selected small businesses, feel like stripped out versions of Google+ posts and have been given prominent positions on search result pages. The product is being positioned as an “experiment
Check out our new podcast! Hey there, podcast fans! We recently launched a new podcast of our very own, Buffer CultureLab! We’d love for you to check it out and share any thoughts, feedback or ideas with us! You can listen on iTunes here or Google Play here. :) OK, now back to the post! We’ve talked a lot about podcasts at Buffer. We’ve shared some top marketing podcasts. We’ve talked about podcasting tools. We’ve even provided a blueprint for starting your own podcast. But one thing we have
Dealing with complainers and haters in social media can, of course, be tricky. What you need is a framework for how to do it right. This is that framework: F-E-A-R-S: You may notice that I didn’t include “be fast” as a specific component. This is because it is axiomatic. Today, nearly 40% of all social media complainers who expect a response, expect that response to arrive within 60 minutes, according to the research I conducted for Hug Your Haters. Yet, the average length of time for busine
The Facebook News Feed is designed to deliver the best, most relevant content from the people and Pages you’re closest to. Even if that content was posted a few hours ago. That approach isn’t a great fit with Live video, though. It doesn’t matter if a video was broadcast live if you missed it and had to catch a replay. To counter this Facebook have made some updates to the way the News Feed works when it comes to displaying Live video content. Facebook wants to draw attention to Live video br
Social media has evolved to become inherently visual, with text, video, and photos dominating on almost every platform. Sharing a great looking photo on Instagram is quick and easy, as is sharing a video to Facebook, but until now, creating and sharing audio content has been very difficult. Anchor is looking to change that. Anchor is a free iOS app that makes it easy to broadcast short audio clips in seconds. Listeners can talk back, sparking instant group conversations. In this post, I’d lo
I often read quotes, blogs and books by some of the great minds of startups, and realize that I don’t fully take on board what they mean until some time later. A while back, I reached a point where I felt like I understood the following Basecamp quote: “Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service.” What does it mean to have a point of view? Over the course of the Buffer journey, the values that I had in mind for our startup have become a core part of our culture—not
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. I truly believe our value of transparency makes Buffer a better company than we might be otherwise. There wasn’t one specific reason why we began to share so openly about nearly everything we do, like: * Salaries of all team members * Revenues of Buffer’s combined paid plans, consisting of the A
When Buffer first introduced video on our platform, it was quite clear that the feature would be a perfect fit for our mobile users. We know that videos can be an important part of a social media strategy, so making sure this rolled out to our whole audience was important to us. Fortunately, we were able to get things moving quite fast on mobile. Uploading videos to Buffer on iOS worked great—but then one day Fabric let us know that we had likely missed an edge case: We weren’t immediately su
Editor’s Note: Reply was sunset in May 2020, read more about the decision here. As social media has evolved, our use of social networks has changed: We’ve found new ways to use Twitter, Facebook, and more to share, to communicate, to talk about our favorite things. We engage more than ever with brands and businesses – brands and business like you and yours! At Buffer, we’ve been fortunate to have a front row seat to watch this evolution of social media for businesses, as it’s expanded f
Your Facebook newsfeed is about to get a whole lot more meaningful. After nearly a year of testing in various markets around the globe, Facebook has now released their new, supercharged ‘like’ button. For the first time, Facebook users globally can now react to status with more than just a thumbs up. Facebook Reactions enable you to express yourself with five additional emojis, alongside a “like.” The new Reactions are: ‘love,’ ‘haha,’ ‘wow,’ ‘sad,’ and ‘angry.’ Curious to learn more about t
On a recent flight to Hawaii, I tried a little experiment and did an “AMA in the Sky.” On a flight (sitting in a chair in the sky with wifi!) ✈️? Got a little time, ask me about @buffer / startups / anything and I’ll reply! — Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) February 20, 2016 It was incredibly fun and kept me busy for about 2.5 hours, nicely passing some of the flight time. I think I ended up answering over 50 questions or thereabouts, about topics including why startups are so challenging, t
“Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” – Bruce Lee I’ve felt lucky to learn so much from being an avid reader in the past few years. I’ve come to believe that there is such immense power and knowledge contained within books. As a natural introvert, I’m a reflective person and love to read books and think about what we could try to apply at Buffer. In fact, we’re such believers in the power of reading at Buffer that all new team members (and family members
At Buffer, we’re a fully distributed team. We recently closed our office in San Francisco and now have a team in 12 different timezones. One of the frequent questions we receive is, “How do you work as a remote developer with so many timezones?” It’s such a great question and helps me reflect on some the unique aspects of working as a full-time developer at Buffer. It’s been such a fun journey working remotely for over two years now, so I’d love to dig into some of the challenges & advantages o
This post originally published on February 18, 2016. We’ve updated it here with the latest change to Twitter’s algorithm-based timeline. Over recent months, there has been a lot of debate about the future of Twitter. Growth has halted, share prices have fallen, and some are even saying #RIPTwitter. With all that in mind, the future of Twitter still feels extremely exciting, though. It feels like something big is afoot. And in order to kickstart growth and get people excited again, Twitter has