Courtney Seiter
A collection of posts by Courtney Seiter
A collection of 188 posts by Courtney Seiter - Page 6
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 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
I’m so excited to share that Thomas Dunn joined the Buffer team in December. Tom joins us from Bristol in the UK, with a focus on customer development and UX research. He has a really neat story before finding us at Buffer. Tom was in a rock band after high school and also started and managed his own company. He did full-time social media freelance work while he finished his degree. Wow! Here’s how Leo described Thomas as he introduced him to all of us on the team: “I loved how many high-r
We never get tired of thinking about happiness, do we? Life is so much nicer when you’re able to couple it with joy and gratitude. We’ve published posts before about simple ways to be happy and retraining your brain for more gratitude, and Buffer’s CEO Joel has even shared his own daily to-do list for happiness. (There’s also our popular list of things to stop doing to be happier.) Meanwhile, science continues to study happiness, finding ever more specific and idiosyncratic ways we can bring j
If someone were to ask you about your happiest moment yesterday, would you have an answer? How about your happiest moment of 3 months ago? I’ve got an answer for at least 100 of my recent days – and a new perspective on gratitude, thanks to the 100 Happy Days project. The challenge couldn’t be simpler: Take a photo of just one thing that makes you happy each day for 100 days . I knew a bit of what was in store for me once I began chronicling my moments of happy beca
Starting a new social media presence from scratch can feel like a big challenge. As I launch my own side project right now, I’m poring over my Buffer analytics as I start at the very beginning to build a following everywhere. Things look very different in these early days as compared to what it must feel like for big, established names who have thousands or millions of fans. Here on the Buffer blog, we’ve written about some great strategies to get your first 1,000 followers that I’ve been foll
At any given moment, any one of Buffer’s staff of nearly 30 could be on our social media accounts chatting with customers, answering questions or scheduling posts for the days or weeks ahead . Thanks to Buffer’s social media management tools and the many other awesome tools that help us out, social media is a team effort here. Maybe it’s
There are many features of the world that I simply cannot wrap my head around, and one of these has always been time zones. Teammates I work with every day who live in Singapore and Australia are a whole day ahead of me in the USA. Wild! In addition to confounding my brain, time zones also provide some fun and interesting challenges when it comes to how we all work together at Buffer as a fully remote, distributed team. For instance, here’s a glimpse at what our team looked like a while back,
Do you remember seeing your first emoticon? The first documented use of “:-)” dates back to 1982, when Scott Fahlman proposed that it be used as a “joke marker” on a message board for Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists. Here’s his Internet-changing message: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: “:-)” Read it sideways.” Today, emoticons need a bit less explanation. As social media has grown (and character counts have shrunk), these pictorial representa
Towards the end of 2014, Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich came back to his family home in Austria for a visit and was able to join the coworking community space sektor5 for a fireside chat about Buffer’s culture, values, transparency and lots more. The audience at this event asked tons of smart questions, so we thought it would be fun to share the answers with you here. What’s Buffer? Where are you right now? Leo: We are a social media management tool. We help people to publish, schedule and an
Hey there! Since this post was published, we’ve updated the Buffer values. See the updated values here. There are a few things I can count on when I tell someone about what it’s like to work at Buffer. If I stick to talking about what our social media scheduling tools do, I know I’ll probably have a fun conversation about the triumphs and challenges of social media. If I talk about Buffer’s culture and values a bit, a whole different conversation emerges. I’ve gotten a wide variety of reactio
I have a lot of things I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. Some of them are really small things (like learning to make hashbrowns, a breakfast food that has confounded me for years) and some are really big, like learning to live a more minimalist life. In the past, I have begun each new year with great intentions but found following through really difficult—like many of those who create goals for the new year. I think that’s because change is hard. We all want to improve and become bett
The end of each year is always one of my favorite times. I love the reflection that comes along with the close of a time period, and the hope that comes with looking ahead. I also really enjoy all the best-of lists that tend to accompany the end of a year. Browsing through them, I realize how many things I’ve missed throughout the course of the year. It’s great to have a chance to catch up! If you’re afraid that any of Buffer’s most useful social media marketing blog posts might have slipped b
Important update: We’re retiring the Suggestions feature – beginning August 1, we’ll start turning off Suggestions in phases. Read more… One of the coolest things about working at a true startup like Buffer is how many jobs each of us gets to do in the course of a day or a project. I joined Buffer thinking that most of my time each day was going to be spent writing, and then I discovered that I could also be working in search optimization, paid ads, conversion optimization and lots more on any
To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, social media moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. That’s why from time to time we like to offer an overview of all the recent changes to some of the major networks in social media. There’s always something new to learn, study or experiment with in social media, and even the biggest social media networks aren’t exempt from this rule. Here are 14 of some of the most recent changes to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
We’ve talked lots on the blog about how we communicate and the tools we use to get work done as a remote team, but I thought it might be fun to give you a bit of a different view into the life of a Buffer team member. In this post, I’d like to tell you about the ways we communicate that aren’t so much about work. From GIFs in Hipchat to theme days on Sqwiggle to supportive notes on iDoneThis and even our UP apps, Buffer has a great variety of “virtual watercoolers” that keep us connected in wor
October and September (I’m lumping them together because I did not manage to get a Crafters report done for the month of September, so sorry!) were huge months for Buffer’s small team of Crafters. So big, in fact, that much of the “way we do things” has changed immensely over the past 60 days. It’s been incredibly exciting, and I’d love to tell you all about it. But first, let’s take a quick look at the numbers! Buffer Social analytics Traffic stats Our overall numbers have stabilized from
There are a lot of ways to have a great day at Buffer. Between our value of positivity , our awesome team , our be-your-own-boss decision maker structure and our pro-naps policy , it’s downright tough to have anything but a good day. And exactly what that day looks like i
Note: Updated Sept. 18 based on more details from Google’s John Mueller in the comments. Thanks again, John! We’re so grateful for Google’s help and guidance in solving our mystery and fixing our errors so quickly! The month of August gave the Buffer Crafters an unexpected SEO mystery to solve. When Google announced that https would become a ranking signal , we switched our Buffer Social blog over to https—and sub
Here’s a riddle: When is a tweet more than a tweet? We’re all pretty familiar with Twitter’s 140 characters—and of course, a photo is always an eye-catching addition . But what if your Twitter audience could sign up for your email list without ever leaving Twitter, or directly download your new app straight from a
I know you don’t want to take a break right now. Why? Because you’re too busy. This post is probably one of more than a few tabs you have open on your browser or phone. Your to-do list is likely close by and packed with tasks. Sometimes we know there’s a better way to do things, but we’re just so busy we don’t even think we have the time to find it—so we keep going like we always have. That’s how I saw things, too. And then I discovered the power of taking breaks at work. They made me happier
At national business magazine and website Fortune, there’s a lot of news being reported, published and shared every day by many different editors and reporters. With that much going on, a few social media pileups might seem inevitable. “The problem we kept running into was if we had three stories going up at the same time by different editors, each editor would publish a tweet and not pay attention to when last tweet occurred,” says Franchises and Social Media Editor Heather Muse. “So we’d hav