We encounter a lot of incredible small businesses regularly at Buffer. Last year, we had the chance to highlight eight of them in season one of a new Buffer original series — Small Business, Big Lessons. We’re happy to share that the series is back! So start listening to Small Business, Big Lessons Season 2 wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll release a new episode every Tuesday for the next six weeks. Listen to Small Business, Big Lessons: Season 2 In this series, we’re bringing you busines
After hiring three new teammates I took an extended period off of work on sabbatical. This time ended up being really positive for my team, here's why and how I set everyone up for support while I was out.
Do you ever wish there was a shortcut to better understanding everyone you worked with? I definite have. At Buffer, we've had assorted documents to communicate work preferences over the years. Some folks have kicked off specific documents called operating manuals or leadership blueprints. Still, we've never had anything centralized or standardized, which can be a superpower for this type of internal communication and collaboration, especially as a fully remote team. Earlier this year, we decid
This is Buffer's 2022 pay analysis, a look at our annual progress towards closing the unadjusted gender pay gap at Buffer.
On February 26th, our team became aware that access was obtained to a number of Buffer accounts and those accounts were used to spread support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The accounts affected did not have two factor authentication (2FA) enabled, indicating that this was likely related to reused passwords as there continues to be no indication of a breach to Buffer. In total, 1,552 accounts were accessed, and of those, 618 accounts posted unauthorized content for a total of 766 unauthoriz
The start of a new year is a great time to reassess your marketing strategy. To help you try some new strategies, we talked to 10 small business owners to learn how they’re doing marketing differently in 2022.
We’ve outlined a calendar of all of the official (and slightly less official) holidays in 2022 to serve as a blueprint for your content, plus fun social media post ideas to jumpstart your brainstorm.
A list of 21 small businesses that have really impressed us this year.
I’ve recently been going through the process of hiring a new social media manager for Buffer so I wanted to share what I’ve learned so far to help anyone else who wants to bring on a social media manager for their team.
If you’re seeking a bit more balance while simultaneously wanting to continue growing your business, this article is for you.
Now, with just a few clicks, you can import content directly into Buffer from Dropbox, Google Drive, and One Drive. Alongside our recent Canva integration — it has become easier than ever to create and publish social media posts without having to leave Buffer.
While you can gain plenty of traction simply by posting now and then, there are tools you may not know about that can improve your impact. Read on for a few new ways to start using LinkedIn today—along with examples of how a few entrepreneurs have put them to use.
There are a lot of great ways to come up with content ideas that don’t require an entire social team. Here are a few ideas that I’ve seen work over the years.
Here are all of our numbers from our 2021 pay analysis, along with more on the positive impact that transparency has had on the gender pay gap for us.
We used to have a system called "transparent email" for all internal communication at Buffer. That stopped working for us, here's what we do now.
Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. You can’t improve something if you don’t know that it needs to be improved. That was very true for us four years ago when we first started looking into equal pay at Buffer. We have long used a salary formula to determine all of our salaries – the same role in the same part of the world receives the same salary. That m
One remote work best practice that we live by at Buffer is asynchronous communication. This concept simply means that work doesn’t happen at the same time for everyone. Communication and collaboration are complex issues, especially for remote workers – in our last three years of State of Remote Work reports they have been in the top three struggles for remote workers. Ensuring good asynchronous communication practices is one of the ways that we address this struggle at Buffer. Asynchronous com
We just released our annual State of Remote Work report, and one of the most consistent responses is that when we ask remote workers if they’d like to work remotely (at least some of the time) for the rest of their careers, 98 percent of them said yes. A further 97 percent of people said they would also recommend remote work to others. So what is it about remote work that makes people want to do it for the rest of their careers and recommend it so stron
Did you know: Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions. Talk about buying power! Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest. Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the w
As 2019 comes to a close, there are a lot of fun, interesting, and important numbers for us to look back on at Buffer. One of my favorites is looking at the number of books we’ve read as a team – 1,541 books this year! One of the coolest perks we have at Buffer team is that all team members (and their family members!) get a free Kindle and all the Kindle books they want to read—any book, anytime, no questions asked. It’s always interesting to see which books are most popular on the team. We ha
I am the kind of person who really thrives on lists. On the blog, we’ve written about lists as both a key element of a daily success routine as well as a vehicle for accounting for your productivity each day . Personally, I make lists of tasks every day in Todoist, and I also keep an ongoing list of my goals. There’s one group of lists I make in particular that I classify as “career lists.” There are fi
When Buffer succeeds, we believe everyone on the team should benefit. One of the ways we make this happen is by sharing some of our profits based on our annual financial results. We haven’t always been profitable – here’s a look at our net profit numbers from the last four years: * 2015: $17K * 2016: Loss * 2017: $2.41M * 2018: $3.29M Over these last two years of profitability, we’ve put in place a profit-sharing plan for the whole team, as well as set aside a chunk of money for charitab
The concept of a career path at Buffer has changed a lot over the past seven years. We’ve gone through various phases as an organization: beginning as an early-stage startup where everyone did a bit of everything, then to a period when we decided against having managers and leaned into a flat structure , and now to a lean level of management
One of our favorite year-end activities — and one of our favorite everyday cultural values — is to pause and reflect on all that we’ve seen and done at Buffer over the past twelve months. (You can check out our reflections on the past two years: 2017 and 2016 .) We’ve done the same year-in-review again for 2018 , and having gathered this data for three years in a row now, we are able t