Buffer

The wait is over: Scheduling to Threads is now available in Buffer! 🧵✨ Start scheduling your threads and build your community with Buffer: buffer.com/threads

Buffer has now existed for almost 14 years, and throughout that time I've seen a lot change in social media, and in our space of tools to support people and businesses with social. We're an outlier as a product and company that has existed for that kind of timeframe with our mission and values left in tact. We've been fortunate to be able to scale to 56,000 paying customers and over $18M in annual revenue while taking our own unique path. We've maintained control of the company and our ability to go boldly in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team. This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. These networks have been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to. The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term. I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon) as the prominent implementation, and AT Protocol from Bluesky. What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web. I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in third-party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space. Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do. We recently added Bluesky to Buffer, and you can now use Buffer to seamlessly post to the top 3 new decentralized social networks: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. I encourage you to add these decentralized social networks to your channels in Buffer, and start participating in this new era of social today.

I just sent Buffer's monthly shareholder update for June 2024. This goes to all of our investor and alumni shareholders (75 people on the list) and I share it publicly as part of our value of transparency. Here are the highlights: Buffer's metrics for June 2024: - MRR: $1,548,844 (+0.82%) - ARR: $18,586,128 (+0.82%) - Customers: 56,046 (+0.22%) - Revenue Per Employee: $261,776 (+0.82%) - Net Income: $86,538 (+22.90%) In June, we: - Launched our Meta Threads integration - Launched the Duplicate action - Hit our 3rd consecutive month of profitability See comments for a link to the shareholder update (includes a Q2 2024 reflection from me). What reflections or questions come up for you while reading our June update? I'd love to hear from you.

Now that we’ve added Bluesky scheduling, that means you can crosspost for multiple decentralized social networks all from one place: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. Why are we focusing on decentralized networks? As a business, we feel philosophically aligned with these networks because they’ve been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations. We're here to see decentralized social media grow and become more meaningful for more people across the world. We’ll be doing everything we can to support the growth of new decentralized social media options, because we believe that individuals and small businesses should maintain control over their content and the connection to their audience.

🚀 A Look Inside Buffer’s Customer Advocacy Support Stack At Buffer, delivering exceptional customer support is one of our top priorities. To achieve this, our Customer Advocacy team relies on a set of apps that enhance both our efficiency and effectiveness. Here’s a look inside our Support Stack—a collection of tools that underpin our workflow and are instrumental in delivering outstanding service. 💌 Help Scout: Our shared inbox that streamlines customer conversations and ensures no query goes unanswered! This includes email, in-app messages, and Facebook messages. 🤖 Discord: Our real-time community forum where we provide support and connect with small business owners to explore topics related to building businesses and growing brands. 🐦 X Pro: Formerly TweetDeck, this is our go-to tool for managing and responding to interactions on X, including public posts and direct messages. 💸 Stripe: While most subscriptions and payment processes are automated or managed by customers via our app, our teammates sometimes make manual adjustments directly within Stripe. ⚙️ Retool: We’re building a brand new customer admin tool using Retool, a low-code platform that lets our Engineering Ops team rapidly create and deploy apps and features. We're excited about the possibilities with Retool! 📊 Mixpanel: This event analytics tool enables us to track user interactions across web and mobile apps, enhancing our ability to troubleshoot issues and provide more personalised support. 📉 Datadog: Our comprehensive monitoring tool that keeps an eye on servers, databases, and apps to maintain smooth operations. 🚀 Raycast: We’ve recently started using Raycast to supercharge our productivity! It centralises common tasks and shortcuts, letting us perform actions across apps swiftly. Windows users, don’t miss out—Flow Launcher is a great alternative. 📸 Zight & Loom: We’re long-time users of Zight (formerly CloudApp) and use it to share screenshots and screen recordings with customers. Loom is another fantastic tool for screen recording that lets us effortlessly create and share visual content with customers. 💬 TextExpander: Our trusted snippet tool has been a staple in our customer support for years! We typically use it for detailed instructions, always adding a personal touch. Used correctly, snippets can greatly enhance efficiency while maintaining the essential human element. A few teammates are now exploring Text Blaze as an alternative—we always stay open to new possibilities! ✍🏼 Grammarly: Keeping our communication clear and professional by checking spelling and grammar and suggesting helpful improvements. These apps are integral to our daily operations, helping us provide swift, effective, and personalised support. Curious to know more or have questions? I'm always eager to connect with fellow Customer Support Ops enthusiasts! ✨

A new platform has entered the chat: Bluesky is now available in Buffer! This means: 1. You can create, plan, and schedule your Bluesky posts in advance with links, images, and hashtags and also schedule threaded posts (something you’re not even able to do natively on Bluesky just yet) 2. You’ll have analytics for your posts: View your likes, comments, and reposts Start growing your community on decentralized social media: https://buffer.com/bluesky

We just launched Bluesky support with Buffer and the landing page was a great demo of how to use various units for overlapping images. Let's start with the hero image. We want it to extend past the bottom of the hero section, without impacting the layout of the next section. To achieve these, we use (negative) margins with `rem` for a fixed overlap amount. We set a negative `margin-block-start` on the image, and match this amount with `margin-block-end` on the hero section. This allows us to control the overlap independent of the screen size. Further down, we have feature sections with a grid layout and images that we want to overlap surrounding content. These images need to proportionally overlap their containers as the screen (viewport) scales in size. This is best achieved with negative margins using the % unit, which is relative to the parent. We fine tune the overlap amount that scales proportionally to the viewport and parent container. We also set `pointer-events: none;` to prevent the image from blocking clicks.

Today, we've added Bluesky to Buffer! Bluesky is an important new social network pushing forward an era of decentralized social media with a focus on ownership and control. Bluesky are also contributing to a resurgence of the open web with social media protocols. And I appreciate that they're prioritizing simplicity, too. With Buffer, you can easily add Bluesky to the networks you're participating in. Bluesky is a special place, so I encourage you give it a try.