A few books that Buffer teammates have been reading lately: 📚 Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari 📚 Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group), by Marty Cagan 📚 The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, by Brandon Sanderson 📚Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, by Tiago Forte What's on your reading list right now?

doing some early research ahead of Buffer's 2025 trend predictions (DM me if you have something, and I'll send over the form!) and shout out to Lindsey Gamble and Lia Haberman for calling the rise of LinkedIn influencers/creators (and shoutout to Glimpse for their amazing extension - that forecast button is golden)

As a marketer, I'm keeping a close eye on alternatives to X/Twitter. Fortunately, we have a ton of interesting data about this at Buffer. We introduced our Mastodon integration last year, followed by Threads in June and Bluesky in July. Bluesky seems to be growing the fastest at the moment.

Struggling to define your niche as a creator? Gigi Robinson, M.S., BFA has some advice. 💡 In this episode of Buffer Chat, Gigi shares her take on: ✨ Defining a niche (without boxing yourself in) ✨ Turning content creation into a true business ✨ What she’d do if she were starting from scratch today (and why Instagram is still her favorite) Watch or listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Find the 🔗 down below! #BufferChat #Podcast #SocialMediaTips #SocialMediaPodcast

A recap of September/Q3 happenings at Buffer. My personal favourite highlights: 🎉 New scheduling options for TikTok and YouTube Shorts 📎 Attach PDFs to your Ideas for LinkedIn 🎠 Schedule up to 20 images to Threads carousels 🔔 $19m ARR 🇹🇷 2025 retreat location revealed!

Here are 3️⃣ prompts you can use to create LinkedIn posts this week ✨ 1. Share a personal accomplishment you're proud of and what it took to achieve it. 2. How did you land your current role (or if you’re a business owner, what steps did you take to get going)? 3. Revisit an old post and rework it in another format – repurposing is a great way to extend the shelf life of your ideas. What's another prompt you use?

Here's a reflection on Buffer's Q3 which I recently sent to shareholders: We ended Q3 2024 with $1,602,052 in MRR or $19,224,628 in ARR. This represents 3.46% growth from Q2, which is our strongest quarterly growth in almost 5 years. We also grew paying customers by 2.89% to 57,666, our strongest growth in over 6 years. We continued our trend from Q2 of profitability in each month of Q3, and achieved a net income of $125,289 for the quarter. Segmenting out Legacy and New Buffer customers, we can understand the numbers and trajectory in higher definition. New Buffer now represents 83.2% of total MRR, and 80.2% of paying customers. We saw an MRR/ARR growth rate for the New Buffer segment of 7.82% for Q3. The delta between our 7.82% growth rate for New Buffer vs our overall growth rate of 3.46% shows that we have a strong foundation of growth in our current and majority customer segment. In Q3 we added $83,427 in net MRR growth for New Buffer, with $12,861 (15.4%) of this coming from Legacy customers migrating over to our New Buffer plans, while Legacy Buffer as a segment declined by $30,259 in net MRR. This indicates that we will continue to see strong overall growth rates going forward. The Legacy segment continues to decline as we are not adding any new customers to it, and it has a natural churn rate. In Q3 the Legacy segment declined by 13.81% to $268,974 in MRR or $3,227,693 in ARR. We are happily tracking the decline without aggressively forcing customers to migrate to New Buffer plans. Eventually we will aim to get this segment to zero, which will enable simplicity in our product, architecture and customer service. I predicted in my Q2 update that Q3 would be the quarter we see an overall increase in the number of paying customers once again. We are celebrating achieving this, and looking ahead to how we can continue to achieve strong growth in both the number of paying customers and MRR/ARR so that we can see many more strong growth quarters ahead. I expect we will see a strong Q4 despite the usual seasonal dip in usage of our product during the holidays, thanks to a continued strong growth rate of New Buffer and the lessening pull down effect of Legacy as the segment declines. Do you have any questions on our Q3 performance or generally on Buffer? Let me know, I'll try to respond to all of them.

Buffer Chat has entered the chat. 🎙️ Are you looking to learn how to grow your following from folks who have actually done it? ✨ Meet Buffer Chat: The Podcast. ✨ In every episode, we dive deep with top creators, influencers, and social media experts who’ve achieved social media success — whatever that might mean for them. From LinkedIn to YouTube, TikTok to Threads, we’ll talk content that converts views to follows, strategies that stick, routes to monetization, and more. Our goal is to make Buffer Chat a must-listen show for creators, entrepreneurs, and anyone looking to level up their social media presence. The first episode with Gigi Robinson, M.S., BFA drops today! Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. 🔗 to the show in the comments. #BufferChat #Podcast #SocialMediaTips #SocialMediaPodcast

I know, I know - it's tempting to simply copy/paste content across social channels. I do this also, when there's a HUGE audience difference (like sharing an image on LinkedIn and Instagram). But text-based posts in particular are a bit different, because different platforms (LinkedIn, Threads, X/Twitter) have different styles. What performs well on one may tank on another. Generating *new* content for each platform is wayyy too much work - don't do that. Instead, you can use automation + AI to tweak you content. Here's what I do: 1. Send a post from LinkedIn via Buffer 2. Run the post through ChatGPT via Zapier 3. Send the modified post back to Buffer to schedule for Threads I, of course, edit the post before publishing. But that way, it's not identical content.

I posted (nearly) every day for the past 30 days on LinkedIn and here are my results: 🌍 891%+ increase in impressions ↗️ 1390%+ increase in members reached 🌱 38%+ increase in followers 🫶 346%+ increase in engagements Amongst the metrics, here’s what I’ve learned: ✅ Your content should always be purpose-led ✅ Engagement is everything—be active in the comments! ✅ Video content doesn’t always perform well ✅ Be your authentic self and everything will fall into place One of the biggest takeaways from this experiment is how much people truly connect with those who share their vulnerability and shed light on the realities of their careers. LinkedIn is one of the platforms where we truly appreciate and uplift others, we celebrate growth, and we value transparency. Buffer’s Creator Camp has been an incredible way to challenge myself and get back into the rhythm of regularly posting for my personal brand. A huge thank you to Tamilore O., Kirsti Lang, and Hailley Griffis—I've had a blast. 🙌 #PersonalGrowth #MarketingGrowth #Community #SocialMedia #SocialMediaManagers #CreatorCamp