Blog - Page 86
A collection of 2,456 blog posts
March was a really amazing month for us at Buffer: 10% MRR growth and awesome increases in daily and monthly active users, too! I’m happy to share with you our update for March that I just sent to Buffer investors. Let me know if I can answer any questions about this. :-) If you want to read our update from February, you can take a look here . Traction update * New users: 71,000 (Total: 1,407,000, fro
Do you ever wonder how often you’re being A/B tested? The practice is so commonplace among websites and marketers these days that at any given point at any given website you could be part of a grand experiment in optimization. I often hope this is the case. I love the science and analysis behind improvements—both on the web and in the real world—so I find myself clicking a blue button and hoping my participation is making a website better. I love participating in A/B tests, and I love performi
You may have heard some talk recently about the “Heartbleed bug.” That’s the scary-named vulnerability that was just discovered in the software library that protects many sites on the internet – including Buffer. We wanted to make sure to tell you exactly what we know and what we’ve done about Heartbleed at Buffer to keep your information as safe as possible. What is Heartbleed? The Heartbleed bug was just recently discovered on April 7th in OpenSSL, a kind of cryptography software that protec
Today, we are thrilled to announce the newest version of Buffer’s iOS app , which represents a major upgrade in design, code, and features. We’ve gone through many iterations, and we’re hoping you like what we’ve come up with. The end product was more than five months in the making, and we thought it might be neat to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the development process. Design The first thing you’ll notice with most iOS
Social media sharing doesn’t just happen at a desk. It happens in the car, on the train, during a holiday – anywhere and everywhere. At Buffer, our goal is to provide you with the easiest possible way to share to your social accounts – even on-the-go. That’s why today we’re ecstatic to show you a project that’s been five months in the making here at Buffer: the completely redesigned Buffer app for iOS 7. Complete details on all the app’s upgrades are below – or if you just can’t wait, download
March was an incredible month for the Buffer blog, not only in terms of traffic but also in terms of change—so much so that calling this update the Buffer Blog Report doesn’t seem to do the month justice. At the very least, we’d have to call it the Blogs Report (plural on blog; more on that below). Big changes were afoot in March: blog strategies, audits, goodbyes, and so much more. It’s exciting to share this all with you and see what you think. So without further ado … Quick summary of the B
Great news: Courtney Seiter has joined the Buffer team full-time as Head of Content Marketing! Courtney, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., wrangles the Buffer blog and Open blog, making sure they’re always full of useful content for Buffer’s audience. I remember when I first came across Courtney’s writing through her Marketing Land column over a year ago and I loved reading and following her posts there. In fac
Hey team! I’m excited to share a few bits of awesome people and numbers news this month. Let’s dig in. :) Numbers We set our sights on a big jump this month. :) It’s been really fun crashing toward these new highs! Goals set for March: * 76.5% within 1 hour (February was 64%) * 91.5% within 6 hours (February was 84%) * 189 live chats (February was 105) Actual numbers for March: * 67% within 1 hour (Missed the goal) * 93% within 6 hours (Exceeded the goal!) * 1% over 24 hours (Forgot t
Subway has this sandwich with Fritos on it. I know this because their commercials play constantly on my TV and computer such that I nearly have the ads memorized. Every time their commercial airs, Subway is flirting with the fine art of frequency. How often is too often to share with your audience? Social media marketers face the same dilemma. We want to connect with followers without driving them away. We aim for the perfect balance of sharing and listening. I end up guessing a lot, trying
The internet is not lacking tales of all-night coding sessions. Or non-stop, no-time-for-weekends crunch periods at critical and not-so-critical times. So, it would seems to be the case that it is possible to program constantly, only taking breaks for as long as it takes to answer a call of nature or maybe scarf down a pizza. Which is really strange to me. I feel like I have never been as productive as I have been since starting at Buffer . And yet, I have never spent
From the moment you join the Buffer team, you are encouraged to read. In fact, the welcome email implores you to read early and often, and you receive a Kindle Paperwhite and free Kindle books just to make sure there are no obstacles to reading as much as you want. (Sound like something that might interest you? We’re hiring! ) And once you are part of the team, you continue to see the deep impact that reading has on the goals and improvements of all of us. When we s
We recently realized that we have been miscalculating our true monthly and annual recurring revenue. I wanted to write up some of the details around this and also apologize for accidentally misleading as a result of getting it wrong. With our commitment to transparency (and the fact we’re rare in sharing our revenue numbers at all) I felt it’s even more important to share our error. We’ve always reported “Annual revenue run rate” and “Revenue” for the month in our investor updates [https://buff
It is a great day in the land of Buffer. Daniel Feeney has completed his Buffer Bootcamp and come on board as our very first “Weekend Warrior” Happiness Hero, answering customer questions and keeping track of product feedback (not to mention impressing us with his biking) on Fridays through Tuesdays. Daniel has pioneered the “Weekend Warrior” position for us. Several months ago, we determined that customers weren’t having a very happy or consistent experience when they needed help on the weeken
Buffer runs seven days at a time. Many of our improvements, metrics, experiments, and tasks fit into one-week slices, which helps us to move quickly on new ideas and to revisit our results right away. Instead of it being early April around here, it’s just Week 14. This weekly perspective has some big advantages across all our departments, including marketing. Reviewing and improving our marketing metrics week over week, for the blog and our social media accounts, lets us quickly experiment, tes
We analyzed over 10 million posts sent via Buffer, looking for a common theme among the most shared content. Our findings surprised us as much as they might surprise you. The clear winner: pandas. Panda content—photos, GIFs, and stories—made up nearly 18 percent of the top 500 posts sent through Buffer. These posts received an average of three times more clicks and 10 times more retweets than content without pandas, and the gap between panda content and the next-highest viral ingredient, monkey
As I was brainstorming ideas for my last post on the Buffer blog, I started reflecting on what I’ve personally learned during my time at Buffer. My writing process is considerably different today than it was when I joined Buffer nine months ago, so hopefully you can find some nuggets in the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned that might help you as well. Slow beginnings When I first joined Buffer, Leo had been running the Buffer blog pretty much on his own: he wrote or sourced th
It’s with very mixed emotions at Buffer that we bid farewell to Belle Beth Cooper , Buffer’s first Content Crafter. Today her final post appears on the Buffer blog. We’re happy because she’s going on to something really special: her own startup, Exist – a quantified self app that digs up insights from hidden connections in your data. (You can learn more about Exis
When Buffer was in its very early stages, just a couple months after the product launched, we applied to be part of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program. We were rejected. Since then, we’ve been keenly aware that this experience is one that many fellow startups have encountered and one that many more will eventually face. When Karen Cheng, CEO of GiveIt100, shared the story of her Y Combinator rejection, it struck a chord with readers. Rejection stories don’t get told nearly often
UPDATE: See a newer, updated version of this post with a brand-new infographic . Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much? I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media [https://buffer.com/library/the-complete-guide-to-social-media-formatting-make-your-co
When I was in elementary school, my wardrobe was fully automated. I had a certain pair of sweatpants for Mondays, jeans for Tuesdays, Zubaz for Wednesdays, and so on. It was quite the system for a fourth-grader! Automation has been a big part of my life ever since. I love to find helpful ways to work smarter—anything to shave an extra few minutes off my day. Automation, when done right, scratches this itch perfectly. The same holds for automation of one’s social media marketing. There are huge
The word “audit” deserves more love than it gets. When I hear the word, my mind goes straight to tax season and the manila envelope crammed with receipts and forms that I keep stashed away in the closet. Audits seem to equal anxiety, which is too bad – because not all audits are created equal. A tune-up at the garage is essentially an audit for your car, a check-up at the doctor is an audit of your health. You can learn a lot from regular reviews like these.The same holds true for an audit of
I often get asked about my research process for the Buffer blog. For my science and life hacking posts in particular, I rely heavily on scientific research to back up my points, so there’s a lot of research to be done. Unfortunately there’s no secret sauce or magic bullet when it comes to this process. It’s mostly just a matter of time and practice. I do have a few tips to share about where and how I find the sources for my research, though, so hopefully you’ll find these useful. Finding the
We at the Buffer blog can vouch for LinkedIn’s growth as our blog has experienced a swell in LinkedIn referral traffic over the past year, up 4,000 percent from last year at this time. Part of that has to do with our emphasis on updates and sharing at LinkedIn, another part has to do with the popularity of LinkedIn contributing a larger audience and more eyes to our content. Together, these factors have made LinkedIn a great source of visitors for our blog, and I’d imagine you might see a simila
When you have a goal — whether it’s starting a business or eating healthier or traveling the world — it’s easy to look at someone who is already doing it and then try to reverse engineer their strategy. In some cases, this is really useful. Learning from the experiences of successful people is a great way to accelerate your own learning curve. But it’s equally important to remember that the systems, habits, and strategies that successful people are using today are probably not the same ones th
