Blog - Page 92

A collection of 2,439 blog posts

Life HackingSep 30, 2013
8 Common Thinking Mistakes Our Brains Make Every Day and How to Prevent Them

Get ready to have your mind blown. I was seriously shocked at some of these mistakes in thinking that I subconsciously make all the time. Obviously, none of them are huge, life-threatening mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more rational, sensible decisions. Especially as we strive for continued self-improvement as we build Buffer’s social media management platform, if we look at our values, being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thin

Buffer NewsSep 26, 2013
Introducing Smart Twitter Autocomplete for Web and Mobile

I’m really excited to write this post today! It’s the feature I’m most excited about, and I hope that it’ll be equally helpful for you to start using it! If you’re anything like me, I’ve had this one on my Buffer wishlist for a long time. Since at Buffer we want to focus the most on helping you share better on social media and saving you time by scheduling your updates, we’re really ex

ResourcesSep 25, 2013
The Habits of Successful People: They Start Before They Feel Ready

In 1966, a dyslexic sixteen-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first

ResearchSep 24, 2013
The Surprising History of Twitter’s Hashtag Origin and 4 Ways to Get the Most out of Them

Twitter hashtags are so ingrained in Twitter now that I rarely second-guess them. They seem so much a part of the service, it’s as if Twitter shipped with them in its original version, even before it had vowels in the name. But actually, Twitter’s version of the hashtag has a vibrant history which is really fascinating. Let’s take a look at the origins of the hashtag and how to use it best on Twitter. The origin of the hashtag The very ephemerality of hashtags is what makes them easy and com

Life HackingSep 23, 2013
The Daily Routines of 7 Famous Entrepreneurs and How to Design Your Own Master Routine

Our daily routines can make a huge difference to how healthy, happy and productive we are. I’ve recently tried adjusting my own routine in the hopes of getting more done and wasting less time in-between tasks or activities. While it’s important to understand how your own brain works and what routine will suit your body best, I always find it interesting to see what works for others when planning something new for myself. Amazing routines of 7 successful entrepreneurs In the hopes of building

From 0 to 1,000,000 users: The Journey and Statistics of Buffer

Wow! We couldn’t believe it. With all of you on board, we’ve hit the milestone we didn’t even dream about when starting Buffer: 1,000,000 people have signed up for Buffer as of today. We thought, what an incredible opportunity to reflect on the journey up until this point. To breakdown some of the core numbers about Buffer, take a look at the infographic below: Along the way to reach 1m users a lot has happened for us. Here is a brief review of the last 2.5 years: The journey to the 1 millio

Customer ServiceSep 17, 2013
10 Tales of Remarkable Customer Support That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, a contributing Buffer Blog columnist. Read more about Greg at the bottom of the post, or read his latest piece on how to build customer loyalty . Why are we, as consumers, so captivated by stories of great customer service? Perhaps it’s because they serve as a much needed reminder that there are still companies out there who care about their customers. Every company says customers are their #1 priority, but st

Tips / How ToSep 16, 2013
The 7 Biggest, Counterintuitive Social Media Mistakes You May Be Making

I’m pretty well known for making mistakes. It’s kind of a known trait of mine. Just this weekend I walked into a door because I didn’t open it properly first. When it comes to social media, though, I try hard to learn from mistakes since they’re all saved for me to reflect on. Plus, I research and write about social media enough to have access to stats that make it easier to

Life HackingSep 13, 2013
How to Never Forget the Name of Someone You Know: The Science of Memory

How would you like to be able to recall the name of a client or associate you just met? How would you like to go to the bank and not fumble for your account number every stinking time? Everyday scenarios like these are classic examples of our need for memorization. The function of memory has so many more applications, too—public speaking, schoolwork, studying, research, the list goes on and on. Memorizing is a key function in so many areas. Imagine if we could be better at it. Would you belie

ReportsSep 13, 2013
How we reply to 52% of support emails within an hour: The August Buffer Happiness Report

At Buffer, we try to be transparent about everything, and our customer support processes and successes (and failures!) are no different. Here’s a snapshot of how we did in August. August was a unique month at Buffer, because it began with the first-ever all-hands company retreat. Although this provided a unique challenge for the support team, it was absolutely amazing to have all of the full-time staff together. More on that in a bit. :) In August, we chose to focus on one key metric: response

Life HackingSep 12, 2013
10 Surprising Facts About How Our Brains Work

One of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains work and how they actually do. On many occasions I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do things, only to find out that actually that’s the complete wrong way to think about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it’s literally impossible for our brains to handle 2 tasks at the same time. Recently I came acr

Buffer NewsSep 11, 2013
Introducing Buffer for LinkedIn Company Pages: The Easiest Way to Keep Your LinkedIn Page up to Date

After announcing the addition of being able to post and schedule to Google+ pages a few weeks back, we’re super excited to bring you another one of the most popular feature requests to Buffer this week: Buffer for LinkedIn Company pages. Next to Twitter, Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn profiles, Google+ Pages and App.net

Content MarketingSep 10, 2013
From Ideas to Traffic Results: How We Run a Blog with 700,000 Readers Per Month

One of the thing that people often ask us is how we are running the Buffer blog here. A few of the key questions that people ask us are the ones below: * How do we come up with ideas? * How do we manage our content pipeline? * What do we use to write? * What are our goals with the Buffer blog? * How do we measure results? As we work hard on growing and improving the Buffer blog, we thought it would be fun to answer these questions and share what happens behind the scenes to keep fresh con

OpenSep 9, 2013
Brian Lovin is part of the Buffer Team

I’m happy to share that Brian Lovin has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp* and just accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time. I just hit send on an email to the whole team and we’re in the midst of a GIF party in HipChat :) Brian will be working out of Waco, Texas as part of the fully distributed Buffer team . Since he started working with us, he has impac

Self-ImprovementSep 9, 2013
Why I Changed My Name and What It Taught Me About Who I Am

If you take a look at my bio here on the Buffer blog, my Twitter account or my website, you’ll see that my name is Belle Beth Cooper. That’s been my name for about eight months. Prior to that it was Corina Mackay. Corina Mary Mackay, in fact, since about ten days after I was born. Changing your name so dramatically isn’t something many of us do, so I thought it would be fun to tell the story of why I changed it, what the process was like and what I learned from it. Why I changed my name Changi

Life HackingSep 5, 2013
The 13 Biggest Failures from Successful Entrepreneurs and What They’ve Learned From Them

One of the great things about our focus on transparency at Buffer is that we get to help other people learn from our experiences. We love learning from others as well, and since we got so much out of our round-up of counterintuitive advice, we wanted to find out even more about what other people have learned from experience. This time, we wanted to learn about the darkest moments of successful and famous entrepreneurs and what their lesson has been. Without any further ado and in their own wor

OpenSep 5, 2013
Brian M. Roff is part of the Buffer Team

This week we welcomed Brian M. Roff (BMR) to the Buffer team! I just hit send on an email to let the whole team know that BMR has accepted our offer and is now on board full-time at Buffer. BMR has recently crossed his 45 day mark in the intro period.* BMR is joining the Buffer team from Massachusetts. BMR has become a core part of the Happiness team serving customers with speedy and delightful responses to emails and Tweets. He also has paved the way on some rece

Life HackingSep 3, 2013
How Stress Can Change the Size of Our Brains and What We Can Do to Lower It

Stress is something I’ve been intimately acquainted with since I was a teenager. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to perform to a high standard, and often end up losing sleep due to stress. Since I’m working on decreasing stress in my life, I thought it would be interesting to look into how it actually affects our bodies and our brains. Here’s what I found out. Stress is normal, and sometimes even good for us Stress affects pretty much all of us at some point in our lives. The funny

ReportsSep 3, 2013
How Our Traffic Grew by 118% in 1 month: The August Stats From the Buffer blog

Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of September. It features our latest thoughts, ideas and questions about content and the Buffer blog. Since we default to transparency with our culture, we thought making this public could be useful for others too. Quick summary In August we published 18 posts on the blog, 6 of which were guest posts. After July’s 59% increase in traffic, August blew that away with a 118% increase. Our top post for the month hit

ResearchAug 29, 2013
A Scientific Guide to Posting Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails, and Blog Posts at the Best Time

Update: We looked at 4.8 million tweets sent through Buffer to find the best time to tweet for clicks, retweets, favorites, and more. See the results for your specific time zone! This post was originally published in August 2013. We’ve updated it here with new research and visuals. We’re pretty keen on optimal timing for social media here at Buffer , and I figured it was high time I c

Buffer NewsAug 28, 2013
Introducing Buffer for Google+: The Easiest Way to Post to Your Google+ Business Page

An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next. It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone. Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+

ReportsAug 28, 2013
Buffer Happiness Report: July 2013

Here at Buffer, we strive to track our progress toward our vision of setting the bar for great customer support. And, since we probably have a lot of the same goals and challenges as other customer-facing teams out there, we’d love to share how we’re doing each month and what we’re trying next. It would be awesome to hear from you, too. How Support Works at Buffer Our current set-up includes three members of the Happiness team, some help from the rest of the Buffer team and the following tools,

ResourcesAug 27, 2013
How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the “2-Minute Rule”

Recently, I’ve been following a simple rule that is helping me crush procrastination and making it easier for me to stick to good habits at the same time. I want to share it with you today so that you can try it out and see how it works in your life. The best part? It’s a simple strategy that couldn’t be easier to use. Here’s what you need to know to stop procrastinating once and for all… How to Stop Procrastinating With the “2–Minute Rule” I call this little strategy the “2–Minute Rule” and

Life HackingAug 26, 2013
How To Think Positive Everyday: 4 Simple Steps to a Happier Life

One thing that I noticed immediately when joining Buffer was our emphasis on cultivating positivity. If you take a quick look at our culture deck , you can see the high priority we place on this. Since I joined the team, positive thinking is something I’ve focused on a lot, and it’s been fun to see how spending time with positive thinkers rubs off on me. At the moment, some of us are experimenting with sharing one great moment we had at the