How Much Does it Cost to Build the World's Hottest Startups? Could $100,000 and the right developer skills make you an overnight billionaire? How much does it really take to build a product like Twitter or Instagram? With mobile development agencies and product incubators on the rise and more corporate “labs” spinning out each day, there’s no shortage of talent to help you build the next great Web or mobile app. We interviewed the heads of the top Web and mobile development companies, incubators, agencies and labs to understand what it takes to design and develop the most successful apps of our generation. Here are their breakdowns of the costs and time investments to create 10 of the world’s hottest startups. 1) Twitter Henrik Werdelin, the Managing Partner of Prehype, a venture development firm based in New York City that has helped build companies like Tradable, Barkbox, FancyHands, Basno and Path, says recreating Twitter isn’t necessarily difficult, but the layered features will take time to get right. 2) Instagram 3) Facebook 4) WhatsApp 5) Uber
The Most Popular Words Used in Viral Headlines 6.3K Flares Filament.io 6.3K Flares × There is no one way to create viral content. So many different variables go into a viral post—timing, emotion, engagement, and so many others that you cannot control. There is no viral blueprint. Thanks to some incredible work by the team at Ripenn, we have access to headline analysis from four of the top viral sites on the web—who happen to be really good at headline writing. The top words used in viral headlines The headline data from Ripenn came from four of the most click-worthy sites on the web—BuzzFeed, ViralNova, UpWorthy and Wimp. To give some variety to the list, I added the top headlines from 20 different tech, social media and productivity sites that we find ourselves reading and sharing often here at Buffer—sites like Seth Godin, 99u, Social Media Explorer and more (the full list is available in spreadsheet form)—for an additional 400 headlines to be analyzed. In total, I examined 3,016 headlines from 24 top content sites. You and Your This
Switching from Windows to Mac: What I Learned Apple announced new Retina display-equipped MacBook Pro laptops at its event last month, as well as the launch of the latest version of OS X, Mavericks. For this PC user, it was enough to finally make the jump from Windows to Mac for the first time. Almost everyone I know slowly switched to Mac in college, but I stuck it out with Windows. For a long time I thought it was the best choice of platform simply because purchasing a Mac seemed to be extortionately expensive compared with buying a PC desktop or laptop. The Good After booting up for the first time it stood out to me that there wasn’t a longwinded setup process, nor was there any pre-installed junk on the machine. The applications that are bundled with Mavericks are pretty fantastic, Mail and Calendar work great. Unified notifications and the Notification Center are well-built pieces of functionality that leave me wondering why Microsoft still hasn’t added anything similar to Windows yet. The bad
Social Media Frequency: How Often to Post to Facebook, Twitter 2.1K Flares Filament.io 2.1K Flares × Subway has this sandwich with Fritos on it. I know this because their commercials play constantly on my TV and computer such that I nearly have the ads memorized. Every time their commercial airs, Subway is flirting with the fine art of frequency. Social media marketers face the same dilemma. If guessing is required for finding the optimal frequency, then at least we can be making educated guesses. Strike the balance between informative and annoying Good content can be found in a multitude of places, and once you find it all, the next question you may ask yourself is how often you can share. Our post on curating content sparked this exact question, asked in the comments by Ryan Battles. I’ve started tweeting content from Buffer, ranging from 3x per day to 7x per day. Informative versus annoying. How frequently Buffer shares to social media Twitter – 14 times per day, from midnight to 10:00 p.m. The optimal frequency for posting on social media Predict.
30 of the Most Beautiful and Well-Designed Android Apps 4 November '13, 09:24pm Follow Android can be beautiful. Here, we present 30 of what we consider to be some of the most beautiful and well-designed apps available on the Android platform. Update: This article is paginated to make reading easier, but you can click here to read all of them on a single page. Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
10 Theories to Know For Greater Persuasion Power 478 Flares Filament.io 478 Flares × What are we really talking about when we’re talking about conversions? Persuasion, right? Influence. When we talk about conversions, we are—most of the time—discussing ways we can be more persuasive, more influential. So how can you persuade—i.e., convert—better? Perhaps not surprisingly, the hacks for conversion and persuasion begin with psychology. The psychological theories of influence and persuasion One of my favorite places to learn about psychological theories is Dave Straker’s Changing Minds website, which is full of theories written in layman’s terms, organized neatly into specific categories and clusters for easy reference. Here is a brief snapshot of each of the 10 theories, many of which might sound familiar to you—either because you’ve employed them in the past or because you’ve had others try them on you. 1. When you express with certainty a particular attitude, that attitude hardens. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. You want what is in short supply. 7. 8.
50 Instagrammers to Follow Right Now As a self-proclaimed Instagram addict, I spend a lot of time popping onto the app when I need a little break in my day. But if you’ve spent any time on there, you know it’s easy to have a feed filled with selfies. No disrespect to the selfies, but it’s not exactly the inspiration I’m looking for when I step away from work. Instead, try following some of these amazing accounts to step your feed up a notch. To Give Your Mind a (Beautiful) Break Next time you need to step away from it all, these breathtaking accounts are sure to help clear your head. 1. 2. 3. praisesyndicate 4. 5. 6. 7. palomaparrot 8. 9. 10. howl_hemulen To Get Some Inspiration for Your Company Account In charge of running your company’s Instagram (or just think it needs a little love)? 11. onefinestay 15. 16. charity: water 17. 18. 19. gopro 20. 21. To Kick That Sad Desk Salad to the Curb Have lame lunches no more with the help of these-food filled accounts. 22. cahmun 23. foodstories 24. 25. 26. food52 27. vsco_food Animals, that is.
Five useful Bookmarking tools - Birds on the Blog In the days of old, many people saved links to sites they liked to the Browser Bookmark. Only problem with that approach is that it was hard to search if you had lots of them and you had to remember the name of the site in order to find them, making it a pretty hit and miss experience. As a scientist, I clip or save lots of interesting stuff on social media and websites every day, making an application a more logical solution, especially if you can tag them for easy searching. So here’s a few ideas I’ve tried and tested over the years. It’s best to try them out because perceptions of the interface and user experience can vary from person to person. 1) Delicious I’ve had a Delicious account since the days the URL was the quirkily spelt del.icio.us. Eventually, Delicious was resurrected and sold, but by then many avid fans had moved on. 2) Diigo Diigo was the first place I tried after switching from Delicious. 3) Evernote You can also email PDFs, files, even photos you take to Evernote.
10 boring PR tasks you can automate Could a robot do a PR pro’s job? For now and the foreseeable future, the answer is no, PR will remain a human-powered industry. Robots won’t automate PR pros out of a job, but they can help us automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time to focus on the fun parts of PR: creativity and strategy. Here are 10 boring PR tasks we’re more than happy to hand over to robots, and the tools you’ll need to automate them: 1. If you send a lot of pitch emails, tracking them manually gets tricky in a hurry. A Gmail add-on that was originally designed for sales professionals, Yesware has a lot to offer PR pros, too. 2. If you’re still posting social media updates manually, it’s time to leave the Dark Ages. If you manage multiple client accounts, Buffer is an excellent choice. 3. If you’re tired of searching Google for influencers and entering their contact details into an Excel spreadsheet one at a time, give BuzzStream a try. 4. Building a multimedia press release is hard. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
The Best Free Stock Image Resources on the Web Here at Buffer, we think a lot about visual content. We’ve shared our own study on the importance of images in Twitter posts for more social sharing. We’ve explored tools that help anyone create visual content. Our social media management tool incorporates image posting because we know how important that element is to engage your followers and fans. But there’s one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free images that are high quality and cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content? It’s a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. In this post, we’ll share more than 20 different sources and tools for free images, covering searchable image sites, create-your-own-image tools, and more. (Related: If you are interested in learning how to pick and use such images, you might like our complete guide to using stock images in your marketing.) Understand these terms before using any free images A few things to know before we get started. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Post Smarter: The Best Times to Use Social Platforms (Infographic) Almost every small business, 81 percent, is on social media, and 94 percent of them use these social platforms for marketing purposes (attracting clients and building a brand), according to research from LinkedIn. As social media usage becomes ubiquitous, the rate will only continue to grow, as more small businesses use Facebook pages and Twitter as their main platforms for communication, even more so than their websites. Related: What Day of The Week Will Your Company Be Mentioned Most? (Infographic) The LinkedIn study and SumAll data further find social media’s importance to “hyper growth” companies (those with significant year-over-year growth). Once small businesses are on social media they need to then figure out how to leverage each platform to meet their goals. What many small business owners and managers overlook is the “when” of social media posting, not just the “what,” “where” and “why.” Click to Enlarge+ Related: 5 Social Media Tricks to Boost Your Business