Blog - Page 49

A collection of 2,432 blog posts

OpenOct 10, 2016
3 Tips on Running Remote Coaching Sessions

Buffer is a remote company; we are a team of 80 people operating in 11 different time zones, and we don’t own any offices! At Buffer, everyone gets to work from the place they feel the most comfortable in. This lifestyle opens up a lot of possibilities: Some team members decide to pack up and go traveling, while others embrace family life to the fullest from their home office. This freedom also requires us to be more disciplined when it comes to working together — part

BufferchatOct 9, 2016
Idea Generation: A Bufferchat Recap

We were joined by Austin Petito of Evernote this week to chat all about idea generation! We discussed our strategies for creative brainstorming , ways to organize and keep track of all of our ideas, how we work through creative blocks [https://buffer.com/

OpenOct 7, 2016
How “What if We” Turned into Traveling and Working from an RV Across America

Editor’s note: Join the journey of Buffer’s data analyst, Matt, as he and his wife and two dogs travel across America in an RV while working remotely! This is the first post in an ongoing series. And they’re kicking off their voyage today, October 7th! Go, Matt and Jenna! On a Friday evening in late October, 2015, my wife, Jenna, and I were back-porch philosophizing over a bottle of Tuscany red blend wine at our home in Boulder, Colorado. We can’t remember whose idea it was to begin with, but

ReportsOct 6, 2016
The 23 Things We Had to Do Before Launching a Marketing Podcast

Buffer Marketing Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All marketing reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Buffer signups 12,422 +25.7% Buffer for Business trials 1,034 -13.7% Social blog sessions 1,227,494 -2.7% Email subscribers 97,205 -3.6% NPS 56 -1.7% Last summer, in a tiny Icelandic coworking space on a Buffer team retreat, we recorded the very

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Inside Buffer’s Process for Product Development

Buffer Product Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Product reports * All Buffer reports Weekly active users (Awesome + Individual plans) 165,180 +5.1% Weekly active B4B users 4,854 +2.4% B4B Monthly Recurring Revenue $473,425 +4.6% Social updates sent by B4B users 2,998,879 -0.7% Users starting B4B trials in September 5,796 -44.4% Converted B4B tri

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Our People Team Explores: Does Transparent Communication Include Slack?

Buffer People Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All People reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Applicants 505 +49% Open blog posts published 17 +2 Open blog visitors 133,309 +2.4% Bimonthly team NPS score 60% If we’re known in particular for any of

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Introducing Respond’s Customer Service Academy: Bite Sized Lessons For Better Customer Support

Respond Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Respond reports * All Buffer reports Key Metrics Customers crushing their support queue in < 2 hours 82% Paying customers ? 82 MoM growth -4% Respond 2 launching in late October! We’re so excited to announce the upcoming release of Respond 2. It’s the culmination of many months of learning and hard work, and the product has been built from t

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Meet The Familiar Face Handling Buffer’s Trickiest Support Tickets

Buffer Happiness Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Happiness reports * All Buffer reports Key stats in September Responses within 1 hour 36% -24.7% Customer satisfaction score 91 Email conversations 11,698 +39.5% Twitter conversations 5,956 -29.9% Hour avg. Twitter response time 4.2 +27.2% Onboarding Webinars hosted 8 September and in the Nort

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Making MRR Actionable: How We’re Fine-Tuning Our Financial Model to Gain Insights

Buffer People Report September 2016 * All People Ops reports * All Buffer reports Key Stats Team members 79 Revenue in cash receipts $996k +1.2% MRR $987k +4.6% ARR $11.8m +5.0% Debits $854.5k –6.1% Profit $122k –1.9% We have $1.56m in the bank as of September 30, which is a good signal! We continue to be cashflow positive, and plan to remain as such. In September, we’ve worked hard on a few topics, especially improving at forecasting our cash planning. Here is a

ReportsOct 6, 2016
Streamlining and Improving Buffer’s Video and Image Services

Buffer Engineering Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Key stats Requests for buffer.com 196 m Avg. response for buffer.com 226ms Requests for api.bufferapp.com 1.04 b Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 86.8 ms Bugs & Quality * Code reviews given: 68% of Pull Requests were reviewed * 4 S1 (severity 1) bugs: 4 opened, 3 closed. (42% smashed) * 24 S2 (severity 2) bugs: 9 opened, 13 closed (59% smashed) Buffer

How to Get Verified on Twitter (If I can do it, you can too!)

Update: Twitter has paused its verification program for the moment. We are keen to let you know when Twitter resumes its program and will update this note accordingly. That said, I think it’ll still be good to keep your Twitter account tip-top in the meantime. Here are some ways to maximize your chances at getting verified on Twitter. Have you ever felt like a celebrity on social media? I’ve had a moment or two when someone I reall

OverflowOct 4, 2016
Smooth Scrolling in Buffer for iOS: How (and Why) We Implemented AsyncDisplayKit

Each year after Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference we switch most of our focus onto a bigger update to our Buffer iOS app to build out support for the newest iOS features and changes. This year was no different, but this time we also focused a bunch of time on performance and future proofing. New version of iOS = new changes to Buffer iOS app During the time after WWDC, we typically will run through the app and adjust our minimum target to the previous iOS release. In this case, it

OpenOct 4, 2016
A Year At Buffer: Top 10 Things I Learned While Working at a Startup

On September 14th, I celebrated my first Buffversary — a year at Buffer , a social media management startup. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take some time to reflect on the past year and share some of the things I learnt. A bit of background: I’m a Community Champion and I have been working on our community initiatives such as our weekly #bufferchat and our Slack community. Recently, after the Marketing and Community team combined forces [https://buffer.com/res

Guides & CoursesOct 4, 2016
Instagram for Business: 30 Tips to Grow Your Audience and Stand Out on Instagram

Instagram is the go-to place for over 300 million people to share their photos, videos, and stories every single day. And as Instagram has grown over recent years, that’s left many business owners and marketers with one very clear and important question: How can we use Instagram for business? Well today, we’d love to dive head first into that topic and share: * How to set up a killer Instagram profile * The importance of goal setting and how to creat

PodcastsOct 3, 2016
Millennial Marketing: Actionable Social Media Advice from a Top Marketer [SSM008]

Understanding the consumer behavior of younger generations is one of the most talked about subjects in marketing today. Particularly when it comes to Millennial marketing. But what if you could look inside the mind of a successful Millennial marketer? At 27 years young, Everette Taylor is a 4-time entrepreneur and is currently serving as Vice President of Marketing for a fast-growing and revolutionary mobility company called Skurt [

What Happened When We Cut Back on Refunds: A Customer Service Experiment

In Buffer’s history we’ve tried many different experiments that have soared – or flopped. Some with our culture . Some with our management structure (or lack thereof!) . Some with launching products . If a belief or philosophy hasn’t been examined recently, we like to take a closer look and perhaps try something new. We feel that one of our biggest

BufferchatSep 29, 2016
Essentialism: A #Bufferchat Recap

Greg McKeown , author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less , stopped by #bufferchat this week to share his expertise and insights all about the concept of essentialism! We discussed what it means to be an essentialist, strategies for working toward this mindset, how to decide which things are essential in your life, and much more. Read on to discover all of the amazi

News and TrendsSep 29, 2016
Everyone Can Now Create Twitter Moments: Here’s All You Need to Know

The ability to create Twitter Moments is being rolled out to all users. Twitter Moments enable users to stitch together multiple tweets into slideshow-like stories. When they originally launched, Moments were intended to help Twitter users keep up with what the world is talking about at any given time without having to follow loads of new people or watch trending topics closely. The below video from Twitter explains a little more about how Moments work: pic.twitter.com/boP59z64dH [https://t

OpenSep 28, 2016
Why We Give Our Team Paid Time Off to Volunteer

Every employee at Buffer can take a full day or two half-days off each quarter to show gratitude by volunteering or otherwise contributing to their community, wherever they may be. Here’s more detail about the program!

ToolsSep 28, 2016
15 Social Media Podcasts to Take Your Marketing Skills to the Next Level Today

What should you do if you want to become the best at what you do? There’s probably a long list, with lots of options. One thing we’re particularly fond of at Buffer when it comes to improving ourselves is listening to podcasts relevant to our niche and industry. In our case, that means social media podcasts! What we love about podcasts is that they make it easy to hear from industry leaders and talented folks about their experiences and advice (which we might not be able to read about anywher

PodcastsSep 28, 2016
Inside Social Media at one of the Biggest Universities in America (and What You Can Learn) [SSM007]

What is it like to be the Director or Social Media for one America’s largest and most engaged universities? With more than 1,000 social media accounts to oversee and an audience base of over 6 million, Nikki Sunstrum, Director of Social Media at the University of Michigan, knows what it takes to reach and engage with a large demographic of people from prospective students to parents to proud alumni. We had the pleasure of speaking to Nikki about what it’s like to be the Director of Social Medi

PodcastsSep 27, 2016
A Playbook for Becoming a Thought Leader on Social Media [SSM006]

The path to becoming a thought leader on social media is one that is not always clearly defined. Thought leaders and influencers come from a wide variety of backgrounds, specialties, industries and expertise. And in many cases, social media thought leaders don’t consciously seek to become an “influencer,” it happens naturally over time with lots of hard work and dedication. But what if there was a way to position yourself to become a thought leader in your industry? We’d love to share some ti

OpenSep 27, 2016
My First 30 Days as a Manager: The 3 Biggest Questions I’ve Asked Myself So Far

It feels ridiculous for me to write about being an engineering manager. It’s a job I’ve done for not even 30 days yet. But that’s what I want to know from others —how did you start? How did you make it through your first month? No two first rodeos are ever alike. But they’re all rodeos, and falling off is falling off. There’s some kind of pattern. So here I am, writing the post that I want to read. What is this job, anyway? I had a rough idea what I was getting into from the internal job des

OverflowSep 26, 2016
How We Rethought our Complete Package Structure for Buffer on Android and the Awesome Effect It’s Had on Our Workflows

For the past five years, our Android project has maintained a similar package structure from when it was first created in 2012. There have been a few changes here and there, but the general structure has remained the same. When most applications are created, the class count is small. However, as the app grows and features get added, it can be easy for packages to become bloated, potentially to the point where it makes a workspace feel unorganized and difficult to navigate. This was starting to