All posts - page 89
A collection of 2,598 blog posts
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie Once in Hong Kong I took a trip to the barber, since my hair was getting a little long. It ended up being one of the most fascinating times I’ve had my hair cut. The last few times I’ve been to this barber, they’ve always washed my hair in the sink before I’ve had my hair cut. The way they did it was to turn
How do you choose which social media networks to participate in? Certainly, there’re a ton to choose from. Are you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn? Are you on Pinterest and Tumblr? Instagram and Vine? How many social media networks can you handle? Instagram makes a strong case, if you’re interested in raw numbers and unique appeal. Instagram has 200 million active users and provides a huge asset for visual content, which we all know is driving social like none other. It’s one of t
In late October 2013, Buffer suffered a major security breach. As a startup of 8 people at the time, I’ll admit, security wasn’t a top priority on our minds. Our approach when it came to security was to checkmark the basics like setting up proper firewalls, enforcing SSL, and salt+hashing passwords. Going through a security breach changes your perspective on this. We made a huge mistake by doing the minimum. Since that fateful day we’ve completely revamped how we approach our application securi
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post. Being part of a remote team has special opportunities and challenges. In this video, hear Joel and Leo talk about how Buffer started remote working, as well as all the different tools we use at Buffer to work closely together even though we’re physically far apart. Want a little more info on those tools? Here’s a deeper look at some of the products and servic
Six in ten of us are visual learners: people who learn best when information is delivered through the eyes; by looking at images or videos, or reading. That’s just one of the reasons why visual content is so important in today’s content marketing world. Another is its shareability and engagement power. In 2013, social media analytics company Socialbakers reported that 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook were images, up from 85% in 2012. Only 3% of the most engaging posts in 2013 were reg
What an interesting month May was for Buffer content marketing! We did a lot of learning, brainstorming and evaluating this month (in addition to writing a lot of content!) As a result, some of these metrics may look different when we do this report next month. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a dive into the numbers! Buffer’s social media blog Our biggest content “hit” this month was 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts, followed by The Big List of The 61 Be
Recently Apple announced iOS 8 and along with it many features that will be hugely useful for Buffer for iOS. Here are my initial thoughts on what you might find in our iOS 8 update this fall. Buffer sharing via App Extension We’ve sometimes struggled to get Buffer integrated in other applications, with requests coming in almost hourly for us to integrate in X & Y. With App Extensions we’ll be able to provide a composer that is available in all applications that use the Action Sheet. Sneaky pee
It’s a truly remarkable story when I think about how Rodolphe first reached out to us at Buffer and how he eventually became part of the team. If I were to guess the inspiring philosophy behind Rodolphe’s way of coming on board and also his general approach to making things happen, it’d be based on one of Mark Suster’s recent posts that I really enjoyed: “Be politely persistent.”
I spend my days writing content from my desktop computer for people who will read the content on their smartphones and tablets. Go figure. Mobile devices are fast becoming the preferred method of reading, sharing, and engaging with online content. It’s strange to think that the content we create on desktops and laptops will end up on dozens of different screen sizes before all is said and done. It’s a good lesson to keep in mind. When I share to social media, what will my sharing look like to
In August 2012, my cofounders and I decided to pull the plug on Fancite, the startup I had been working on for over a year and half. Making that call was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. Sunil and the C-suite, South Africa The days that followed were highly existential. Initially, I was relieved and excited about doing something new, however as a few days passed my (perceived) reality hit me: “I wasted all that time building something that achieved nothing.” I remember being filled
Where do email subscribers fall on your list of priorities? We’ve recently pushed email toward the top of our most valued sources, and it doesn’t seem like we’re alone in that. While social media might be the hot place to push your marketing efforts, there are many who choose to rely instead on building a valuable email list. And they couldn’t be happier. Here’s Michael Hyatt, speaking about his email list of 115,000: I have literally built a multi-million dollar business on the strength of m
I’m pretty big on words. As Buffer’s content crafter, I guess that kind of comes with the territory. However, I’m not alone on this. Words are an extremely valuable component to the way we get work done at Buffer. As a distributed team, the words we use in our communication with each other carry extra significance. As a company focused on culture and customer support, the words we use are vital to getting across our message in the most accurate, positive way. As such, we’ve developed a bit of
The entire Buffer team starts each week fresh with new goals—both work and personal. One of Buffer’s 10 values is a focus on self-improvement, and it’s a lot of fun to share our personal improvement goals and cheer each other on each week with our daily pair calls. Improvement goals can be almost anything, from exercise and eating better to home projects to learning a new language to listening more. Since we all receive free Kindles (and Kindle books) and a Jawbone UP, there’s generally a lot
It’s a great problem to have—tons of content and lots of social media channels to connect to your audience. That’s where About.com—one of the most visited sites on the Internet—found itself. Team members wanted a way to streamline their social media publishing process so they could have more time to connect with fans and build relationships with users. Buffer’s simple scheduling and intuitive team management quickly earned it an important place in the About.com team’s workflow. Now members wor
What does Skrillex have to do with blogging? It took us awhile to put the pieces together ourselves. We’ve been thinking a lot about the optimal way to produce content for the Buffer blog. We’ve pivoted the blog multiple times before—the latest came just in the past two months when we shifted from lifehacking and productivity to a purer focus on social media. The blog is both a huge driver of conversions for us and an ongoing experiment. What kind of content works best on the blog? And, more j
Is SlideShare part of your content strategy? Truth be told, we have yet to fully integrate it into our content creation process here at Buffer. We’ve felt lots of great nudges, though. We’ve heard tell of the amazing opportunity on SlideShare, how it’s a primed network of highly engaged influencers just itching to find and share your stuff. What might ultimately sell us, though, is the response we got from a single slide deck, created in a hurry, that garnered over 5,000 views in one weekend.
We’ve updated our transparent salary formula since this post originally was published. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here . Joel and Leo discuss one of the best-known elements of Buffer’s culture—transparent salaries—in this Founder Chat. Here are a few more resources for additional information on Buffer’s transparent salaries: • Take
Live smarter, not harder. This principle is one of the 10 Buffer values that form the backbone of our company culture. We love experimenting with new ways to live out this value, and we’ve found productivity tips to be instrumental in this equation. What are some of our best productivity discoveries so far? We’ve written about a few before on the Buffer blog. • Ultradian rhythm and the 90-minute work cycle • How we’ve turned a 2-day writing process into a 4-hour process • The valu
Variety is the spice of life … and digital marketing? Variety can certainly make a digital marketer’s life a little easier. When you’ve worked hard to create a perfect piece of content, you can help that content go the extra mile (and then some) by repurposing and recreating the content in a huge number of ways. Is it easy? Well, I wanted to find out. I took a favorite piece of content from our Buffer blog, “How Often Should You Be Posting to Social Media?” and I hacked together 21 variations
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching. One of the key learnings for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. In fact, downtime is an opportunity to make people love you more than they did before you went down
I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of some amazing companies such as Facebook, Mint and now AppSumo.com (including our latest products: Monthly1k.com and SumoMe.com). Collectively, these companies have reached nearly 1.5 billion people, and each has taught me many marketing methods that are extremely effective. Here are the 10 most important marketing lessons I’ve learned along the way. Lesson 1: Incentivize your audience (with something they want) It’s not just any incentive that get
Anne Isabelle Ritchie coined a concept in the 1880s that we still use today. Modernized, it is: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The conventional wisdom is that it’s always preferable to teach someone how to fish. However, the Buffer support team has been thinking about this concept a lot lately. We’re learning that often there is a huge market for skipping the lesson completely. This can be a stretch for tech suppo
Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It’s a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re blogging about perfect blogging. So I hope you’ll still trust the advice here even if you don’t find this post itself to be flawless. I’m sure we’d all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection—however it is that you measure perfection—so I researched
We love setting goals for improvement here at the Buffer blog, and one of our most recent challenges has been this: Every post gets an original image. This might not sound like such a tall task until you consider that Courtney and I are journalism majors whose skills lie in painting pictures with words and not so much in painting pictures with Photoshop. We try our best, in the name of visual content. You’ve perhaps heard of visual content? The term seems to be everywhere these day