Did you know companies with happy employees outperform their competition by 20 percent?

LinkedIn has carried out research to say that 58 percent of employees are proud of their company and are glad to tell others about it, especially on social media.

This is great news, as happier employees means happier customers, because they pass on their energy & passion in everything they do, including customer support.

But how can you create happy employees on social media?

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Celebrity selfies and fan-snapped shots on the Internet have cut the prices they can charge for their pictures. But those tweets and Instagrams and Facebook posts allow them to track down and trail boldfaced names like never before.

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RSS has taken some big hits recently. Of course, people have been announcing the death of RSS pretty much since it came into existence, but when Google Reader bit the dust on July 1st, 2013, many were ready to place a wreath at the headstone and walk away.

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The same laws of attraction have never governed the social media marketing scene for too long.

Just as one Tweet changes another, so does user preferences when it comes to consuming online content. New social media rise and fall quickly and this year SnapChat and Periscope already shown a great influence on the marketing landscape. With new players entering the field and old companies rushing to introduce new features and innovations, the rules of social media play hardly ever stay the same.

In 2016 we should expect to see new exciting trends and changes in the social scene and here are the top 4.

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You are definitely not alone in feeling the RSS information overload. As wonderful as it is to be able to tap into all the information in the world, there are only so many hours in the day to spend consuming it all. Not to worry: With a little pruning, filtering and prioritizing, we can turn the deluge of data into a nice, manageable stream of content.

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The end of the year is drawing near, which means its time for fresh starts and new beginnings. While that does apply to whichever New Year’s resolution you plan to make in 2016 (and, in all likelihood, abandon by February), it applies to social media sites as well.

Unfriend and Unfollow
The new year is the perfect time to go through your friends list with a fine-toothed comb. Here is a quick guide for whether you should be friends with someone online: Do you know who this person is? Have you seen him or her in the last year? Do you honestly think you’ll need to talk to him or her in the future?

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Nothing motivates me to clean up like having to move. When I move house, which I do more often than I like, I see it as a time to purge junk and scrub the new place from corner to corner before moving in any of my stuff.

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Feeds are added one after the other to Munch which is the program's greatest shortcoming, especially if you have an opml file full of feeds already that you would like to import.

This means that you need to add feed after feed manually in the application which is a problem considering that you need to get hold of feed urls first somehow to do so.

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The raw simplicity of RSS is its beauty, so any upgrades need to maintain that simplicity. But we can create additional function without sacrificing RSS’s usefulness.

Can an old dog learn new tricks?

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This week, a group of Android users noticed a new feature in the Twitter app: a GIF button that can be used to search through trending GIFs to drop into status updates.

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Whether you are constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or there is a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query—and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.

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Lately, Facebook newsfeeds have been seeing a new page pop up asking for assistance from the community, and the response has been abundant.

Jessica Williams, chief probation officer and program director of the Ross County Probation Department, created a Facebook page for the agency a few weeks ago. She started posting names of people wanted on warrants after violating the terms of their probation, along with their pictures.

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Software to Create Feeds
If you are not as confident and would like software to create the feed we strongly recommend FeedForAll an extremely easy to use feed creation tool that allows webmasters to create, edit and publish rss feeds.

If you want to create an RSS feed using a text editor a step by step walk-through at Make RSS Feeds will help.

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Whether you are constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or there is a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query — and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.

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If a blogger falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to see it…will Google still pick up the feed?

Ha! I crack myself up.

For those of us who spend time blogging, one of the more critical questions is: “How do I get people to read my blog?” After all, if we’re out there hustling to write content for the blogosphere, how valuable is it if no one reads it?

Have no fear. Here are eight great ways to get (and keep) blog readers:

1. Identify your audience. What are you blogging about, and what kinds of people would benefit from reading it?

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Do keep in mind, though, that not every website keeps an updated RSS feed anymore. Here are the best RSS reader apps for Android!

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Whether you are constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or theres a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query—and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.

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It is difficult to get real-time alerts about articles with specific headlines on specific subjects from specific websites.

News reader applications like Feedly or Flipboard are great for browsing and even searching through news items, but they lack the ability to send notifications proactively.  Emails from Google Alerts can be tardy, and at other times, articles can slip by completely.

Never fear!  Used together, two web applications, IFTTT and Feed Rinse,  solve this problem easily.

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We live in an age of information overload. With all the stories from news, blogs, social media, and other sources, the amount of information about any given subject can be overwhelming. It is hard enough to keep up when you are just a consumer of information, but what about when you need to curate content for a target audience?

Thankfully, there are tools that can collect and organize information from a large number of sources, making that task easier. One such tool is the PressForward plugin for WordPress.

PressForward is a multi-user, collaborative RSS feed reader that integrates with WordPress' publication work-flow and provides users with the ability to curate content for a target audience.

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The federal government has confirmed that it will start targeting social media posts by prospective employees as part of its review process for security clearance.

The new policy, which will allow investigators to scan an applicant’s history on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other similar sites, will be adopted soon, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The guidelines make clear that agencies can target publicly available social media posts, if they deem it necessary, but cannot force individuals to hand over their passwords for private accounts, or provide pseudonyms for any profiles.

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I was interviewing Antonio Lucio, the CMO for HP, for my CMO Insight series (see article here), when we started talking about social media. For perspective, Lucio has over 33,000 Twitter followers, has a 62 Klout score, and is the 4th most influential CMO on Twitter (see list here). I asked him why he is so personally involved in Twitter. Very few CMOs tweet and of those who have a lot of followers, few tweet themselves, instead delegating the task to somebody on their marketing team. His response to my question was fascinating, and an important one for any CMO or aspiring CMO to hear.

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New-age publishers are toying with innovative content models that offer more value to end users and set their cash registers ringing. It does not come as a surprise, when content is evolving as a major source of income for them. By offering high-value content and a trove of inbound links, digital publishers can maximise the profitability of their websites.

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In what has become a heartbreaking routine—employed during the Paris attacks of 2015, as well as after recent terrorist attacks in such places as Belgium and Istanbul — people shared emotional memes in solidarity with the city of Nice, where 84 people were killed by a truck driver barrelling into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais.

Using the hashtags #PrayForNice or #JeSuisNice, people expressed solidarity over the deaths of at least 84 people, which French President Francois Hollande says was caused by an act of terrorism.

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The former Top Gear crew seem to be embracing the internet in a whole new way. Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have announced that their new social network, DriveTribe, will be launching this autumn.

Details are scarce, but each of the founders shared a quote of what they would like to see from this new venture.

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I had never heard of Nextdoor when I lived in New York City. Social media services catering to individual neighborhoods weren’t useful in an apartment building where most tenants lasted a year, and longtime residents kept to themselves.

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Last week, a prominent feminist writer left Twitter after a rape and death threat was directed at her 5-year-old daughter. Online violent threats are not uncommon, especially for women and minorities, but when they are reported, police are often not responsive.

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When Google killed Reader back in 2013, many people worried that it was the end of RSS feeds—an open source format that websites used to syndicate their posts automatically. Instead, it actually led to a huge degree of innovation. Now, three years later, things have never been better.

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If you want to increase the readership on your website, or you want to make it big with a podcast, you need an RSS feed. The RSS feed keeps your users up to date on all of your latest articles or episodes and can result in a massive increase in traffic. Creating an RSS feed is quick and easy, whether you’re using an RSS creation program or writing one yourself. Follow this guide to find out how.

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Did you know that there are thousands of people out there earning incredible amounts of money through social media? That s right, social media stars can make thousands, even millions of dollars per year through sponsored posts, original content, and consistent engagement with their followers. Here are five social media celebs who might make you want to quit your job to go full-time on Instagram!

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Use a Conversational tone On Facebook
Facebook is probably the only site that still holds that perfect mix of business and pleasure. In order to not upset that balance and lose followers, your posts and updates should blend in perfectly with your fans and encourage more click-through. While repurposing Facebook for marketing, make sure to use a conversational tone to sound less spammy.

Follow the 80/20 Rule
Just making your presence felt over social media is not enough, it has to be worth following in the first place. Make sure to post valuable, productive and useful content instead of just promoting your company. The most useful tip to keep in mind is the 80/20 rule, where 80 percent of all your posts should be of value to your audience and 20 percent will be self-promotional.

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Keeping all of your favorite sites organized is not always easy, especially when you want to stay updated with all of them. That is where RSS feed readers come in. Not familiar with RSS feeds? It is where you compile all of your favorite internet content into one feed, so you do not have to individually be keeping up with health/exercise websites, food blogs, travel diaries, and so on. When you sign up for an RSS feed reader, all those things are in one place.

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Whether you are constantly searching your own name online (you know who you are) or there is a topic you want to follow closely, Google Alerts lets you know when new pages hit the web that match your query—and you can convert these results into an RSS feed (or something else) to make them easier to manage.

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The Amazon Kindle is a great ereader, but it is not particularly feature-rich. Reabble is a simple little RSS reader optimized to work inside the Kindles experimental browser to make reading articles less of a chore.

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The best blogs and feeds are those that contain unique, fresh, compelling, content. So where do these prolific posters get their ideas? I talked to a handful of bloggers to determine where their inspiration originated for their content.

Not surprisingly, ideas for blog posts or RSS feed items originate or are influenced by other web content. The following are venues for finding your online muse:

How to Get Ideas for RSS Feeds

This summer, the American Civil Liberties Union of California requested records from 63 police departments, sheriffs and district attorneys across California. Of the records they received, 40 percent of the agencies (20) used social media surveillance tools, and most of them started using them within the last year.

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Ladies, gentlemen and all overly anxious Jewish mothers, I recently had a date that was NOT set up via a dating app. Hey, you have to start somewhere, right? Even better, it was a great date.

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Social media monitoring services such as Geofeedia rely on bulk data access to be able to search far larger volumes of social media posts, and more efficiently, than the average user.

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Since January, more than 200,000 posts per month on Instagram, a picture-sharing app owned by Facebook, have been tagged with #ad,  #sp or #sponsored, according to Captiv8, an analytics platform that connects brands to social media influencers. Hiring such influencers allows companies to reach a vast network of potential customers: Mr Ronaldo has a combined following of 240m people across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

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The Internet is a big place. Really big. With more than a billion existing pages and thousands more being created each day, there is a wealth of great sites offering fantastic content free of charge. But with such a massive torrent of media being produced each and every day, it can often be tough to keep up with all your favorite websites. So, how do we alleviate this problem? Easy. Here’s a really simple explanation of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

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If Uber is going to make its dreams of self-driving ridesharing cars a reality, it is going to need a lot of expertise in artificial intelligence... and it is taking big steps to make that happen. The company has created Uber AI Labs to fuel its research, and it is getting the team started by acquiring AI startup Geometric Intelligence.

This is also a preemptive strike against the competition. The company tells the NYT that there is a fierce battle for AI talent -- acquiring Geometric Intelligence prevents Uber from losing out to Lyft, Google and others hoping to put machine learning to work on the road.

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Is Facebook our ultimate utopia, where failures find no room?

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In the past two years, investors have spent more than $10 million on social networking apps in India. And a growing number of them are focussing on niche segments — from students to Hindi speakers and parents to high networth individuals.

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1. Avoid use of headlines and writing of tweets that misrepresent and/or oversimplify the content of linked-to articles. Headlines matter as they frame the stories for users.

2. Call racism racism.

3. Call sexism sexism.

4. Call terrorism terrorism, and be consistent in the use of the term regardless of the ethnicity, religion, national origin and ideological motivation(s) of the perpetrator(s).

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Teens spend more time in front of screens than they do sleeping.

According to a 2015 report by Common Sense Media, teens spend upwards of 9 hours a day consuming media on screens. And while the National Sleep Foundation recommends that teenagers get a 9 and 1/2 hours of sleep each night, the average American teenager sleeps around 7 hours each day.

A lack of proper sleep has been connected with reduced cognitive functions and lower academic performance. Teens may be tired because instead of sleeping soundly they are sleeping with their smartphones.

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Not familiar with RSS feeds? It is where you compile all of your favorite internet content into one feed, so you do not have to individually be keeping up with health-exercise websites, food blogs, travel diaries, and so on. When you sign up for an RSS feed reader, all those things are in one place.

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RSS really does not get as much love as it used to, and that is actually a shame. Being able to pull stories from multiple sources into one good app is great, especially when you can customize these to show what’s important to you.

The Top 6 RSS Reader Apps for iOS

Twitter is one of the foremost platforms for gaining information quickly as all the major news publications and companies are breaking news about new happening around the world on Twitter.

Scratch that, even influencers, athletes and other celebrities are constantly divulging information on Twitter and many of you might be interested in not missing out on their tweets.

And for those of you who are in a habit of maintaining an RSS reader to consume information from worldwide publications, authors and people you’re interested in hearing from, here is a tool to help you do so on Twitter.

How to Add a Twitter Feed to Your RSS Reader

When Google Reader was discontinued four years ago, many technology experts called it the end of RSS feeds.

And it is true that for some people, social media and other aggregation tools are filling a need that feed readers for RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats once served. But old technologies never really die just because new technologies come along, particularly if the new technology does not perfectly replicate all of the use cases of the old one. The target audience for a technology might change a bit, and the tools people use to consume the technology might change, too.

5 open source RSS feed readers

As of this year, about 81% of the United States population uses at least one social media platform. That number is growing by roughly 5% per year. At this rate, 100% of the United States will have a social media profile on at least one platform by 2021.  

Businesspeople searching for the ideal marketing channel to engage prospects should look no further than social networks. Social media provides companies with ample information to create messages targeted to valuable niche audiences, and given the statistics, it is inevitable that the audience you are trying to reach is on at least one social network.

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Unlike traditional news feeds that invade user privacy, show ads, and track users across the web, Top Bottom Center is a new content feed that bursts filter bubbles by providing the smartest, funniest, and most flexible news feed ever. Private content feeds give the best information and entertainment, all in one feed.

Content is pulled from a variety of diverse, top-tier sources to give broader perspectives directly from the world's leading thinkers, entertainers, and content producers. Stories feature information from politically and socially diverse sources right next to each other to remove the echo chamber and ideological bubbles of social media.

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