Updates and tips from

How To: Get extra space for Tweets in your Buffer

We’d like to give you a quick update on the latest feature available for your Buffer account. From now on, whenever you invite friends to use Buffer you will get one extra space for a tweet in your Buffer. On the free plan you get 10 spaces in your Buffer to start with and you can extend this to as many as you wish by inviting people. It’s our way of saying thanks to all of you who are helping to spread the word :)

Your personal link to share wherever you want

Access the new Referrals section by clicking on the new button when you’re signed in to Buffer. Once you’re in you will be able to find your own personal link you can use to invite people. You can also click our Invite button to add a Tweet into your Buffer inviting people.

How does it work?

As soon as a friend has signed up and used Buffer we give you an extra space in your Buffer. You can check on the status of the friends you’ve invited and see who has already signed up through your invite link. We’ll send you a notification whenever you get an extra space in your Buffer. Here is how the progress is represented:

So go and check it out now. Do you have any thoughts on our Dropbox-style referral program? Please let us know below or @bufferapp on Twitter.

6 Brilliant Twitter Resources You Can’t Miss

When brainstorming this week’s blogpost I realized that there was a fantastic amount of resources about Twitter Tips and insights published last week. So I thought the best thing to do is to give you a brief overview of these invaluable resources so you can go and have a read yourself.

I firmly believe that reading these 6 posts will arm you with the knowledge you need to make the right moves forward on Twitter:

1.) How to best engage your community – by @JanetAronica This post tops the list as it was the most amazing Twitter Tip post I read in a long time. In 4 simple steps you are walked through how to engage with your community. Start off with being responsive and gracious. Continue by being consistent and add your personal tone.

Read it all here

2.) How to best promote your content on Twitter – by @MackCollier

Mack’s post is, like all on this list, in a league of it’s own. It teaches us about Twitter what an old favorite Chinese saying of mine does too: “If you want to walk fast, walk alone – If you want to walk far, walk together”

In a compelling way Mack tells us how the best way to create traffic and promote your own content is to promote others and share their content. Intuitively it might sound contradictory but both the argument of creating a strong community he develops and the hard facts of his success teach you otherwise.

Read it all here

3.)How to find your like minds on Twitter – by @AskAaronLee

Aaron is a master mind as regards finding the right and the best people in your niche to follow on Twitter. A chat with him or a look on his follower count will clarify this for you.

Now that he has published his insights where the best places are to start building your own tribe it is a no brainer that this resource will be mind blowing. The best lists, websites and hashtags you need to get started with creating your own tribe:

Read it all here

4.) How to Increase Your Retweets, Twitter Followers & Klout – by @Kikolani

Kristi’s post is another must read for you if you are looking to create and scale your Twitter presence. She explains everything you need to know in order to make your own blog Twitter-Fit.

The best part is that Kristi magically underlines her advice on what to do with strong arguments on why you need to do this. She tells you how this will directly affect your Klout score. How it will affect your retweets and your follower count. And you can start doing it right away:

Read it all here

5.) When should you tweet? – by @TweetSmarter

This is one again stood out sharply from all other posts I read. Given the vast amount of apps, posts and even books that are written about what the best times to tweet are, this resource is by far the most valuable one I came across. Dave elaborates on this topic reflecting on 4 factors influencing the best times to tweet. They are RCCF (Retweets, Clicks, Comments as replies and Favourites).

The reason this post stands out from the rest is the vast amount of other reflections about tweeting times it includes. Does tweeting mean you are active? Should you retweet your tweets? You will find answers to these and many more questions you ever had about tweeting times.

Read it all here

6.) What’s going on with Twitter? – by @JeffBullas

I found several posts reflecting Twitter’s latest growth figures, however none made sense of it all in such a way as Jeff did. It’s not just the common gossip on mindblowing figures of how many tweets and how many new users. There is more to it here. Jeff reflects on the longterm impact these stats are likely to have for Twitter.

What’s particularly interesting is a link to an early post he wrote about Twitter’s figures and how they relate to current ones. His conclusion? Twitter is super healthy.

Read it all here

To speak with Mack’s words this is not a post to get on anyone’s radar, it is a collection of resources because the content is amazing. I hope you find the posts useful. What are your thoughts on them? Or would you like to add a post to this list? Let me know below

Fotocredit: Tweetcloud

Full analytics for your tweets on Buffer [Update]

We’re excited to unveil the latest features for your Buffer account. You are now able to track the full impact your tweets are making. Check your buffered tweets for clicks, retweets and reach from now on. Simply click on the “analytics” button in your Buffer account.

Here is what you get:

Shorten your Links with one Click

In addition to the above we’ve also added the ability to easily shorten links. As you know, if you use one of the browser extensions you get auto-shortened links. If you want to type or copy a link and shorten it yourself - now you can.

Stay tuned for more and keep on Buffering.

If you have any thoughts on the new features, please let us know below. Or if you just want to chat, leave us a comment too, we’d love to hear from you :)

10,000 Tweets sent using Buffer! [Stats]

We’re really excited to let you know that we’ve just hit a big milestone here at Buffer. Our lovely users have sent out a combined total of 10,000 tweets. We’re delighted to be helping people send so many tweets :)

We’re particularly happy about the curve that all these tweets is generating, so we want to share it with you. Take a look:

This is of course due to all of you Buffering great tweets every day. As can be seen below, Buffer is currently sending close to 500 tweets every day:

The only thing for us left to say is thank you and keep on Buffering! Stay tuned for many more useful features to be unveiled soon.

Is there anything you want to desperately see Buffer do for you? Let us know in the comments and we will let you know what we can do about it.

5 deadly sins you should avoid on Twitter

One of the most important aspects which makes Twitter such an awesome place to share and exchange thoughts and links is it’s openness to all users. Twitter’s guidelines on do’s and don’ts are extremely loose and leave us, the users, with a large degree of freedom. We are left with using the service to how it suits us best.

Additionally, there are also many good examples of what works and what actually harms your twitter activities. Here are 5 things you should avoid if you are interested in genuinely building up your twitter presence.

1.) Turning yourself into an auto-bot

Whilst cruising through the twitterverse there is one important action that should be avoided at large. It is switching your account to full auto-pilot. In our viewpoint, there is no problem with optimizing your twitter activity, if you for example schedule genuine tweets in order to provide value when you are not around or want to create a certain consistency.

However changing over to fully automated feed-tweeting, where you have no knowledge about the content being tweeted, is something which can have a substantial negative impact. Followers who are looking for your personal tweets will be turned away and lose interested in you and may unfollow you eventually.

2.) Linking to your own blog far too often

Another bad habit we observe, which can really turn off people from clicking your links and engaging with you, is giving too much love to your own blog. Of course, no one will be annoyed if you tweet your latest blog posts a few times, to get the word out.

However striking a good balance, where the larger amount of your linking tweets point to other sites and resources you’ve found useful will build up trust far better.

3.) Spamming your followers with #FF - Tweets

You have most likely heard about the Twitter tradition where you give credit to the most recommendable twitter users you’ve come across during the week. You do this by sending a tweet that includes the #ff or #followfriday hashtag. In our view, this is a very powerful and important habit, which you should definitely make good use of.

In order to really use it to your advantage you should avoid sending out tweets including #ff and then cramping in as many twitter usernames as possible to flatter as many people as you can. Instead, try to only give credit to one or at most 2 people, whom you truly appreciated during the week.

Provide value for your followers by sharing why they are worth being followed. This guarantees an experience your followers will start looking for instead of ignoring.

4.) #Don’t #hashtag #every #topic

Speaking of hashtags, there is also another important aspect we want to share with you regarding this topic. It is our understanding that using hashtags is a way to enhance the twitter experience for your followers, instead of cluttering their timeline.

Our suggestion is to use no more than one hashtag and only if it is a topic you are aware of having a notable audience for the hashtag(s). This will give your followers an opportunity to read more about this area, without feeling overwhelmed by several different hashtags.

5.) Usig bad grammer and shrtning evrythng

The last hint we want to give here is to look out for correct spelling and use of language everyone understands. We believe that it is possible to send a strong message to followers by showing sophistication about the use of words.

Even though there might be lots of different abbreviations you feel everyone is already aware of, the LOL-ing and WTF-ing is something that impacts your personality as a twitter user. If you are looking to build a sustainable following around your twitter account, make it a simple requirement to watch out for your language.

These are the 5 things, which are really putting us off from continuing to follow someone. Which are the deadliest sins for you? Let us know, so we make sure not to commit them!

Photo credit: KungPaoCajun

New features for your Buffer

This is just a quick post to update you on the latest things we have been doing lately.

Firstly, we pushed a small, but hopefully very helpful feature live. It is a simple shortening button that will work for both the browser extensions and for your home account at bufferapp.com. Here is how it looks:

Is there an easier way to use Buffer?

Additionally we thought of guiding you through a common way a few people have started to use Buffer lately.

That is that you can use the browser extension as your single place to add tweets to your Buffer. You don’t have to go back to your Buffer panel to add tweets. In order to make that a little more obvious we added a little “x” at the top corner of the extension. Click it to clear the text and write whichever tweet you want to go into your Buffer. Simple.

We hope this helps to improve your Buffer experience even further.

What are the best times to tweet to get more engagement?

Twitter is lively and engaging. It is dynamic and has turned into the most important place online to start your conversations – hassle free and in real time.

But what’s new is that as Twitter matures, the more theories on its usage exist. Even though we are quite reluctant to tell anyone what and when to do something on twitter, there is some great research indicating the best times to tweet.

If you feel you could improve with your click through rates and engagement, take a look below.

What are the best times for retweets during the day?

Dan Zarella’s research suggests that the best time of the day to get your tweets retweeted is around 4 p.m. Interestingly though, there is also another spike at around 2 a.m., indicating you should definitely bear different timezones in mind when planning your tweets.

(Source: The Fast Company)

What are the best days during the week?

Zarella also indicates that there is one particular day during the week at which you should increase your tweeting for more engagement. The clear result is Friday.

(Source: The Fast Company)

What about Click Through Rates?

Even though the correlation between retweets and clicks might be obvious, our findings for clicks on links differ slightly from retweets. According to Gary McCaffry, who simply analysed traffic coming in from his own twitter account, found these times: Tweets anywhere between 9 a.m. PST and 3 p.m. PST are giving the most traffic to your site.

How does this help me?

The interesting bit here is that there might be place to assume, that people are retweeting your posts, without reading. This of course is not something you would be interested in. That quality (clicks) goes over quantity (retweets) is something we should bear in mind, when choosing the times to tweet.

Last week we posted: How often should I tweet?

How often should I tweet?

In order to master the art of twitter, getting the amount of daily tweets that reach your followers right is crucial. We found some great expert advice, backed up with analytics for different kinds of twitter users, which we want to share with you.

How often should I tweet if I am…

a Newbie: Starting out on twitter can be quite hard at times. After all it is by now an established service, where a mutual understanding of certain dos and don’ts exist. In order to truly understand how it works, listening is the best start. Focus on what your folks have to say and share, then start out with only a few tweets a day to get a proper feel of what is right for you.

Recommended daily tweets: 2-5

(Source: The Social Customer)

a Business: Once you have reached a stage where metrics and optimized engagement with your followers really matters, we have some interesting findings for you. Marketing strategist Ben Hanna found that as a business wanting to make it big on Twitter you have two options. Either leave a time space of 31-60 minutes between your tweets or tweet every 2-3 hours. Why? Because he analysed that these timeframes will give you the most clicks and engagement with your tweets.

Recommended daily tweets: Every 31-60 minutes/ every 2-3 hours

(Source: Ben Hanna)

an established Individual: If you are reading this and you have been using twitter for a while, you have most likely discovered your daily tweeting pattern yourself. At this stage it really depends upon the network you have built around your twitter account. Whatever you come up with as the right amount of daily tweets, considering two things are very important in our findings. First, make your tweeting routine sustainable for yourself to keep up with it. Secondly make this routine consistent for your followers.

Recommended daily tweets: A sustainable and consistent amount of tweets.

That both extremes of any tweeting schedule can work very well shows the stark contrast between many different successful users. A particularly striking one is the one we found between @shitmydadsays and @guykawasaki for example. Even though both couldn’t be more different in how often they tweet, they always go for quality content they want to share. So looking at your twitter account as a microblog, should help to get a feel for the most suitable number of daily tweets.

Does your experience in tweeting habits differ? Share it with us below.

Photo credit: Simon James

Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it

This is the first of an ongoing series of posts called Building Buffer where we share our methods and learnings with the aim to help people and learn from others who have had similar experiences. We’d love your comments.

Rewind…

I’ve learned more in the two and a half month period since I launched Buffer than ever before. I am very excited to let you know we now have over 500 users, many of whom are active, and we are generating revenue through our paid monthly plans at a conversion rate of around 4% of people upgrading. Let’s go back to the very beginning.

A twinkle of an idea

It was a tiny idea. I wanted to take the scheduling feature of many Twitter clients and apps and make that single feature awesome. I believed that single feature was worthy of its own application. The aim was to create something genuinely useful with a delightful experience. The fundamental idea was to create a way to queue up tweets without scheduling each tweet individually. This is an idea I had after using other Twitter scheduling applications for the purpose of ensuring I didn’t flood people with 5 tweets at once whilst reading my tech & startup news in the morning. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I’d suggested it to existing apps and they hadn’t implemented it. It was time to build it myself

Keeping version 1 minimal. No, more minimal than that.

I’m an advocate of the lean startup principles which Eric Ries proposes. With my first startup, I learned a huge amount about the principles and I tried to implement them as much as I could. I found that practice is much harder than theory. I even started coding Buffer before I’d tested the viability of the business. As soon as I realised that, I stopped, took a deep breath and told myself: do it the right way this time. It was time to test whether people wanted this product.

In Ries’ guide to Minimum Viable Products, one of the key things he answers is “how minimal should your Minimum Viable Product be?”. Here’s his answer:

Probably much more minimum than you think

I had read that line so many times. I’d even told others. It was time to do it myself.

The smallest test

Here’s what we launched with:

The aim of this two-page MVP was to check whether people would even consider using the app. I simply tweeted the link and asked people what they thought of the idea. After a few people used it to give me their email and I got some useful feedback via email and Twitter, I considered it “validated”. In the words of Eric Ries, I had my first “validated learning” about customers. It was time to gain a little more validated learning.

Learning more

So we had validated that people probably wanted the product. The next thing to validate was whether people were comfortable with paying for such a product. This was as simple as adding a page in between the two which showed pricing. One extra click before they gave me their email for a notification when we launch. The extra step tests the pricing (by detecting which plan they click on) and also tests further the demand for the product (one extra click, so they must be keen). Here’s what we did:

The result of this experiment was that people were still clicking through and giving me their email and a small number of people were clicking on paid plans. After this result, I didn’t hesitate to start building the first minimal version of the real, functioning product.

The launch

I was lucky enough that coincidentally there was a little buzz on Hacker News about a “November Startup Sprint” where lots of people agreed to try and get something launched by the end of November. After initially grossly underestimating how long it would take to build the first working version of Buffer (I told people 1 week!), I decided to give myself a cut off point of the end of November, to tie in with the Startup Sprint. This resulted in building the first version in evenings and weekends over a period of 7 weeks. There were a number of features which I felt were quite vital, such as a guided step by step signup process, which I had to leave out because the end of November came round rather fast. I had committed to launch and I stuck with that commitment. Buffer went live on the 30th November and I got some great feedback from the Hacker News community.

Being prepared for a long journey with lots of course-correction

When I started building Buffer, I had already experienced building a previous product where things did not go quite according to plan. Luckily, this prepared me to be patient with uptake of the service, and to be willing to change things quite a lot until I reached something that would be truly valuable for people. It also taught be the value of customer development: to take advantage of those emails coming in by asking people questions. With my previous product, I did not reach out to enough people and say “is this a problem for you?” in order to validate whether the product was something people may want. After launching a version of Buffer I was quite embarrassed about, I was fully expecting for it to have a fairly poor uptake and to have to work a lot to adjust the product in order to gain active users and paying customers. Whether or not the goal is reached sooner or later than expected, there are always times in the ups and downs of the journey where this patience is required, so I value it as an overall mindset for Buffer.

Taking advantage when things go well

Despite being prepared for a long journey, and some things later on requiring that patient mindset, I was lucky with Buffer. It was evident that I had hit a chord with users and I am solving a problem which many people have. I also received a strong signal that the solution provided enough value to build a viable business - I had my first paying customer within 4 days of launching the “rough around the edges” product.

After the first paying customer, I took a step back, acknowledged that as a major milestone and decided a slight shift in focus was required. As a developer, it is easy to pile in more features at that point. I knew it was time to focus on marketing and further customer development. It was time to keep the balance of development, marketing and customer development with a product which had proved it was “good enough”. This has been a valuable lesson I want to take forward: when the signal is there that the product is good enough, shout about it!

What next?

There are always more challenges. Since launching I have got someone else on board to help manage the community and marketing, and I have developed a number of interfaces to the existing data in order to make sense of patterns and validate decisions. We’ve gained a huge amount of press coverage, we’ve worked closely with users on a personal level, we’ve rolled out more features, we’ve changed pricing plans and we’ve implemented an admin activity feed and done cohort analysis. I’m excited to share some of the lessons we’ve learned by doing this in another post on Building Buffer.

Have you had an experience of getting an idea off the ground, or have you had an idea and thought it would take longer to validate it? Are there things you would have done differently? I’d love to hear from you.

5 Reasons Why Twitter is Awesome

Here at Buffer we’ve been developing new features and often find ourselves pondering how to make our product better. This week we’d like to share some of the thoughts we’ve had about how questioning our actions more can help us.

What we have found helps us a lot in various situations is to simply pause and actively reflect upon what we are doing at that moment. It seems obvious, but it helps us to focus, see problems from more viewpoints and work on only the changes which are really required for an improved experience inside our product. We’ve learned that asking ourselves “why” again and again is crucial to reach the right “what”.

We’ve discovered that we can apply this simple strategy of self-questioning to other things in order get a clearer view on what the value is for us. So what we’re going to do is think about why Twitter is awesome, and this will help us discover what we should be doing more.

Reason 1: We have to get to the point

Twitter’s 140 character constraint was wildly discussed ever since Twitter launched. The phrase “twitter changed the way we communicate” is certainly true. We are required to cut out all unnecessary wording. It requires us to think really hard what it is exactly we want to say. It teaches us to get to the point, right away and in less than 140 characters. That’s pure efficiency!

Reason 2: No hierarchies and prejudices

This is a point already tacitly implied and even demanded whenever we talk about Social Media. But when I stumbled across that thought, I found it’s actually something very unique and well worth wording out. Especially for twitter. The opportunity to reach anyone in such a direct, yet effective way is something very valuable. We can reach out to the Guy Kawasakis out there and have a good chance of getting a response. This brings our small world closer together still and breaks down barriers further.

Reason 3: Taking conversations conveniently to the next level

This must sound quite contradictory, given point 1.). But twitter, in addition to its “open to everyone” nature, also gives us a chance to get very focused conversations going. The two examples I want to mention are twitter chats and twitter walls. Those are two amazing opportunities, to discuss hot topics with like minds arriving straight at discussing content. No pre-bubbling required. Convenient and efficient.

Reason 4: Get filtered News - Fast

It was a long time ago that I picked up my last newspaper, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Letting my followers set the agenda of which news is broadcast to me makes a lot more sense to me. It gives me news which I am far more likely to be interested in, in the fastest possible way. Everything happening in the world is right there in my twitter stream.

Reason 5: Getting quality help from your followers

Finally, reflecting on this chance of asking our followers for help, whenever we need it, deserves a few lines. What I love about twitter here, as different from Facebook or Quora for example, is that I get a discussion of many individuals going, whenever I ask a question. With a Fb-status update, I might get one or two friends, whom I start a conversation with, “clogging” up the comments. It’s much harder for others to join this conversation then. On twitter the dynamic is very different and everyone is always welcome to reply back.

Those are 5 reasons why we think Twitter is awesome, and we’ve found by questioning we can identify how useful Twitter is and what we can do to get even more use out of it. We’d really like to hear why you think it is awesome :)

Photo credit: .reid.