For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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In our increasingly connected society, building a social media presence is as commonplace as getting a driver’s license. Personal Facebook profiles, LinkedIn accounts, and Twitter handles are common among students and professionals alike. However, frequently updating your Pinterest boards does not necessarily equip you with the tools and experience that you need when crafting a social media strategy for your budding business.

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I am looking for a way to get an RSS-Feed that serves the same content as the main view on Twitter. I am following about 20 people at the moment and I could of course get an RSS-Feed from each of them separately, but I do not want my RSS-Reader to be cluttered with 20 Feeds if I can aggregate them into a single feed.

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Have you considered RSS Mesh?

These days, prospects and customers have more information thrown at them than ever before. From phone calls and snail mail to emails and social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, each new way for a person to initiate contact makes it harder for companies to break through all the noise.

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As an early adopter of media since the early 80s, I love everything about media, its immediacy, urgency, fluidity, and ability to impact the masses and unify people and ideas in real time, in the moment.

Social marketing continues to be a powerful force for good, but as we know it can be a dangerous platform for bad too.

Through prior careers in entertainment and broadcast radio sales, and celebrating 8 years in my current social media consultancy, social marketing clearly is the most effective way to build branding, credibility and the bottom line.

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RSS feeds are fine if you can find a good feed reader and the time to grind through the results, but let’s face it - email is the center of most people’s universes. So why not converge RSS and email? If this sounds like something you would like to do, you need to take a look at the Web service Blogtrottr.

Blogtrottr is simple to use: you enter a feed URL, the address you wish to have the email of the feed sent to, select the frequency of delivery.

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If you are a Twitch user, reset your password. Better yet, regardless of the site or service, do not use the same password on multiple sites.

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In the early days of search engines, I was not much of a believer in XML sitemaps. But over time, I began to see first hand how they can benefit websites.

XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster.

For content publishers, it has become critical to help Google specifically understand if your site is the original publisher of content. Why? Panda.

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When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

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From a marketing perspective, an RSS feed is a direct pipeline to your target audience. It is also a way to boost your Google search profile—sites that update more frequently get better search rankings.

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Yahoo is shutting down Maps.

Nearly three years into Yahoos reinvention under CEO Marissa Mayer, formerly a high-ranking Google executive, the company is shuttering some services including Maps. In a second-quarter progress report posted on Tumblr on June 4—Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013—chief architect Amotz Maimon announced that Yahoo is closing down its Maps site at the end of June.

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There is a very easy-to-use workaround that will give you instant access to Twitter RSS feeds, although it may only be a matter of time before Twitter kills that off too.

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Litenin turns your RSS feed into a text list thats incredibly easy to browse.

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A national diaper company is on the defense after a mothers video on social media went viral, claiming glass shards were in a bag of wipes. Other angry parents also took to social media to attack Huggies, showing how claims, founded or baseless, can reach thousands, even millions in just a few hours or days.

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We often confuse relevance with creativity. Relevance is not about being cutting edge or participating in the latest fad. When it comes to social media, relevance is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time through the right channel. Sometimes it is actually easier to understand relevance by looking at what it is not.

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Google Sheets can monitor competitors prices, capture news headlines, and devour data from websites, CSV files, and more. The tool helps small business owners and marketers gain a competitive advantage.

Google Sheets, the search giant’s cloud-based spreadsheet service, does more than just make your financial statements legible. The service has many powerful functions and features. Three of these may even help your business collect competitor and industry data that could lead to better decisions.

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That little row of social media buttons has become a ubiquitous feature of most websites. After all, it is good to show off that you are social, and that there are channels where you can interact directly with stakeholders.

But is your website header or sidebar the best place to show that off?

Here are five reasons why having social media buttons on your nonprofits website might do more harm than good:

1) They send visitors away from your website

An RSS feed is a means to distribute changing web content including blog posts, podcasts, news releases and site updates to related sites, blogs, online publishers and feed subscribers. It allows busy people to get the information they want without having to use email, which prevents the publisher from selling or otherwise providing their contract information to other parties.

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As hundreds of visitors line up to write prayers on strips of cloth at the Knotted Grotto art installation at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, 18-year-old Cassie Sadie has a message of her own, typed in 140 characters or less.

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RSS has never been fashionable — it is always been a news gathering tool for nerds, not norms. But now, more than two years after the untimely demise of Google Reader, RSS almost feels cool — like listening to vinyl or hating things on Twitter. RSS is a stealthy way to obtain news thats fast, friendly, and free from both ads and trackers. Its ubiquity makes me wonder why anyone bothers with browsers and adblockers at all, especially when mobile.

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When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS or Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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Question for you to answer: What is YOUR goal for your business startup?

I cannot stress enough the importance of knowing the answer to that question. A defined goal helps your team plan strategic & measurable steps; while, in the process, you also keep resources in check as you strive to reach it.

It can be used as a tool to achieve either of these goals:

increased email subscribers
grow profitability
get leads
more website traffic to your website
improved customers service
increased brand awareness
…and more!

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The 4 well established steps of a social media audit include the following;

Step 1: Review your Social Media profiles

Where are you present?
The first thing to start from is mapping your social media presence. Locate all the social media accounts for your brand and write down the current status and audience size. This is a a great base to evaluate your presence on each platform at a later stage. Here’s an example from a recent social media audit for Twitter Counter.

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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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Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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Ping.it, a Web-based RSS reader that lets you create tailored feeds by keywords and popularity.

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In 2015, we have seen several major changes and improvements to the way we conduct business on social media. We have seen brand new networks rise, while others have fallen. We have watched popular networks pivot, and promising networks not take off as expected.

This years social media ad revenue is estimated to total $23 billion.

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Charities are turning to online stars with large YouTube audiences, following an approach increasingly used by big brands to reach new donors and volunteers.

The Make-a-Wish Foundation, for children with life-threatening illnesses, DigDeep, the non-profit organisation focused on water, and Los Angeles-based anti-poverty group United Way are among the charities using a new technology platform designed to let this new kind of minor social media celebrity do their marketing for them.

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  The RSS feed is really something we see as more of a technical help to crawl and index the content a bit better.  So if you have a website that is changing content fairly quickly, a news website, a blog with a  lot of new content, maybe even a shop that has lots of new content, then the RSS feed really helps us stay on top of things so we can pick up on all of those new URLs and crawl them as soon as we can.

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Twitters Moments feature lets users step back from their rapid-fire feeds and see what hot topics are dominating internet chatter. From news to funnies to trending subjects, Moments blend media and commentary into curated, bitesize overviews.

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One of the first things some people do after a major life incident is to post on social media, and sometimes those life incidents are rather personal for such a public venue. This has repercussions in two different ways.

First, people create their own liability by posting online.

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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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How do companies stay afloat in recessionary times with so many calls for financial prudence and as far as the additional cost of marketing goes, is a recession a good time to lay back on your Social Media efforts or should you be stepping it up?

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We keep hearing that RSS is dead but is it? No, RSS feed usage is up and those who switch off their feeds are harming their business.

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I know we think of social media as being a new millennium thing — but the truth of the matter is that the seeds of what would become the social networks we know, love, and sometimes hate today have been around for a heck of a lot longer than the mid-2000s. And these 90s social media sites from before social media was a thing? They are proof.

Most of the sites on this list were originally founded in the late 90s, so I suppose we might also be able to consider them social networks from the early 2000s; after all, that’s probably when a lot of us actually started using them.

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We are a great believer in achieving the widest possible distribution as possible. RSS feeds allow that because they can be easily consumed in many places. RSS was one of the principle ways in which the early bloggers were able to syndicate their content and achieve large scale distribution. To this day, RSS remains one of the best ways to get content onto many people’s screens in as friction free a way as possible.

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John Mueller was asked about RSS feeds in the latest Google Webmaster Hangout, specifically whether there are any SEO benefits to having an RSS feed on the site.

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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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Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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Many investment professionals are naturally competitive people, myself included. Accustomed to being benchmarked and trained to quantify impact, we run an unusual risk of thinking that social media is a contest.

But applying that perspective is counterproductive. It is a bit like going to a dinner party and trying to keep score. People might be into it if you have strange friends, but there’s a better chance that you will alienate everyone there.

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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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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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Twitter has eradicated RSS feeds from its web interface once and for all, following an update to the sites search page today.

When Twitter launched its redesign late last year it subtly removed RSS feeds for users tweets. And while RSS feeds are still available, you have to be willing to jump through some extra hoops to access them.

Of course, there was some suggestion that their removal was accidental, but some 10 months  later this seems not to be the case.

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One lesser known feature of Reddit is the ability to display all submissions that a domain or site received on Reddit.

I mentioned this option two years ago for the first time and don't want to rehash everything I said in the previous article.

You may have stumbled upon it accidentally by clicking on the domain link next to submissions that lead to external sites as it will display the feed of that domain directly.

The feature is quite useful for a number of reasons. As a webmaster for instance, it is easy enough to check all the direct mentions of your site on Reddit.

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I am involved in several free software projects, including one or two where I maintain the website. For one of those projects, we currently are updating the website. Ours is probably similar to other free software projects. We use a hosting service for several key services, including news, but we run our website on a web server that we own. In our case, we run most of our project on SourceForge and run the website on a third-party service, so the news and website are on different systems.

Not surprisingly, our project uses an RSS feed to pull news items from SourceForge to display on the project website.

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For more than 56 years the charity I work for, Bloodwise, has been working to beat blood cancer, the third most fatal form of cancer. In our work, we have had to constantly evolve and adapt to meet the ever-changing needs of our supporters and patients.

Unsurprisingly, the rise of digital channels has been transformational for us, from the delivery of patient information online to communicating with supporters via social media. However, as the importance of digital grew, we knew we needed to use data and insight to understand our online audiences better and measure our performance.

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Opera published a new version of Opera Developer today that introduces basic RSS Feed functionality in the web browser.

The big new feature in the release is support for RSS Feeds. This is not an entirely new feature though, as other browsers support RSS feeds natively as well. Firefox for instance supports live bookmarks which basically list the latest articles posted by a site using RSS.

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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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You read all the social media guru blogs, post religiously across your social media channels, and even publish your content at peak times of the day to capture more views. Despite all of this, you still see competitors gaining ground while your social media influence remains stagnant.

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This question was put to me by Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Derek Mead and I can not stop thinking about it: What is the smallest code?

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