All posts - page 78
A collection of 2,598 blog posts
Community expert Caty Kobe from FeverBee recently joined us at #Bufferchat to talk about community management. Caty—along with our amazing Bufferchat community—shared great advice, blog and book recommendations. Read on for the highlights, or catch the full recap here! What advice do you have for someone building an online community? From Caty: * If you’re building a brand community, please do your homework first! * Take the time to research your customers & target community members. Lear
***Quick update: We’re building a more inclusive Buffer! We’d love your feedback on our new Diversity Dashboard.*** Not too very long ago, developers at Buffer were called “hackers.” We had front-end hackers, back-end hackers, Android hackers, iOS hackers, traction hackers. We started using the word “hacker”in Buffer’s early days because—at the time—it felt like the most inclusive way to describe the work developers were doing. I asked our CTO Sunil to describe what the word meant to him: “I
Author and speaker Jeff Goins recently joined #bufferchat to share some awesome expert tips on building your online tribe. Read on for the highlights, or catch the full Storify recap here! What does it mean to build a tribe online? From Jeff: * Building an online tribe means finding your true fans, the people who will help your work spread. * Something I’ve learned about building a tribe is that it’s not who you know, it’s who you help. More great advice: * “Finding people with whom yo
February at Buffer saw our biggest team retreat yet, the launch of a new mini-product and some big news about buffer.com. Here is the latest: The latest Buffer metrics * 2,171,877 total registered users (+3.9%) * 189,216 monthly active users (+3.0%) * 47,937 average daily active users (+7.0%) * $462,236 monthly recurring revenue (+4.8%) * $5.55m annual revenue run-rate (+4.8%) * $1,827,750 cash in bank * 29 team members across the world * 22 cities, 11 countries, 6 continents It’s aw
I’m so excited to share that Eric Khun has joined the Buffer team! Eric joins us from Beijing, and his focus is on back-end development. Eric was raised in France and fell in love with China when he went to Beijing for a year of school. He’s been there for 3 years now, and has even worked on the PBG game platform, and an Android app called PartyBeijing, which allows foreigners to find top event venues in Beijing and communicate with taxi drivers more easily by offering easy Chinese pronunciat
Disclaimer: It is only through the kind collaboration with the previous owner of buffer.com that we were able to now be the new owners, and a key interest for them was to stay anonymous and not to draw any attention to them in this announcement, which we are very keen to honor. So we have redacted all names and replaced them with “Bob” for the individual and “Company corp.” for the company name. In similar interest to protect their privacy, the previous owner also wasn’t comfortable in sharing
We’d all love to show up first in Google for something. There’s likely at least one golden search term or keyword you’re striving for —and we’ve all heard plenty of different get-to-the-front-page-of-Google formulas. It can get a little dizzying keeping all the approaches straight. But it can be done. If you’re willing to invest some time, resources and brainpower, you can create the top content on any topic. To share exactly how, I made an infographic mapping out not one, but six foolproof,
Having a list of go-to blogs can be a great source of information and inspiration. In our case, the blogs and websites we visit most often provide some amazing articles with in-depth insights, tips, and strategies that help inform our social media sharing. Likewise, the amazing content gives us something to aim for and ideas for what to cover next. We’ve shared a bit about favorite blogs for content marketing and blogs for advanced marketing. Now it’s time to ask you: What are your favorite b
Imagine having a quick and simple way to instantly increase the engagement on your social media posts. We’ve found that oftentimes images are the hook that draws more clicks, shares, and favorites on social media. And a number of marketing studies report the same: * Blog posts with images receive 94% more views than those without images * Having at least one image in a post leads to more than double the shares on Facebook and Twitter * Using an image on Twitter increases retweets by 28% and
It’s amazing that there is a huge amount of discussion on the importance of hitting product market fit for what you are building. Interestingly, there isn’t as much about how to measure when you actually have product market fit for what you have built. The reason that’s the case, is because partially it’s a question that you shouldn’t have to ask: “If you have to ask whether you have Product/Market Fit, the answer is simple: you don’t.” – Eric Ries And I can see where Eric is coming from with
Sharing transparently about all aspects of what we do at Buffer—pricing, salaries, fund-raising, earnings, hiring, and more—has been an amazing opportunity to connect with and learn from others. We get such great ideas and encouragement from sharing openly. We’ve shared before about our content marketing goals, numbers, and adventures, and I’d love to continue these stories in regular blog posts here! I’ll be sharing how we’re doing, what we’re up to, what we have planned for the future, and a
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t is a Jim Collins classic that shares an eye-opening study on how top companies managed to manifest great results and maintain them for more than a decade. After the study was completed, Collins found key business traits and strategies that transformed these companies into successful, elite companies. So how do these traits apply to content marketing? What makes a ‘good-to-great’ content marketing strategy? Here are the seven ste
In a forest, there is absolutely no waste. Every single element is reused in a continuous cycle. A tree produces leaves. The leaves fall to the ground and become compost. And the forest uses every last ounce of the compost and puts it back into its ecosystem. We have the exact same idea for Buffer’s organizational design as we move towards a self-managing company. Without any processes, save 4 essential ones, there is little to no occurrence of waste. As an example, we recently completed our f
How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette? For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting, and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media, I had just the most basic rules and intuitions. Even now, I feel like I learn a new quirk or quibble on a near-daily basis. It’s hard to know which rules exist, which ones are real, and which ones are okay to break or follow. I’d love to help shed some light here so that you can
In my recent travels around Asia, I’ve had the great opportunity to meet a lot of local founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. A few themes that seemed to come up many times are questions like “What triggered you to become passionate about company culture and transparency?” or “How did you know you wanted to build Buffer to what it is today?” One of the most memorable moments for me was talking to a super smart lady who is having a lot of success at a large company and longs to work on something
Have you ever delivered a speech or considered public speaking as a way to network or build your business? Speaker, author and professor Dr. Emad Rahim joined us for a #bufferchat to share advice and resources on how public speaking can grow your personal or business platform. Read on for the highlights, or check out the full Storify recap here. What’s the best way to get started in speaking? From Emad: * Start small speaking at clubs, events, parties and classrooms. Speak where you are f
It seems like a great portion of the social media research we do at Buffer often comes back to a few big questions for social media sharing. How do I get more followers? What should I share? When should I share it? And how often should I be sharing? Social media frequency is one that we’ve enjoyed experimenting with a lot at Buffer. How many times per day should we be posting? Is it different for individuals versus companies? I personally share to Twitter four times per day, and we share to
Do you have a favorite author or blog whose content is always so amazingly useful that it earns an automatic read every single time something new comes out? Rand Fishkin is one of those authors for me. And Moz is one of those blogs. Rand’s slide deck on content marketing is one of our favorite content resources here at Buffer. His article about individual contributors has been hugely impactful for the way I view my role at Buffer. Moz’s blog posts on measuring social media success and sorting
I’m delighted to share that José Gilgado joined the Buffer team in December. José joins us from Madrid, Spain and helps out the team with a focus on backend development. José learned how to code when studying computer science in school and even cofounded a small web studio while in school. José was recently in charge of supporting push notifications to mobile clients, and we’re excited to have his experience to help support our Android and iOS apps. Here’s a cool story that Sunil shared with
In February of 1999, Mari Smith needed a sign from the universe. It showed up in the form of … cake. The Scottish-Canadian had arrived in San Diego on a borrowed round-trip plane ticket (“That’s how broke I was!”) with 50 British pounds in her pocket and a feeling that she was supposed to start her nascent seminar business in the U.S. instead of Scotland, her former home. But she was running out of time. She could only come into the country for 30 days without all her immigration paperwork don
Travel is embedded pretty deeply into Buffer’s values—so much so that our entire remote team meets up every 5 months at various spots around the world. Our Buffer retreats are special times for our remote, distributed team to connect in person with one another, with our Buffer audience and with the community of our host city. Traveling to different locations each time also gives us a great new perspective on gratitude and the extreme privilege we have to be able to work and live the way we do.
When you sign up for a new app, what are the first steps you take? Customizing your settings? Installing add-ons and extensions? Setting up your profile pic? (<– this is a personal favorite) The steps you’re asked to take—click here, customize this, try that—are referred to as onboarding, the process of helping a new person get accustomed to a new place. You’re likely to experience onboarding in many different cases. There’s onboarding in the new apps you download and services you use. Ther
Just minutes ago, I went ahead and published a new version of Buffer’s culture-deck on Slideshare. It contains a tiny change that I and many on the Buffer team deemed a very important one. Here is the slide that changed before: and after: The essential change, as you can see, is the removal of the word “always,” which many of us felt made things slightly dogmatic and too one-sided. We’ve also changed the words “never” to something less one-sided, to be a better reflection of how we work as h
When it comes to social media, lately I’ve been surprising myself by how often I’m turning to LinkedIn. With the addition of LinkedIn Publishing, there seems to be more awesome content on the business social network than ever before. And I don’t think I’m alone. LinkedIn has more than 347 million users across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. We’ve written before about some of the best practices to make the most of your LinkedIn marketing, but I’ve recently discovered even mor