Buffer

I've worked at Buffer — a remote and distributed company — for over 8 years now, and while we do plan in-person gatherings, they are often spaced out. For that reason, meeting up in person is something I treasure very much. I recently had the chance to cowork alongside the delightful Suzanne Kelly, Jacob Chadwell, and Carolyn Kopprasch in Nashville, and it was the best! Here's a little recap of our time together. 📹 #RemoteWork #Coworking

When is the last time you or your business tried something new? Something that might be a disaster? It was pretty recently for us at Buffer. We spent a whole week working very differently. We cancelled recurring meetings and went deep into strategy discussions for Q4 and 2025 in long-form, asynchronous posts that anyone in the company could create and reply to. The result? Overall good! Though we did end up with a somewhat overwhelming number of posts to reply to, the general energy was outstanding and we can imaging seeing ourselves work this way more often. Comment with any questions this sparks for you, we have much more to share here!

When we opened up the Social Media Manager role at Buffer, a lot of people assumed we were only hiring in the US — which isn't how we operate. That assumption is so interesting to me because I can see why some companies would want their teammates all in one country (for ease of admin) or all in one timezone (for ease of synchronous work), but at the same time, there are SO many benefits to being fully distributed. 🌍 Having teammates in most time zones at Buffer means we have more coverage for our Engineering, Customer Advocacy, and Marketing teams. We have people online almost all the time. 💡 We also have more cultural diversity and creative ideas. 🌟 Plus — we have some of the best people I've ever worked with on the Buffer team. It's so unlikely to find top candidates only in one time zone or country. For context, on our Marketing team at Buffer we have teammates who live in: - Australia - Canada - Nigeria - Scotland - South Africa - United States + One nomadic teammate, currently in Sri Lanka ➡️ In the end, for the first interview stage I interviewed 16 people across 8 countries. Grateful we had such a diverse group apply to the role! #RemoteCompanies #RemoteWork #GlobalTeams

We recently crossed $19M in ARR at Buffer… for the second time. It's been a journey, to say the least. We first crossed $19M in ARR in September 2018. It's hard to believe that's six years ago. The chart tells the story well - it's been a rollercoaster and the hardest thing I've worked through as a Founder CEO. There's a lot of pain represented in that curve. To be declining for multiple years is demoralizing and exhausting. But I always planned to build a long-term business and was determined to lead us back to thriving, so I remained optimistic despite the fact it took some searching to find the path to new growth. In many ways, this is a failure for me as CEO and for us as a business. It truly is. I fully own that as a fact. And yet, I see it as a success too. We plateaued, declined, and rediscovered growth as a business in those years. I grew significantly as a leader, and we'll soon cross 14 years since I started the company. We went through this cycle without doing layoffs, thanks to the fact we entered our decline with profitability and a healthy cash balance. Most importantly, we figured out what we are for as a business; who we're serving. For me, that involved reminding myself why I even started Buffer. I love building for and serving entrepreneurs, and I love helping creators and small businesses get off the ground and thrive.We re-committed to the business model that serves these folks, and drove our early growth, which is a highly generous freemium SaaS offering. I get a kick out of delivering immense value compared to what we charge for the product, and challenging myself to continually improve our tools. Through the low lows of our multi-year decline, we rediscovered our DNA and the vital components of our culture. We found a way to blend that with what the world and our space looks like today, to arrive at a strategy and way of working that's helping us thrive again and ensure we can exist for another decade and beyond. I found a new level of passion and conviction for what we're doing, for the potential we have as a business, and the ways I can lead and do work that fuels me to help us fulfill those ambitions. The first time we crossed $19M, the writing was on the wall for our looming decline. Pace of product improvement and innovation had stalled; we were debilitated by tech debt we didn't yet know how to manage. We succumbed to squeezing revenue out of existing customers, and were already seeing a steep decline in new paying customers. This time around, we are moving faster and more boldly than we have in years, and we've re-centered ourselves around growing by serving more customers and continually adding real value, rather than through price increases and short-term growth hacks. There's no doubt we will run into challenging cycles again in our future. I'm confident we'll find our way through those too. To me, that's a natural part of building a long-term business. Onwards to $20M, again.

We've put together 7 content prompts for your next post – make sure to screenshot this video and revisit whenever you need a spark of inspiration.

8 tried-and-tested LinkedIn personal brand tactics — from Bufferoos who are actually using them ✨ More and more Buffer team members are focusing on LinkedIn to grow their personal brands, share insights, and support side projects. With a transparent work culture, the Buffer team has plenty of content to share, making LinkedIn a key part of our marketing strategy. Here's some advice from Marketing teammates David Luhr, Tami Oladip, Hailley Griffis, Simon Heaton, Sophie Gil, and Kirsti Lang: 1. Share ‘how I’ instead of just ‘how to’ Sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses of how you do things adds authenticity and resonates with LinkedIn users. Show real-life examples of your strategies or approaches to make your posts more relatable and impactful. 2. Explore different post formats Text posts, carousels, videos, and polls — try them all! Mix up your content to keep things interesting for both you and your audience. However, don’t underestimate the power of simple, text-based posts for consistency. 3. Ask open-ended questions Encourage conversations by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions. It’s a great way to build relationships, learn from others, and engage with your network in a meaningful way. 4. Make your content easy to read Use short paragraphs, emojis, and symbols to break up your text. Your first 100 characters are crucial — grab attention and entice your audience to click '...More' by making your content scannable and engaging. 5. Deliver value upfront LinkedIn users are there to learn and grow. Posts that deliver useful insights, like an in-depth thread, tend to perform well. Share actionable recommendations and valuable information to keep your audience engaged. 6. Show, don’t just tell Include visuals like screenshots to add depth to your content. Sharing a visual example of your day-to-day work, such as charts or tools you use, helps build a stronger connection with your audience. 7. Repurpose content from other platforms Don't let great content go to waste! Repurpose posts from TikTok, Instagram, or even older LinkedIn content. Polishing up existing material can keep your feed fresh and help you reach a wider audience 8. Post at the right times LinkedIn engagement peaks between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., but it’s important to consider your audience's time zones. Experiment with different times to find when your posts gain the most traction. What's working for you right now as a LinkedIn creator? We'd love to add more tips to this list!

🎬 3 mistakes I made when I first started filming YouTube videos for Buffer — and how you can avoid them. Listen, I'm no expert here. I've posted a whopping 2 whole videos (and scrapped about 3,456 others) in the past few weeks. But I've finally created what feels like a repeatable process. The last video I filmed took me about 10 hours to script, record, and edit, which is pretty grand, considering it took me several *days* to complete the first. I'll link to them below so you can have a gander. (Please be kind! I'm still learning.) 📌 1. Thinking I'd be able to "read" a script. How much easier would it be to chat away to the camera if you had all the words you needed right in front of you? I tried *everything* to make this a reality. Teleprompter apps, printed scripts, separate screens set up behind the camera, you name it. But all of these options looked forced and unnatural. My eyes were either focused off-center or darting all over the shop trying to read lines. I spent hours trying to get this right before calling time on this plan — and coming up with a rather clever new one. And no — it didn't involve learning an 11-minute script by heart. I had my laptop set up just off shot, to my right. I had to turn my head to read it, so that curbed the temptation of constantly checking. And I filmed small chunks at a time, freezing my hands and position every time I moved (since I wanted to keep the flow as smooth as possible — though the jump cuts are still very evident in places). And it worked! After a while, I even started speaking off the cuff! 📌 2. Not recording a 'practice' run I promise you, when you watch the recording back, you will spot or hear something that will annoy the heck out of you. And that's if you even get a good quality recording. I can't tell you how much time I wasted filming while: - my mic wasn't plugged in properly (hello, garbled, unusable audio) - I had a bit of fluff on my shirt - I had something really weird in the background Now, I'll start by setting everything up, filming the video intro, then stopping to play it back and check everything looks (and sounds!) fine. 📌 3. Aiming for perfection My desire to have the perfect YouTuber-worthy set-up and presentation held me back for ages. I recorded countless times because I wasn't happy with some minute thing. Until deadlines loomed and the video was nowhere near done. While I'd been working on my first video (among other projects) for about a week, I ended up having only about 2 days to film and edit. Nothing like a bit of pressure to stop any unnecessary faffing. I had one more shot to record, and that was it. Was it perfect? No. But it was done. And it was good enough. I'll get better at it. Maybe I'll get close to whatever perfect looks like one day (she said wistfully). 💡 Are any other brands/creators/marketers embarking on a similar project? I'd love to hear your mistakes and learnings!

We've fallen into a habit at Buffer of collaborating primarily through recurring group and 1:1 meetings. As an organization, we have many docs filled with agenda items for these 1:1 and group status meetings. It's something I've been reflecting on for a while, and I had a theory that if we could transfer all of those agenda items to be individual discussion topics in an async, transparent collaboration space, we would benefit immensely. There are a number of problems with prescheduled recurring meetings utilized to discuss multiple agenda items: • Agenda items end up being "saved up" for the upcoming 1:1 or group meeting, which slows down progress and leads to items being discussed later rather than when they arise and the person has the most clarity in their mind • These agenda-filled status meetings often have too many items in the list, and everything feels rushed. If it's the primary way collaboration happens, it means that collaboration is constrained to be shallow rather than really delving into a topic. • Many agenda items can benefit from someone being involved who happens to not be in that 1:1 or group meeting • As a leader I found myself sharing the same current strategic reflection or decision across multiple 1:1 and group meetings, which quickly feels inefficient when a broad group could benefit from knowing that information So a couple of weeks ago I decided to conduct an experiment at Buffer. I called it Collaboration Week. Here's how it worked: • For the week, we cancelled recurring meetings and had all of our discussions in Campsite, the tool we use for async collaboration and decision making. • Anyone could start a topic, and others would jump in and add their reflections. • The discussions we had were across all areas, and the team didn't shy away from raising significant challenges and bold ideas. • A wide range of folks across different areas participated in very constructive discussion and debate, and we had a number of breakthroughs. • Towards the end of the week I nudged the group to take discussions towards decisions and conclusions. Overall, the week was a huge success and I'm now reflecting on the week and making decisions as to how it should affect and adjust how we work on an ongoing basis. We covered many more discussions than we would have been able to synchronously. And they all happened out in the open for the whole company to observe. I found that people regularly took words from another topic and quoted them to help us make the right decisions in other areas. There's something about building the passage of time into a topic naturally by having it in an asynchronous collaboration tool that helped us feel less rushed than we do in our meeting-heavy collaboration style. And perhaps the most exciting outcome was that we reached all the way to fundamentals in many areas, rather than solving micro-issues and remaining at local maxima.

Happy start of Q4 to all who celebrate 📅 🥳

Welcome to Week 1 of Creator Camp! Here are the content prompts for this week. We'll be sharing one day early so you can put together your content and schedule for the week 💡 Tag us in your posts @buffer – we'd love to see what you come up with.