<story><title>Change at Buffer: The Next Phase, and Why Our Co-Founder and CTO Are Moving On</title><url>https://open.buffer.com/change-at-buffer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erdojo</author><text>Disagree. The very best digital&amp;#x2F;social marketers don&amp;#x27;t use these tools at all. Each channel has its own platform strengths, weaknesses, peculiarities, not to mention audience differences, trends, breaking news etc.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re scheduling social posts without doing your due diligence on each and every platform within 2-4 hours of a post going live (preferably within 30 minutes before), you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re using the same post across multiple channels, you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re re-using the same post multiple times within a few weeks, you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;The only people I give a free pass too are solo marketers who really just don&amp;#x27;t have time to do things right and have to keep up a minimum level of noise on social.</text></item><item><author>Yabood</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Tools like buffer would still exist even if every single social media network offered scheduling capabilities. The fact is, if you&amp;#x27;re a digital marketer, you&amp;#x27;re not going to waste your time jumping between networks and multiple accounts scheduling content manually.</text></item><item><author>jpeg_hero</author><text>My guess at what happened: the natural hyper growth engine ran out, they tried a bunch of things to jump start it, none of them worked, so now they are on the slow growth path.&lt;p&gt;If they were not remote-only maybe they could have pulled off the CTO&amp;#x27;s plan of hiring a bunch of traditional managers and &amp;quot;pushing&amp;quot; the company forward (probably enterprise sales), but they&amp;#x27;d have restructure the bones of the company at great expense.  The great expense part probably doesn&amp;#x27;t work, because since the sizzle is off the growth, the next VC round would be tough if not impossible to do. It would be very &amp;quot;term-y&amp;quot; and founders are already underwater enough on investor preference.&lt;p&gt;They probably made the right call of not shooting for the moon, and slowing down into a remote-only company that takes its time. Skype and boxer shorts.&lt;p&gt;But now the COO and CTO are faced with the decision of A) sitting around and riding it out at $185,000 and $182,089 per year respectively (healthy money no doubt but not DHH buy-a-racing-team like earn outs) or B) move on to the next thing while the market for vc funding is still hot and they can still get some juice from their association with buffer.&lt;p&gt;Rational decisions all around.&lt;p&gt;Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rythie</author><text>More than half of all the businesses have no employees (i.e. It&amp;#x27;s just the founder) and most of the rest have less than 50 employees. For most companies is social one of many things that they need to do, setup a website, pay taxes, answer the phone, emails etc. because they&amp;#x27;re is no one else. Whilst for big companies, they perhaps have full time social media or at least communications staff, most companies do not.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately this is a tool that saves time for, mostly, small companies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Change at Buffer: The Next Phase, and Why Our Co-Founder and CTO Are Moving On</title><url>https://open.buffer.com/change-at-buffer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erdojo</author><text>Disagree. The very best digital&amp;#x2F;social marketers don&amp;#x27;t use these tools at all. Each channel has its own platform strengths, weaknesses, peculiarities, not to mention audience differences, trends, breaking news etc.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re scheduling social posts without doing your due diligence on each and every platform within 2-4 hours of a post going live (preferably within 30 minutes before), you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re using the same post across multiple channels, you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re re-using the same post multiple times within a few weeks, you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;The only people I give a free pass too are solo marketers who really just don&amp;#x27;t have time to do things right and have to keep up a minimum level of noise on social.</text></item><item><author>Yabood</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Tools like buffer would still exist even if every single social media network offered scheduling capabilities. The fact is, if you&amp;#x27;re a digital marketer, you&amp;#x27;re not going to waste your time jumping between networks and multiple accounts scheduling content manually.</text></item><item><author>jpeg_hero</author><text>My guess at what happened: the natural hyper growth engine ran out, they tried a bunch of things to jump start it, none of them worked, so now they are on the slow growth path.&lt;p&gt;If they were not remote-only maybe they could have pulled off the CTO&amp;#x27;s plan of hiring a bunch of traditional managers and &amp;quot;pushing&amp;quot; the company forward (probably enterprise sales), but they&amp;#x27;d have restructure the bones of the company at great expense.  The great expense part probably doesn&amp;#x27;t work, because since the sizzle is off the growth, the next VC round would be tough if not impossible to do. It would be very &amp;quot;term-y&amp;quot; and founders are already underwater enough on investor preference.&lt;p&gt;They probably made the right call of not shooting for the moon, and slowing down into a remote-only company that takes its time. Skype and boxer shorts.&lt;p&gt;But now the COO and CTO are faced with the decision of A) sitting around and riding it out at $185,000 and $182,089 per year respectively (healthy money no doubt but not DHH buy-a-racing-team like earn outs) or B) move on to the next thing while the market for vc funding is still hot and they can still get some juice from their association with buffer.&lt;p&gt;Rational decisions all around.&lt;p&gt;Oh, and Twitter launched scheduled tweets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Yabood</author><text>Right. I agree with most of what you said. However, that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you can&amp;#x27;t build a platform that does what you described. In fact, and I&amp;#x27;m not trying to self-promote here, but we&amp;#x27;ve already done that. We&amp;#x27;re currently in beta going live in a couple of months.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;If you&amp;#x27;re scheduling social posts without doing your due diligence on each and every platform within 2-4 hours of a post going live (preferably within 30 minutes before), you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Can you elaborate on this? What type of due diligence do you need?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;If you&amp;#x27;re using the same post across multiple channels, you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Some posts can be shared as they are across multiple networks, other posts need to be different. We address this by allowing the user to write the post once and customized it for each network before its published. This includes different images, different URLs, different OG tags, keywords, mentions, etc.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;If you&amp;#x27;re re-using the same post multiple times within a few weeks, you&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;When you publish something, only a percentage of your audience sees it, which is why it is considered a good strategy to repost every now and then for higher exposure. Just don&amp;#x27;t do it every few weeks. The way we solved this problem is by allowing the user to create category-based schedules. Basically, we have a content library that organizes posts by categories, and each category can have one or multiple publishing schedules. You can choose to recycle content from specific categories or not, up to you. The more content you have in each recyclable category the less frequent your content will be reposted.&lt;p&gt;There are many other hard problems that SMM platforms can help you solve including social listening, which if done manually can be very time consuming and silly.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: typo</text></comment>