Having just moved to a new country, I’m currently surrounded by novel sights, sounds and experiences. It’s an overload of new for my brain. However, after only being here a week, I’m surprised how ordinary my house and my street seem. After walking the same route to the train station three or four times, it quickly became boring.

How quickly novelty can disappear as we become familiar with the things around us, and yet how completely stimulated we become when we find yet another brand new experience to have or sight to see.

It turns out, this isn’t just because I’m part of a generation of compulsive email checkers or internet addicts, or because I don’t appreciate life enough. It’s actually hardwired into my brain—and yours—to appreciate and seek out novelty.

How we find novelty

Anything that’s new, different or unusual is bound to catch our eye. A new phone, a new working environment, a new friend. Changing our hair color, wearing new clothes, visiting a new place. In fact, we can even be drawn to novelty without being conscious of it.

Of course, this makes a lot of sense—we wouldn’t get much done if ordinary things captivated us constantly.

The cool thing about this is how intricately novelty seems to be associated with learning, which means we can use this knowledge to our advantage for learning new things and improving our memory.

How the brain handles novelty

There’s a region in our midbrain called the substantia nigra/ventral segmental area or SN/VTA. This is essentially the major “novelty center” of the brain, which responds to novel stimuli.

The SN/VTA is closely linked to areas of the brain called the hippocampus and the amygdala, both of which play large roles in learning and memory. The hippocampus compares stimuli against existing memories, while the amygdala responds to emotional stimuli and strengthens associated long-term memories.

It’s been thought before that novelty was a reward in itself, but, like dopamine, it seems to be more related to motivation.

Researchers Bunzeck and Düzel tested people with an “oddball” experiment that used fMRI imaging to see how their brains reacted to novelty. They showed the subjects images such as indoor and outdoor scenes and faces with occasional novel images (oddballs) thrown in.

The experiment found that the SN/VTA was activated by novel images—that is, brand new images that hadn’t been seen before. Images that only slightly deviated from more familiar ones didn’t have the same effect, and neither did images with strongly negative emotional context such as car crashes or angry faces.

The Dopamine pathways, which are activated when we are exposed to novelty look something like this (highlighted in blue):

A second part of the experiment was designed to test whether relative novelty or absolute novelty was required for the SN/VTA to activate. Images that were slightly more novel to the subject than others (relative novelty) were tested, as were images that were completely novel compared to others (absolute novelty).

The SN/VTA only activated when shown absolutely novel stimuli—images that had never been seen before. Other related areas of the brain still reacted to the images, but the reactions decreased slightly with each showing as they became more familiar. Dr Düzel explained it like this:

“We thought that less familiar information would stand out as being significant when mixed with well-learnt, very familiar information and so activate the midbrain region just as strongly as absolutely new information. That was not the case. Only completely new things cause strong activity in the midbrain area.”

This is similar to what might happen during repetition of flash cards or educational material. Only the completely new information stands out among a group of overly familiar objects or images.

How novelty motivates us

You’ve probably heard about dopamine before, and its effects on the brain. It’s often touted as a ‘reward chemical’ or part of the brain’s ‘reward center,’ but more recent research has shown that, like novelty, it’s actually more closely related to our motivation to seek rewards rather than being a reward itself.

Animal studies around the brain’s reaction to novelty have suggested increased dopamine levels in the context of novelty. So the brain reacts to novelty by releasing dopamine which makes us want to go exploring in search of a reward.

You might remember how a new level or world to explore in a video game motivates you to play for longer, in the hopes of the reward of unlocking an achievement or gaining more points.

Each new stimuli gives you a little rush of motivation to explore, because it makes you anticipate a reward. Here is a graph that shows activity in your brain on this:

Dr Düzel said this about how novelty motivates us:

“When we see something new, we see it has a potential for rewarding us in some way. This potential that lies in new things motivates us to explore our environment for rewards. The brain learns that the stimulus, once familiar, has no reward associated with it and so it loses its potential. For this reason, only completely new objects activate the midbrain area and increase our levels of dopamine.”

What this means for learning

This is pretty interesting stuff, but it’s only useful if we can take something away from it to apply to our own lives. Unfortunately the human studies on this subject, such as the one mentioned above, are few and far between at this stage. More studies have been completed on animals, but the research is still in early stages.

This doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it though. Here’s what it means for those of us who want to improve our learning and knowledge retention.

Remember how I said the hippocampus is closely tied to the SN/VTA? Well these animal studies also showed that the plasticity of the hippocampus (the ability to create new connections between neurons) was increased by the influence of novelty—both during the process of exploring a novel environment or stimuli and for 15–30 minutes afterwards.

As well as increasing our brain’s plasticity—and therefore potential for learning new concepts and facts—novelty has been shown to improve the memory of test subjects:

Separate behavioural experiments were also conducted without the use of a scanner to test the subjects’ memory. Their memory of the novel, familiar and very familiar images they had studied was tested after 20 minutes and then a day later. Subjects performed best in these tests when new information was combined with familiar information during learning. After a 20 minute delay, subjects’ memory for slightly familiar information was boosted by 19 per cent if it had been mixed with new facts during learning sessions.

This information could help boost students’ performance both during classes and in exams, as well as helping those who suffer from memory loss.

Dr Düzel pointed out the possible medical benefits that could come from this research:

“We hope that these findings will have an impact on behavioural treatments for patients with poor memory. Current practice by behavioural psychologists aims to improve memory through repeatedly exposing a person to information – just as we do when we revise for an exam. This study shows that revising is more effective if you mix new facts in with the old. You actually learn better, even though your brain is also tied up with new information.

How you can learn more and improve your memory

If you want to start putting these findings to work, you can improve your knowledge retention and make new ideas and concepts stick by introducing novelty into your learning process. On top of some of the best productivity tips we’ve shared before, here are some ideas to get you started:

Add in something new

Each time you review information or facts that you’ve learned before, add in a small number of new ones. This will make your brain notice and recognize slightly-familiar information more easily because it’s offset by brand new concepts.

Change your environment

Your environment can offer a huge amount of novel stimuli for your brain. Try offsetting the familiarity of learning material by reviewing it in new settings. On top of this, changing temperature or lighting in the room you are already in can make a big difference.

Learn after doing something new

Use your brain’s increased plasticity wisely by setting aside time to learn right after taking in novel stimuli. If you meet someone new for coffee or explore a new place, your brain will be more open to making new connections during and right after this time, so you might as well take advantage.

Have you noticed novelty affecting your memory or how you learn? Let us know your thoughts.

About the author:

Belle Beth Cooper: Belle has spent the past four years as a freelance writer and social media consultant. She has written for The Next Web, Desktop Magazine and Social Media Examiner. Belle now spends her days wielding a pencil as Attendly’s Head of Content.

The post Why getting new things makes us feel so good: Novelty and the brain appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

Schedule retweets

We couldn’t be any more excited to finally release this for everyone today. Being able to schedule your retweets with Buffer gives you an awesome opportunity to show your support and engagement for other people’s tweets – without ever flooding your followers with too much content.

When we brainstormed this feature internally, we wanted to achieve something very unique: The ability to schedule a retweet, no matter which app, web or mobile client you are using. After many months of testing and tweaking, we are finally able to release this it to everyone.

Let’s take a look how you can make use of this:

How to schedule native retweets from the web

First up is schedule retweets from the web. This is super easy and works with the click of a button. The first thing you need is the Buffer browser extension.

Now, whenever you are seeing something that’s worth sharing, you can hit the Buffer button:

It’ll give you the chance to easily schedule the retweet from that Twitter account. You can also schedule the retweet for multiple accounts:

If you want, you can easily change the Tweet to the old school “RT @username: Text of the tweet” format. If you hover, hit the “change to quote” button:

After all of this, the retweet will sit excited to be published in your Buffer queue. Of course you can still always go back to deleting, changing to quote or moving it around in your queue

That’s it. Fill up your Buffer with as many retweets as you want. Oh and you can of course also do this for multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. Grab our Awesome Plan if you want to have more than 1 Twitter account connected and then add retweets to wherever you see fit.

Schedule retweets any mobile Twitter client on Android or iPhone

Now that you are scheduling retweets from all around the web, we’ve also got another cool way for you to do so: From anywhere on mobile. The way this works is super simple: You email the Tweet to your secret Buffer email address. That’s it. You can grab your secret Buffer email from here:

Get your secret Buffer email address

Here is what mine looks like:

You can also save your Buffer secret email address straight from the Buffer Android or iPhone app. Simply hit “save” and the contact will be added as “Buffer” to your address book:

Now, whenever you are browsing in any of your favorite Twitter clients, maybe the official Twitter app, TweetBot or others, just hit “mail Tweet” and you can add it to your Buffer queue. Here is an example of the official Twitter app:

All you have to do is send it to your secret Buffer email address and you are all set with another great retweet scheduled in your queue:

I hope you get a chance to give the new retweet scheduling a try. Grab our browser extension and give it a go on Twitter.com. Over to you now. We’d love to hear what you think of the new retweet scheduling. Let us know how you use it and how we could improve it for you! 

The post For the first time, you can now schedule retweets appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

I learned that quite quickly while working with my startup—in many instances, if you have the most experience within a certain skill, you’ll have to become the ‘leader’ during some key moments and guide the rest of the team.

What I happen to find fascinating is that numerous psychology studies tend to make a connection between this ability to lead when necessary and the achievement of professional success—especially for men.

The connection lead me to a question that guys have been asking themselves forever:

Do nice guys really finish last in life?

It’s hard to say for sure, but a new study shows that ‘nice guys’ typically earn less than their more aggressive peers.

Fortunately, the research doesn’t suggest that you need to be a jerk to get ahead in life, but that highly agreeable men need to be careful about how assertive they are when it comes their work. This assertiveness, as you’ll see, relates more closely to taking on the role of ‘leader’ than you might think.

Let’s take a look at why this phenomenon happens and what ‘nice guys’ can do about it.

The Problem with Nice Guys

According to a recent study by the University of Notre Dame, nice guys, at least statistically speaking, are not as likely earn the big bucks as their less agreeable peers.

The ladies are probably wondering, “What about us?”, but the study notes that this variable trait of ‘agreeableness’ only seems to detrimentally affect men:

The study shows a strong negative relationship between agreeableness and earnings for men. The more agreeable a man is, the less he will earn. For women, there is essentially no relationship at all.

Why?

Outside of the workplace, ‘Agreeableness’, one of the big 5 personality traits, is generally associated with positive characteristics, such as being warm, sympathetic, kind and cooperative.

It’s also the most commonly cited trait (of the big 5) when people describe an ideal person to spend time with, and most psychological research associates the trait with a slew of other positive behaviors.

So how do men benefit in the workplace by being the opposite?

According to the researchers, this double-standard exists because disagreeable men (at least in competitive, work-related scenarios) are viewed as tough negotiators and willing to stick to their vision, whereas women don’t gain the same benefit in terms of how they are viewed.

It seems that being ‘disagreeable’ isn’t really the ideal behavior, but rather that being too agreeable is viewed as a sign of weakness in men, or as a characteristic of a flaky personality that is lacking in confidence and conviction.

And yet, we’ve seen that being an agreeable person is a highly desirable trait in general, so how can a balance be found? Is there any correlation between assertiveness and other psychological traits that are associated with higher earnings and more work-related success?

I feel the answer lies in analyzing what makes a great leader, as leaders are quite likely to fill up high-earning positions, even if they aren’t ‘the boss.’

Examining leadership qualities also allows us to look past gender discrepancies, as leaders can be men or women and the traits are more universally applicable in the workplace.

So, what makes a great leader?

The Traits of Great Leaders

A lot has been written on being a great leader, but today we’ll take a look at two studies and their findings on what characteristics are most important for those who wish to lead others.

The first comes in the form of some academic research on leadership qualities conducted by psychologists Robert Hogan and Robert Kaiser, and the second is a set of data from Jim Collins on what traits are most often associated with a great manager (a position regularly associated with leadership).

By examining the traits that have strong connections with leadership, we can see where ‘nice guys’ may be going wrong, and find out what it really takes to lead others and advance in a competitive environment that isn’t entirely accepting of overly agreeable people.

Let’s dig in…

1.) Decisiveness

The #1 trait across both sources, this characteristic is also the most at odds with being too agreeable.

When we watch others make decisions frequently and stick to those decisions, we subconsciously associate them with responsibility, and thus we are more likely to view them as leaders (especially when other people follow suite).

One study even found that first-movers often have the advantage in many decision making situations, as it only takes a few other people before the majority of the group will view the decision as valid. In essence, the person with the most conviction can create an availability cascade where others will agree with their opinions simply because they are presented so convincingly.

It’s easy to see why being too agreeable can hurt a man’s perceived qualities as a leader, as more agreeable men may look for a consensus to be formed first before they state their opinion, whereas more assertive men are likely to put their opinion forward immediately.

2.) Vision

A natural complement of decisiveness, as we know that a truly great leader does more than just shout his/her opinion the loudest—they back it up with a convincing explanation of how things are going to pan out.

Have you ever spoken with someone who was able to brilliantly articulate their idea to you one-on-one… but fell apart when they had to share it with a group? Sometimes this is the result of a fear of public speaking, and other times the person is just too agreeable to push for their vision in the face of opposing opinions.

In fact, research in the realm of creative thinking (often a fundamental aspect of leadership) has shown that brainstorming is often an ineffective method for coming up with ideas because participants can suffer from evaluation apprehension and social loafing, where they decide to rely on the rest of the group for ideas instead of putting forth their own. Most people are apprehensive about having their thoughts judged by others, which is why this occurrence is so common in group brainstorming sessions.

So skilled creative workers need to realize that what they plan out in their head doesn’t mean a thing unless they are willing to practice being able to present their idea persuasively (and confidently) to their peers and superiors.

3.) Persistence

While being persistent doesn’t necessarily mean being inflexible, there are certainly some differences between the stereotypical ‘agreeable’ personality and a persistent one.

One of the most interesting pieces of research I came across in this area is the denouncement of a tactic that I see many nice guys trying to use—playing devil’s advocate when they want to disagree.

Unfortunately, although being the devil’s advocate allows nice guys to keep pushing for their opinion without hurting any feelings, an insightful study conducted by Charles Namath shows that the tactic generally backfires—using a ‘devil’s advocate argument’ generally strengthens  the group’s opinion on the original argument!

Conversely, true dissent was actually listened to much more closely and evaluated for much longer, as a majority of people will at least seek to understand the opposing argument of someone in the room before they dismiss it (that generally doesn’t happen when dealing with arguments between groups, but that’s for another day!).

Nice guys should therefore not only be persistent in their efforts towards greatness, but they also need to realize that ‘when to hold em’ and when to fold em’ applies to the workplace as well, and if they are confident in their stance/idea/argument, they need to push for it without trying to appeal to everyone.

The Case for Moderation

It should be noted that the other 3 big traits associated with great leaders (there were 6 in all) included things like Modesty, Competence, and Integrity, meaning it’s not always about conviction and confidence on the path to leadership.

That being said, before you close out this post and begin embracing some new Machiavellian lifestyle, you should know that the key trait we’ve thrown around, assertiveness, does have to be used in moderation.

What are the potentially negative impacts of being overly assertive?

Research from Ames & Flynn (2007) sought to find that very answer. They gathered 3 groups of MBA students who were instructed to fill out questionnaires about their peers and the respective managers for whom they’d worked with in the past.

The main observations made examined social outcomes and instrumental outcomes—in other words, how well were the managers liked by the students and how much were they able to accomplish.

The results (as published on PsyBlog) were quite revealing:

• Productivity: higher and higher levels of assertiveness produced diminishing returns. So in terms of results it’s not much better to be highly assertive than moderately assertive, but it was definitely better to be moderately assertive than not assertive.
• Social outcomes: higher and higher levels of assertiveness lead to increasingly poor social outcomes. It was definitely better to be moderately assertive than highly assertive.

When you put both of the outcomes together you get an inverted U-shape (below; from Ames & Flynn, 2007). So that people who are low in assertiveness get less things done but people very high in assertiveness are socially insufferable.

In other words, forceful leadership doesn’t result in a rapid increase in productivity and can make the person in charge socially insufferable, a bad trait for long term leadership.

There seems to be a “sweet spot” where a leader’s presence is felt and their guidance listened to, but without the overbearing presence that tends to be detrimental to others in the group.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

— Lao Tzu

It’s the seamless integration into the group with the clear understanding that one person is taking charge that creates an effective chemistry and allows for a great leader to thrive.

This is one instance where a photo from the web speaks a thousand words:

Your Turn

Now I want to hear from you…

1. What did you think of this research?
2. Have you had a great manager/leader in your professional life? What made you willing to follow them and heed their advice?

I’m interested in hearing that you think, so I’ll see you down in the comments!

CC photo credits: Cayusa, Darrin,  Ames & Flynn

—

About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the content strategist at Help Scout, the invisible Desk.com alternative built for providing exceptional email support for startups and small businesses.

Get more data-drive content from Greg by checking out our Customer Acquisition guide or by downloading one of our free resources, absolutely no charge.

The post Nice guys really do finish last: what science says about the traits of great leaders appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

First, Happy Birthday! We got you a cake.

We’ll come back to the cake in a moment.

Second, we have a question for you on your special day. Your friends want to give you the celebration you deserve, but they’re stumped. They can’t decide whether to a) let you plan your perfect evening, from the first stop through the main event, or b) plan the perfect evening for you, leaving you with just one responsibility: to enjoy.

Which would you pick?

For myself and a surprising number of people I talk to, the answer is B. I would much rather have someone else plan the event and take care of the details. Even though the result might not be exactly what I would choose, a night free from the minute-by-minute pressure of decision-making is a true luxury.

We’re conditioned to think that more choice is always a good thing, but in the past few years, studies have discovered something called decision fatigue. The research helps explain why decisions are so much harder at the end of a work day and why we’re tempted by the candy in the checkout lane after a marathon grocery trip.

Our cognitive resources are regularly depleted because we’re fighting an uphill battle every day — physically and mentally, both at home and at work.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. When we understand decision fatigue and how to combat it, we are able to make better choices and free our cognitive resources to solve big problems and spark fresh ideas.

Let’s start with that cake.

Running on empty – The decision fatigue phenomenon

Kathy Sierra has written and spoken extensively on this topic. Take the time to watch her recent Business of Software talk, Building the Minimum Badass User. It’s phenomenal.

In the talk, she tells the story of a famous experiment by Professor Baba Shiv. Two groups were given different mental tasks (memorizing a 2-digit or 7-digit number). When they were finished, the students had the choice of a piece of cake, like your birthday cake above, or a bowl of fruit. Those who had faced the more mentally taxing task were significantly more likely to choose the cake.

This was unbelievable; it took them a long time to figure out what was happening, because it seemed so bizarre. But what happened is willpower and focus and concentration and working on problem-solving are all coming from the same pool of cognitive resources. More significantly, it’s really a scarce resource that’s easily depleted.

Roy Baumiester and John Tierney introduced decision fatigue to a wider audience in their book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. In a piece for The New York Times Magazine, Tierney summarized the idea:

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy.

As you might guess, decision fatigue is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Here is a list of some of the most depleting activities that will drain your brain and turn you more likely into a cake-eater:

When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices.

Obviously, more choice is often a wonderful thing, as is using our cognitive resources to learn, think and grow. When our cognitive resources are depleted in unproductive ways, we not only have less willpower and make poor decisions, but we also don’t have much left in our mental tanks for the big problems and questions. As Kathy says, “we should be patching cognitive leaks everywhere we can.”

The rise of simple

Some smart companies have come to the conclusion that reducing mental drain is good business. Trader Joe’s, a thriving grocery store chain, has a unique approach. The average grocery store carries around 50,000 different products. Trader Joe’s features about 4,000. Whereas most chains compete on offering the widest selection, Trader Joe’s has cultivated a large, passionate customer base by focusing on the quality of the products and the experience. Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s is an excellent look at the company.

Swapping selection for value turns out not to be much of a tradeoff. Customers may think they want variety, but in reality too many options can lead to shopping paralysis.

Not only do fewer choices make purchases easier and less taxing, they make customers happier.

Studies have found that buyers enjoy purchases more if they know the pool of options isn’t quite so large.

Other companies exemplify a similar approach. Apple, with its tightly limited product lines, is an obvious example, but there are many others on the web and in our neighborhoods. Numerous online services intentionally limit the number of features and plans they offer to provide refuge from the overcomplicated and confusing sign up pages and interfaces of their competitors. Restaurants are attracting discerning customers with pared-down menus featuring a few unique, high-quality items.

Companies that offer fewer choices and a simple, high-quality experience are rewarded with happy, loyal customers.

Now that we understand decision fatigue and how some companies are responding to it, let’s talk about what you can do to protect your cognitive resources and make better decisions.

5 Ways to fight back

1.) Know your limits

Fighting decision fatigue starts with being smart about how you plan your day. Build different types of work into your schedule so you can avoid making decisions for hours in a row. If you’re facing a big decision, try to process it early in the day and after a meal so that you’re at your peak mentally.

On days when you feel the effects of decision fatigue, avoid situations where a poor decision could have significant repercussions.

2.) Make decisions that free you from making more decisions

We can’t avoid decisions, but we can be smarter about how we make them. Here are a few examples…

• Meals: Instead of trying to decide about dinner after a mentally exhausting day, plan the meals for the week a few days in advance, when your decision-making is at its best.
• Television: Hundreds of channels provide enormous choice, but those choices drain our mental energy. Be intentional about what you watch by renting or buying the best shows and then cancel cable or switch to a package with fewer channels.
• Automation: Try a service like Amazon’s subscription program, which will ship frequently purchased items to you automatically. Use Pandora or iTunes Genius Mixes and let the cloud pick the next song. Schedule your posts to social networks with a tool like Buffer. Each of these frees you from endless micro-decisions.

3.) Choose products that energize you instead of drain you

Seek out things that reward and nourish you and drop those that leave you depleted with little to show for it. A simple test is a vacation. When we take a break from our normal routines, many of us set aside the apps and services that constantly demand our attention.

Most aren’t even missed, but once we return to normal life, we find ourselves pulled in again. Instead, try to leave them behind and develop new routines.

4.) Help others

You can make a big difference by helping your friends and family escape decision fatigue.

• Plan the next date, or if you’re really ambitious, vacation!
• Avoid saying, “Whatever you want is fine with me”, which places the responsibility on the other person.
• Champion customers at work and look for ways to simplify and improve their experience.

5.) Simplify one thing right now

The key to change is to start small. What can do you do today to start replenishing your cognitive resources? Pick something and share it in the comments so we can learn from each other. For more inspiration for taking the first step, read Leo’s post on making changes stick.

When you become aware of what drains your mental energy and what replenishes it, you’ll be able to make small changes that will produce huge results. Freed from decision fatigue, you’ll have the resources to make better choices and be more creative. I’d love to hear what works for you. How have you overcome decision fatigue? What replenishes you?  

About the author: Brian Bailey is a writer and content strategist in beautiful Austin, Texas. He is dreaming up Uncommon in Common, a front porch for the Internet. Previously, he was part of the initial team at Gowalla. He’s @bb — say hello!

The post Why variety is no longer the spice of life: How to be happier by avoiding decision fatigue appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

Twitter is still used more than Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Also, African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to use Twitter than Whites, according to the study.

Most of the findings are in line with what you might expect and some are truly surprising. For example, people living in cities spend the most time on Social Media, at 70% of the population. And women, on average, spend 9% more time on social networking sites than men.

Let’s dive into a further breakdown of the stats:

So, who is the average Facebook user? According to the research, it’s a young, 25 year-old woman, living in a big city, with a college degree and a household income of more than $75k a year.

Interestingly, here at Buffer, we’ve just completed a similar research to find out more about demographics of our users. Who is your average Buffer user? Here are two key ones we found

• 1.) Young male (we called him Guru Gordon) in his late 20s, early 30s). He has a college degree and reads a lot of business and political publications. You’d probably call him a “gadget freak,” and he’s a self-proclaimed “life hacker” who loves finding ways to be successful and get the most out of life. He’s in his late 20s, early 30s.
  
• 2.) Community Cathy: Cathy uses social media to spread information about a cause and interact with other people in the community that share an interest in that cause. She reads Mashable and the Huffington Post and has way too many clothes in her closet. She’s probably in her twenties, but she may be in her early thirties.

So what about other details, age groups, demographics and more? Here are all the details on it:

What do you think of the latest user demographic research? Are their any key insights you can take away and use for your business? I’d love your thoughts on this!

Quick note: We’ve got a few secret, new Buffer features to share images directly from a page and more.

The post Social Media in 2013: User Demographics For Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest And Instagram appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

This is a guestpost by Mikael Cho, the co-founder of ooomf. More about Mikael at the bottom of the article.

Palms sweaty. Heart racing. You know the feeling. Whether it’s five people or fifty, public speaking is a gut-wrenching experience for most of us.

Before co-founding my startup, I had a huge fear of speaking in public. Any time I had to present something in front of more than a handful of people, my stomach would turn to knots and my throat would get so tight I wouldn’t be able to speak.

The reality is, if you’re planning on presenting pretty much anything in your life (which you most likely will), you’ll need to be able to effectively communicate your ideas in front of at least a few people.

To get over my fear of public speaking, I realized a good place to start would be to understand why I was getting stage fright in the first place.

I thought it would be interesting to share with you my research for how I learned to overcome my fear of public speaking in the last year while founding a company.

What is stage fright really

Sometimes, even weeks before a presentation, I would think, ”What happens if people think I suck or someone thinks I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

As humans, we’re hardwired to worry about our reputation above almost all things. There are primitive parts of your brain that control your reaction to threats on your reputation, making these reactions extremely difficult to control.

These reactions to threats are precisely what Charles Darwin tested when he visited a snake exhibit at a zoo in London. Darwin tried to remain perfectly calm while putting his face as close to the glass as possible in front of a puff ader snake that was ready to strike.

However, every time the snake would lunge toward him, he would grimace and jump backward. Darwin wrote his findings in his diary,

My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.

He concluded that his response to fear was an ancient reaction that has not been effected by nuances in modern civilization. This response is know as the “fight or flight” syndrome, a natural process that is designed to protect your body from harm.

What happens in our brain

When you think about negative consequences, a part of your brain, the hypothalamus, activates and triggers the pituitary gland to secrete the hormone ACTH.

This hormone stimulates the Adrenal Glands in your kidneys and results in the release of adrenaline into your blood:

It is at this point in the process when many of us experience the reactions of this process.

Your neck and back muscles contract (forcing your head down and your spine to curve) moving your posture into a slouch. This results in a Low-Power position as your body tries to force itself into the fetal position:

If you try to resist this position by pulling your shoulders back and lifting your head up, your legs and hands shake as the muscles in your body instinctively prepare for an impending attack.

Your blood pressure increases and your digestive system shuts down to maximize efficient delivery of even more nutrients and oxygen to your vital organs. When your digestive system shuts down, this is what leads to the feeling of dry mouth or butterflies.

Even your pupils dilate, which makes it hard to read anything up close (like presenter notes) but improves long range visibility, making you more aware of your audience’s facial expressions.

Your experience of stage fright is also affected by 3 main things:

1. Genes

Genetics play a huge role in how strong your feelings of anxiety are in social situations. For instance, even though John Lennon performed on stage thousands of times, he was known for throwing up before going on stage for his live performances.

Some people are simply genetically wired to feel more scared when performing or speaking in public.

2. Level of task mastery

We’ve all heard the saying, “practice makes perfect.” The main benefit of practice is to increase your familiarity of a given task. As this familiarity increases, feelings of anxiety decrease, and have less of a negative impact on performance.

In other words, the anxiety you feel about speaking in public will be less, the more comfortable you feel with your presentation.

To support these findings, in 1982, a team of psychologists watched pool players play alone or in front of crowd. The study found that:

Stronger pool players sank more shots when performing in front of a crowd, while poor pool players performed worse. Interestingly, the stronger pool players performed even better when people were watching them versus when they were playing alone.

What this means is if you know your presentation inside out, it’s more likely that you’ll give an even better presentation in front of a large audience than when you rehearsed alone or in front of a friend.

3. Stakes

If you’re giving a presentation where your business is on the line or the whole nation is watching you speak, there’s an increased chance that your reputation could be massively damaged if you screw up.

As the stakes increase, there’s a chance your reputation could be completely ruined if you perform poorly, which triggers the release of more adrenaline, and can result in paralyzing fear and anxiety.

We’ve seen the effect of stakes on reputation in online communities as well. For example, many eBay sellers worry about their reputation a ton because it directly effects how much money they make. One piece of negative feedback can ruin an eBay seller’s profile and cause them to lose sales.

In fact, one study found that a good reputation for a seller on eBay added 7.6 percent to the sale price of their items.

Having a good reputation is important to protect but, this also leads to having a fear that one slip-up could ruin your reputation and cause the loss of future opportunities.

How I learnt to cure stage fright – a 4-step guide

So now that we know the root causes of why public speaking is scary, here’s what you can do to dramatically improve and overcome your on-stage jitters.

1. Preparation

I’ve been to many conferences where I see speakers organizing slides a few minutes before their talk. That’s not the optimal way to prepare for a quality performance. Would you see a musician learning their song 10 minutes before going on stage to perform it? No way.

This way of preparation is also not fair to your audience who is giving the next 10, 20, or 60 minutes of their attention to you.

When I’m preparing to give a presentation or a talk at a conference, here’s my process:

About a week before, I draw out a storyboard of about 15-20 slides, thinking over the content using stick figures or a few words that I may put on my slides. Here’s one of my storyboards:

Creating this storyboard helps me feel comfortable that I know the major points I want to cover and still leaves me plenty of time to rehearse and perfect slides.

I then layout my talk like this:

introduction

main topic 1

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 2

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

main topic 3

    point

    example (something unique from my experience)

    point (with key actionable take away)

conclusion

Formatting your talk in this “point, example, point” format not only helps you visualize your entire presentation but also allows you to think deeply about the subject matter you’re covering so you don’t leave your audience wanting more.

I start by filling in each main topic point first and then skip back to the introduction and finish with the conclusion.

When working on the introduction, I start with a story that covers who I am and why the audience should care about my talk. Tell your audience right away how you are going to help them so they tune in.

I then rehearse each of these individual parts (introduction, main topic 1, main topic 2, etc.) between 5-10 times each.

Once that’s done, I recite the presentation content from start to finish at least 10 times.

This might seem like a lot of preparation but keep in mind, Steve Jobs was known to rehearse for hundreds of hours and prepare weeks in advance for his epic Apple keynote presentations.

2. Practice like it’s the real thing – here is how

It’s important while preparing your presentation to setup your environment in the same way you plan on giving your actual presentation. This removes unknown variables and requires you to spend less mental energy thinking about details when you’re on stage for the actual presentation.

In 2009, a group of MIT researchers found that when there are many visual stimulants in front of you, only one or two things tend to get activated in the brain, indicating that we’re really only able to focus on one or two items.

You want to get to a point where all you have to focus on is connecting with the audience and enhancing the delivery of your story, rather than worrying about what slide is coming up next or where you need to stand on stage.

When I’m rehearsing, I set up my computer on the same side it will be during the actual presentation, I use the same clicker, and deliver my presentation every time as if it were the real thing.

Another tip to help prepare for unknown variables is to say your presentation in front of someone or at least record yourself to replicate the effect of someone watching you. This will help you feel less anxious when you get up in public, knowing that you’ve already said your presentation in front of at least one person.

3. Learn to “Breathe into your balls” (not just for guys!)

The most nerve-racking part of public speaking for me is always those last few minutes before heading on stage. What I do to combat those feelings is I head into the bathroom, stretch my arms up, and take three deep breaths in and out. Elliot Hulse, a YouTube-famous fitness-expert calls this “Breathing into your balls”. He recommends this as the first and foremost way to avoid being anxious before a meeting to giving a speech.

Here is Elliot in action:

This exercise activates the hypothalamus, and sends out hormones to trigger a relaxation response.

In fact, researchers tested a single session of slow breathing on 46 trained musicians and the results of the study found that one session of slow breathing helped control arousal, especially for musicians that had high levels of anxiety.

The feelings associated with stage fright are usually the strongest during the lead-up to the presentation rather than during it, so take a minute to breath and stretch before heading out on stage.

4. After you present, book another speaking engagement right away

If you want to get better at public speaking, you have to do it more. Each time you speak, you will get less nervous and more comfortable.

At first, try to book speaking engagements that have lower stakes. For example, maybe it’s a presentation to your family members about the importance of taking a vacation. Anything to help you rehearse the behavior of getting up and speaking in front of people.

Quick last tip: How to stop saying “ums” and “ahs”

A few “ums” or “ahs” won’t kill your presentation but if they begin to fill every slide transition or each time you pause between points, they can become a distraction.

Training yourself to stop saying “um” or “ah” can be difficult, especially if it’s a part of your everyday speech.

One of the best ways to knock these filler words out of your vocabulary is to use a technique called chunking. Chunking means splitting your presentation up into short burst of words followed by a short break and then continuing on with another short burst of words.

For example, group 1-2 related sentences together followed by a 1-2 second pause, then another 1-2 sentences, and so on. This will help you develop a speaking rhythm, making it easier to avoid filler words.

Public speaking can be scary but it’s a necessary part of almost every career. Hopefully, knowing why stage fright happens and using these tips on how to overcome it will help you own your next presentation.

What other tips do you have for becoming a better public speaker? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Top photo credit: Flickr

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About the Author: 

Mikael Cho is the co-founder of ooomf, a creative marketplace that connects awesome projects with vetted, first class developers and designers from around the world.

Mikael writes more posts on psychology, startups, and product marketing over on the ooomf blog. Find him on Twitter @mikaelcho.

The post What happens to our brains when we have stage fright: The science of public speaking appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

Why is Facebook blue?

“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”

Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

After all, the visual sense is the strongest developed one in most human beings. It’s only natural that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by color alone.

So how do colors really affect us and what is the science of colors in marketing really? As we are also trying to make lots of improvements to our product at Buffer, this was a key part to learn more about. Let’s dig into some of the latest, most interesting research on it.

First: Can you recognize the online brands just based on color?

Before we dive into the research, here are some awesome experiments that show you how powerful color alone really is. Based on just the colors of the buttons, can you guess which company belongs to each of them:

Example 1 (easy):

Example 2 (easy):

Example 3 (medium):

Example 4 (hard):

These awesome examples from Youtube designer Marc Hemeon, I think show the real power of colors more than any study could.

How many were you able to guess? (All the answers are at the bottom of this post!)

Which colors trigger which feeling for us?

Being completely conscious about what color triggers us to think in which way isn’t always obvious. The Logo Company has come up with an amazing breakdown which colors are best for which companies and why. Here are 4 great examples:

Black:

Green:

Blue:

Especially if we also take a look at what the major brands out there are using, a lot of their color choices become a lot more obvious. Clearly, everyone of these companies is seeking to trigger a very specific emtion:

On top of that, especially when we want to buy something, the colors can play a major role. Analytics company KISSmetrics created an amazing infographic on the science of how colors affect our purchases.

Especially the role of “Green” stands out to me as the most relaxing color we can use to make buying easier. We didn’t intentionally choose this as the main color for Buffer actually, it seems to have worked very well so far though.

At second look, I also realized how frequently black is used for luxury products. It’s of course always obvious in hindsight. Here is the full infographic:

How to improve your marketing with better use of colors:

This all might be fairly entertaining, but what are some actual things we can apply today to our website or app? The answer comes yet again from some great research done by the good folks over at KISSmetrics.

If you are building an app that mainly targets Women, here is KISSmetrics best advice for you:

• Women love: Blue, Purple and Green
• Women hate: Orange, Brown and Gray

In case your app is strictly targeting men, the rules of the game are slightly different. Here it goes:

• Men love: Blue, Green and Black
• Men hate: Brown, Orange and Purple

In another amazing experiment Performable (now HubSpot) wanted to find out whether simply changing the color of a button would make a difference to conversion rates.

They started out with the simple hypothesis of choosing between 2 colors (green and red) and trying guess what would happen.

For green, their intuition was this:

“Green connotes ideas like “natural” and “environment,” and given its wide use in traffic lights, suggests the idea of “Go” or forward movement.”

For red, their thinking went like this:

“The color red, on the other hand, is often thought to communicate excitement, passion, blood, and warning. It is also used as the color for stopping at traffic lights. Red is also known to be eye-catching.”

So, clearly an A/B test between green and red would result in green, the more friendly color to win. At least that was their guess. Here is how their experiment looked like:

So how did that experiment turn out? The answer was more surprising than I had expected:

The red button outperformed the green button by 21%

What’s most important to consider is that nothing else was changed at all:

21% more people clicked on the red button than on the green button. Everything else on the pages was the same, so it was only the button color that made this difference.

This definitely made me wonder. If we were to read all the research before this experiment and ask every researcher which version they would guess would perform better, I’m sure green would be the answer in nearly all cases. Not so much.

At my company Buffer, we’ve also conducted dozens of experiments to improve our conversion rates through changes of colors. Whilst the results weren’t as clear, we still saw a huge change. One hypothesis is that for a social media sharing tool, there is less of a barrier to signup, which makes the differences less significant.

Despite all the studies, generalizations are extremely hard to make. Whatever change you make, treat it first as a hypothesis, and see an the actual experiment what works for you. Personally, I’m always very prone to go with opinion based on what I read or research I’ve come across. Yet, data always beats opinion, no matter what.

Quick last fact: Why are hyperlinks blue?

This is something that always interested me and is actually a fun story. It’s to give the best contrast between blue and the original grey of websites:

Here is the full explanation:

“Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the web, is believed to be the man who first made hyperlinks blue. Mosaic, a very early web browser, displayed webpages with a (ugly) gray background and black text. The darkest color available at the time that was not the same as the black text was that blue color. Therefore, to make links stand apart from plain text, but still be readable, the color blue was selected.”

I think it is extremely fascinating that simply changing something as small as the color, can completely chance the outcome of something. What have been your findings in terms of colors and marketing? I’d love your ideas on this.

Solution to the riddle: Example 1: Facebook, Example 2: Google, Example 3: Flickr, Example 4: LinkedIn

Quick note: You can now see exactly how many people clicked, retweeted, liked and shared your Tweets and FB posts with Buffer analytics.

The post Why Facebook is blue: The science of colors in marketing appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

And yet, today, I thought of changing it up dramatically. It goes nicely with Tim Ferriss’ moto:

“To do the impossible, you need to ignore the popular.”

So with this article, I tried to really step aside from the popular and look for the counter-intuitive. Of course, it’s all backed by the latest and most reputable studies.

Let’s dig and find out some of the most controversial things you could do today to boost your creativity, happiness and productivity:

1.)  Give up

Often, if you are anything like myself, we are in an endless quest for “feeling productive” and for “getting motivated” to do great work. Shoma Morita, a famous Japanese psychiatrist influenced by Zen Buddhism that this might be the absolute wrong way to think about it.

Most of our biggest achievements get done, even without being motivated or inspired, so he describes:

“Is it accurate to assume that we must ‘overcome’ fear to jump off the high dive at the pool, or increase our confidence before we ask someone out for a date?” he asks. “If it was, most of us would still be waiting to do these things.

So, instead of trying to get motivated, embrace your fear, the negativity and dreading of doing the next task ahead. Tell yourself “Yes, I don’t feel great right now to work on this.”

Then, start doing it anyway, without trying to change your emotions.

2.)  Procrastinate (with structure)

For a long time, the productivity space has taught us to focus on your MIT (“Most Important Task”) when you start your day. And yet, seeing the MIT at the top of your list, makes you want to do anything, but that task.

The key is, to give in to the urge of not doing that task, writes Walter Chen. Instead, do some of those easier tasks on your list, that don’t feel that important and are easier to tackle:

“The mental trick is to regard other tasks as more important in order to make the Very Important Task an easier choice.”

In doing so, and moving the original MIT down the list, you are now able to complete it much more easily, as you don’t dread it anymore. In his famous essay on structured procrastination Stanford Professor John Perry writes this:

“With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen” and “an effective human being.”

So go ahead, procrastinate, it’s ok!

3.)  Stop using the words “great job”  (especially with kids)

Here is something that I’m particularly prone to go wrong with. Too often, especially with kids, we are using the word “great job”, especially if very little effort was put in.

This, so Shelley Phillips writes, only erodes the meaning of the word and gives others little to no motivation.

“Instead try, “You really tried hard on that!” By focusing on a child’s effort, we’re teaching her that the effort is more important than the results.”

Personally, I find myself too often, even within the Buffer team to just say “great job”, when really I should either hold off, or think really hard about what I appreciated about something that’s been mentioned or accomplished.

4.)  Work less

Within the Buffer team, we have an informal rule, that goes something like this:

“Working more is never the answer.”

This is derived from Tony Schwartz’ book “The Power of Full Engagement”, where he proposes a solution to working, that completely changed my productivity. His key idea is simple: “Manage your energy, not your time.”

Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow also has some explanations:

“There are first order benefits to taking the time off, but I think the real business case is (that) in working together to make that time off possible, companies actually re-think how you work and how to be productive.”

So if you start working less, you will have to think really hard about what you will spend your time doing. Here is also more on managing energy, rather than time.

5.)  Stop saying “yes”

One of the best way to regain control of your day and time is to stop saying “Yes” so many times. It’s very obvious that saying “yes” is much easier than saying “no”. That’s why we need a good strategy to prevent it.

In one of the most interesting studies on learning to say “no”, the devil still lies in the detail. The most common ways of saying no are either “I can’t” or “I don’t”. In a recent study two groups were trained to use either one, when asked for how they feel about something. And here is the outcome:

“The students who told themselves “I can’t eat X” chose to eat the chocolate candy bar 61% of the time. Meanwhile, the students who told themselves “I don’t eat X” chose to eat the chocolate candy bars only 36% of the time. This simple change in terminology significantly improved the odds that each person would make a more healthy food choice.”

In order for a better way to say no, here are 2 of my favorite tips for doing so:

• Decide a lot of things beforehand on whether you do them or not. Some examples are: “I don’t drink”, “I don’t check email in the morning”, “I don’t go to bed after 11pm”. This makes any potential temptations much easier to avoid.

• Hold yourself accountable with these points. Write them down, share them with your family and friends or put them over your bed on a poster. Being held accountable has worked wonders for me.

In case you are interested, we have also written more on the science of saying no.

6.)  Get rejected

Here is something to finally stop being angry or disappointed about: Being rejected. Instead welcome it in and work on how you react to it. In a recent experiment at John Hopkins University, Sharon Kim tried to prove exactly that.

Here is what happened. 2 groups of people were each given a set of personality type questions. They were told, that they might (or might not) be considered for future exercises again. When both groups returned 2 weeks later, the first one was told to complete a few tasks before joining the next group (inclusion). The other group was being told to complete tasks, but wouldn’t join the next group again (rejection).

The tasks to complete were so called RAT tasks. You get a few unrelated words like “cottage | swiss | cake” and you need to combine each one with the same word to build a useful connection. For example: “cottage cheese”, “swiss cheese” and “cheese cake”. (Here is a fun website to do more of these).

The results, and I bet you can already guess them. The people being rejected from joining the group again consistently outperformed those that were included. And those, that were labeled as “independent” by the researchers outperformed everyone else even more in the tasks.

The conclusions from study author Kim:

 “Social rejection can inspire imaginative thinking, particularly in individuals with a strong sense of their own independence”

99u also writes more about this and shows how deep the implications of this are. In an incredibly awesome other experiment titled “100 Days of Rejection”, a guy tries to get rejected 100 times every day and see what this does to him. Here is a list of all his experiments.

Ready to get rejected? It might just make you a lot more creative.

7.)  Use at least Facebook, Twitter and 3 other social networks

Are social networks blocked by your employer? That’s probably not a good thing for your productivity, according to a recent study by Evolv. They monitored hundreds of metrics from Fortune 500 companies and found an exciting correlation between usage of social networks and productivity/output per employee.

And here is what they found:

“Employees who belonged to more than five social networks had a 1.6 percent higher sales conversion than their counterparts and a 2.8 percent lower average call time.”

Of course, confusing causation and correlation is not something we want to do here. And yet, the study goes on to explain:

“Individuals who have a higher technical proficiency and are more productive also stay in their jobs longer.”

So the reason, is probably not because these employees use more social networks, but simply that they are more tech-savvy and have thought more about what drives them to be productive.

If it all holds true, at least we hope to make your life easier keeping up with multiple social networks through Buffer.

8.)  Spend time on email first thing in the morning

This one is indeed a highly controversial one. It seems that almost every article nowadays is about spending less time or eliminating email. Recently, Joel, CEO here at Buffer noticed something interesting. Almost all the top CEO’s in the world start their day with email.  Here is a list of a few who do:

• Tim Cook (CEO at Apple)
• David Cush (CEO at Virgin America)
• Robert Iger (CEO at Disney)

That is interesting and after discussing this more with Joel, this was his intuition:

“my thinking is that the better I communicate with the team the more we get done and improve productivity of whole team”

Depending on the position you hold in a company, email might be more or less of a focus for you. Excluding it, based on 99% of advice on avoiding email might not be so good though.

9.)  Stop visualizing or telling anyone your goals

If you are anything like me, tons of people have told you something like “Write down your goal, put it up on the wall or the mirror, so you can see and be reminded of it every day!”. Sounds like a great idea in theory right? Because we see it every day, or because we hold ourselves accountable through telling others, we are likely to achieve it and keep working on it.

Not so true, according to Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen at NYU:

“Positive fantasies of success drains the energy out of ambition.”

That good feeling about defining the goal and mentioning it to someone or writing it down makes you less likely to achieve. Partly because you are (accidentally!) playing a trick on yourself and telling it that you’ve already achieved it, so you don’t have to work so hard anymore.

Instead, keep your goals to yourself and in your head. There is also a great Ted Talk by Derek Sivers on this.

10.) Do an impossible task

Here is the last tip for you, that I’ve found to work extremely well. Give yourself, or your employees and team members an absolutely impossible task to achieve. Whenever you notice that you’ve started to work on something and realise “I will fail with this”, keep on working.

The reason, according to Robert Epstein, is that you put your brain under shock. It is like going to the gym and lifting an incredibly heavy weight, where you quickly fail after a few reps.

By overwhelming your brain like this, similar to a muscle, it expands and gets activated. Any other “normal” task thereafter appears incredibly easy and allows you to push much further than before. Doing an impossible task is an amazing way to increase your brain’s capacity. 

These are my best, controversial productivity tips to help you become a better self. Have you tried any of these before? I’d love your thoughts and additions here.

The post 10 of the most controversial productivity tips that actually work appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

I’ve always been incredibly fascinated with body language and how it helps us achieve our goals in life better. The power of body language is probably best described by Amy Cuddy’s famous quote:

“Our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us.”

If you are anything like me, then you’ve had a healthy obsession with body language for some time. In recent years, a few fascinating studies at Harvard, Princeton and other top universities shed new light on body language and how to use it at work. So whilst the power of language is extremely important to convey the right message. The power of body language however, might be the determining factor of how someone makes us feel.

Here is an insight of the latest studies and how we can use body language to our advantage in every day life.

Your body expresses emotion better than your face

We all grow up learning about how to deal with each other based on facial expressions. And yet, that might not at all be the best way to judge other people’s emotions.

Researchers from Princeton performed a very simple experiment. They asked study participants to judge from photography whether that person is feeling joy, loss, victory or pain. Now some photographs showed facial expressions only, some showed body language and some both.

Have a go yourself at the following picture and try to say whether the tennis player’s faces on the right enjoy victory or loss:

And the results couldn’t be any more startling:

“In four separate experiments, participants more accurately guessed the pictured emotion based on body language — alone or combined with facial expressions — than on facial context alone.”

Especially extremely positive and extremely negative emotions are very hard to distinguish from each other, explains head researcher Todorov.

Now, it gets even more interesting. Body language isn’t just something we have to learn. Most emotional expressions come built into our system. For example, scientists from British Columbia observed congenitally blind people at the Paralympics.

In this example, the left athlete can see, whereas the right athlete is congenitally blind. Yet, after winning, both express the same body language for victory:

So, if body language is both so ancient and ingrained and also so powerful to express our true emotions, how can we use it better in our every day lives to achieve what we want?

Amy Cuddy from Harvard has answers for us:

Body language changes who you are – literally

In one of my favorite Ted Talks, Amy Cuddy explains some of the most peculiar happenings of body language. Cuddy focuses a lot on the business world and how body language is helpful for us here and the possibilities seem to have no boundaries.

Cuddy distinguishes between 2 different types of body postures. One are powerful poses, and their counter part are powerless ones. Here is an example of a powerful pose:

And here is an example of a powerless one:

Now Cuddy’s research reveals a bunch of extremely interesting things. The first is that expressing more powerful poses helps us get better jobs, makes us feel better and makes us overall more successful.

And yet, it goes a lot further than to just change the positing of your legs or arms. Cuddy explains that inside our bodies, actual changes are happening as our body language changes. These changes largely have to do with hormones.

The two hormones in question are:

• Testosterone: The “power” hormone, which amongst lots of other things helps us to be a better leader, have more focus and attention.
• Cortisol: The “stress” hormone, which amongst lost of other things makes us less re-active to stress, makes us feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Here is what Cuddy’s experiment contained:

They brought people into a room. For two minutes, they would either perform a powerful pose or a powerless pose. Then they would go on into performing a job interview. The results were absolutely stunning:

Neutral recruiters, who didn’t know who performed which pose, consistently picked only those that previously performed the powerful poses as people they would want to hire.

On top of that, the actual hormone levels of people changed dramatically. Here is the increase in testosterone and drop in cortisol after performing the power-pose (for just 2 minutes!):

And here are the hormone levels after performing the powerless-pose, with a significant drop in testosterone and increase in cortisol:

According to Cuddy, here findings show that changing our body language doesn’t just change our outcomes. It changes who we are as people. So instead of “faking until you make it”, her advice is:

Fake it until you become it.

Can you fake it until you make it? Yes, here are 5 postures to work on today to answer the question “How can I improve my body language”:

“How can I improve my body language?” – Here are 5 postures to work on

1.) Focus on the position of your feet

Carol Kinsey Goman has researched the importance of body language in the workplace for many years. One of her best tips is to watch your feet. A lot of the time, we focus on our upper body or faces, yet our feet reveal more about our emotions than we might think:

“When you approach 2 people talking, you will be acknowledged in one of two ways. If the feet of your two colleagues stay in place and they twist only their upper torsos in your direction, they don’t really want you to join the conversation. But if their feet open to include you then you know that you are truly invited to participate.”

In another example from her book Goman explains when to know that “conversations are over”:

Whenever you are speaking with a co-worker who seems to be paying attention, and whose upper body is angled toward you, but whose legs and feet have turned toward the door – realize that the conversation is over. Her feet are telling you she wants to leave. Foot positions are revealing even if someone’s legs are crossed.

I’ve started to experiment this at the Buffer office too. Whenever I speak with someone I make sure to give them my full attention – head til toe. So far, it’s been a great experience.

2.) Smile – it’ll make you happier

We smile because we are happy. But does it work the other way around too? Researchers at Cardiff University think so. People who smile, without actually feeling happy, can make themselves feel a lot happier, says Michael Lewis, a co-author of the study:

“It would appear that the way we feel emotions isn’t just restricted to our brain—there are parts of our bodies that help and reinforce the feelings we’re having,”

Of course, being able to smile well is a whole other story. For now, give it a try to smile in the restroom or in another quiet place before a difficult conversation, job interview or meeting. It might just make you more successful.

3.) Practice Amy Cuddy’s “power poses” before important meetings

Amy Cuddy suggests 3 distinct power poses to practice for 2-3 minutes before you have an important conversation.

Try them next time in a quiet place and see if they have the same results for you:

Power-posture 1:

Power-posture 2:

Power-posture 3:

4.) Realign your body more congenially with your conversation partner

Another great tip from Goman mentions that if you try to align yourself more congenially with a conversation partner you will be able to solve tension in conversations and come to solutions more quickly:

“If you physically align yourself with that person (sitting or standing shoulder to shoulder facing the same direction), you will defuse the situation. “

I’ve found this especially true with meeting people you’ve never met before. It’s hard to build rapport at the start, focusing on aligning can make a big difference. Give it a try.

5.) Lower your voice with deep breathing

Although not a specific tip for body posture, this is one of my favorite tips. Men and women with deeper voices are more likely to land in leadership positions and are generally perceived as a greater authority.

To lower your voice, especially before an interview, try to take some deep belly breaths. It will relax your throat area, which generally contracts and raises the pitch of your voice.

What other body language insights have you come across? I’d love your insights on this fascinating topic!

Quick note: Check out Buffer as the easiest way to share any article to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn with one click.

The post The secrets of body language: why you should never cross your arms again appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..

Tracking things all the time and developing a data-driven mindset is one of the most important things I’ve learnt in the past 2 years. And there is still a long way to go.

Here are some of the social media metrics worth your time and what I’ve discovered by analyzing each of them for Buffer.

1.) Referral traffic from Social

Here is something that took me a long time to get around to do: Tracking our traffic from social properly. Google Analytics, in the last few months has added a special tab that covers just social. Here is how to get to it:

For Buffer’s blog, these were the results for the past 30 days in terms of traffic coming from social:

Google Analytics makes it very easy to dig deeper from your initial overview. Especially for sites like Reddit and Hackernews, there is a lot of granularity in there.

The 2 takeaways we learnt for the Buffer blog from this:

• Google+ is growing strong: We hadn’t been posting consistently on Google+ at all until that point. Seeing it come up in the top 5 for social traffic changed that a lot. We started to publish more and we are getting surprisingly good engagement on Google+:

• Pocket is getting huge. And up until now, you might have been wondering how there is any way you can capitalize on their traffic. You can now add a custom footer message that lets you give your readers a clear call to action.

2.) Click rate on your social shares

Click rates are something very interesting for this social media metrics analysis. In a recent article on the latest social media stats, a key study pointed out that:

“The correlation between a click and a conversion is virtually nonexistent.”

And whilst the study talked about banner ads and less about social media shares, I think it’s still important to be vary of the fact that we have to track the whole conversion funnel.

With Social shares, we’ve found that actual signups/conversions seem definitely a lot more likely after a click and make a lot more sense to be taken seriously.

The easiest way for tracking click data on social media comes with bit.ly. You can easily connect bit.ly click tracking inside Buffer or let Buffer do it automatically. For everything you share, you can now get the click data on top of other analytics:

3 easy ways to improve your social click rates

One of the most frequent questions we are getting at Buffer is how can people increase their click rate. From our research into millions of updates, there are 3 key elements to up your daily click rate on Tweets and FB posts:

• Frequency: One of the key drivers for getting more clicks is to up your posting frequency on both Twitter and Facebook. We found that around 5-10 times a day on Twitter and 1-4 times a day on Facebook gives you the optimal outcome.
• Timing: To improve your click rate more, timing is obviously very important. Here is a more in-depth guide for finding your best time to Tweet. Almost all research studies highlight the main work hours from 8am to 8pm as good timings to Tweet and post to Facebook. More on optimal timing stats here.
• Multiple sites: Another key, that we found from our research is that posting to multiple sites, instead of just your own blog or website, is a key driver for getting click rates up. Over time, you build a much deeper trust with people showing that all you care about are good, useful links, not just your own stuff.

3.) “People talking about this” – your Fanpage reach

Anything I posted to our Facebook page around a few months ago would barely get any likes, comments or clicks. I was thoroughly confused. We had added close to 5,000 new likes and still no engagement.

Then I took a look at the “people talking about this” metric and it was lower than 4-5%. That’s pretty bad I thought. Apparently though, only 16% of your fanbase can every reached says Facebook:

“Pages organically reach about 16% of their fans on average.”

Facebook itself also lists 3 ways that you can increase your reach organically:

• Post videos/photos instead of links
• Ask questions
• Share exclusive information

Now, these 3 points aren’t really that helpful and yet they cover the basics very well. Postrocket, a FB analytics tool, recently dug into some more powerful ideas to increase your number of people talking about it:

• Try text-only posts – they spread further than images

This is a great idea and I have definitely seen a huge spike in likes for doing so. Especially if you are posting quotes. They have had one of the farthest spread this far for us with the Buffer Facebook page.

What worked best for us?

At Buffer, we had one simple and well known idea that helped us up our reach to around 10% within a few weeks: images.

This way, we were able to routinely get 10-20 shares, dozens of comments and much more likes than before.

I still see a lot of pages simply auto-feeding their RSS page to Facebook and losing out on a lot of engagement.

To make posting them smarter, here is the easiest way to post images to Facebook without the download, upload hassle. (Hint: It’s hack #2)

4.) Your Twitter followers – the most talked about metric

This is a metric a lot of people talk about. And yet, very few people try to actively and successfully improve that metric.

It is super easy to track that metric and to see the growth happening over time to your account. The best tool I’ve found so far is TwitterCounter. It makes seeing your overall trend super easy:

Another great option to learn more about your follower growth is Followerwonk.  On top of your growth, they also show you how many followers you have lost and which days you’ve added particularly lots of new followers:

3 Best ways we’ve grown our followers

The best ways for us to pick up more followers were very simple things, that I believe anyone can easily implement.

• Reply to every single mention of Buffer on Twitter: One of our most important aspects at Buffer is to give great customer support and replying to every Twitter mention is a key part of this. One of the best by-products of doing so is a huge growth in followers. @AskAaronLee who recently hit 400k followers has some similar advice.

•  Guest posting: One of the best ways to grow both my personal and Buffers Twitter following was to produce lots of articles and mention your username in the bio. On top of this, most sites now include your mention if people hit the Tweet button and can suggest you to follow afterwards. Those are no-brainers that worked extremely well for us.

• Events hack: Here is something that has worked really well for me. Instead of handing out business cards, I send a Tweet to every new person I meet at an event and even otherwise in real life. This is a great way to connect sustainably with more people and build engaged followers.

5.) Your social influence score – Klout, Kred and more

Another one of the most important social metrics is your social influence. The one measurement tool out there, that I’ve found to be most accurate to real social influence is Klout. The way I like to track this most easily is with the Klout Chrome extension. It adds the Klout scores of all Twitter users, including your own, right into Twitter.com and let’s you easily see at a glance who is influential:

Especially as I search for Buffer brand mentions and see if anything needs my immediate attention, this handy little extension makes making decisions a lot easier.

In case Klout is not something you’ve found helpful, here are a few alternatives to track:

• Kred: A great social influence tracking tool that also has interesting network functionality.
• Tweetreach: This is a great tool for analyzing how far individual Tweets from yourself or others are reaching.
• Peerindex: Long the main competitor for Klout, Peerindex recently switched more to rewards for your influence. Still super handy to check out.

Those are the 5 metrics I’ve found to help us the most at Buffer if improved. What are your insights on Social Media metrics? I’d love your thoughts on this.

The post 5 essential social media metrics to track and how to improve them appeared first on The Buffer blog: productivity, life hacks, writing, user experience, customer happiness and business..