For Twitter and Facebook, the two principal combatants in the world of social media, e-commerce is emerging as the newest battleground.

Twitter announced in a blog post on Thursday that it had agreed to acquire CardSpring, a mobile payments infrastructure company that allows merchants to offer deals to consumers that can be loaded onto to their credit cards. When the card is used to pay at the store, the coupon is automatically applied.

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Experts say the case of a mother accused of poisoning her 5-year-old son to death with salt appears be an example of how social media feeds into Munchausen by proxy, a disorder in which caretakers purposely harm children and then bask in the attention and sympathy.

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The Kindle Paperwhite is my go-to device for reading as I simply love the display. In contrast to my tablet or phone, I can use the device outdoors in direct sun-light without any issues which is a huge plus.

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Did you know that you can rapidly and easily turn any RSS feed into a super cool newspaper style newsletter PDF?

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RSS may be antiquated to some because of the early days of online when RSS readers aggregated content from multiple sources and compiled them into one stream of news and headlines under an RSS reader. It made life easier for people because they did not have to go to dozens of slow Web sites to get their content. Instead, it all flowed to them.

As Web and social media sites became more sophisticated and access speeds became faster, the RSS readers faded away. But the ability of sites to distribute their content to other sites and also collect content from other sites is still viable even today.

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Having a good, or great, social media presence can help your business grow like wildflowers. But, this will only happen after you develop a large following and learn how to give them what they really want. Here are some great ways any business owner or marketer can increase their social media presence and help their business grow.

1. Identify Goals and Objectives
The first step in growing your social media presence is to identify your goals and objectives. This means make sure you know what you are going after – before you start posting. Ensure you know how each platform works, what audiences you can reach where, and what your objectives are and you will be off to a great start.

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In our increasingly competitive world -- one in which we clamor for the right kind of attention for our companies -- the pursuit of likes can become an obsession.

While experts work to define the return on investment, or ROI, of social-media attention and quantify the financial value of social media-fans and followers, entrepreneurs have an innate sense that there is power in gathering a following of likes for our brands.

If being liked is an important goal, and if we measure our likeability by what our social-media fans are saying, how can we effectively gather that evidence of our likeability?

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Many small businesses recognize the benefits of having a social media presence for customer service and long-term marketing purposes. However, many are slow to recognize social medias security issues and how employees own social presence can add to the companys security issues.

Some companies restrict internal access. Others may prevent employees from having any corporate association outside of work on their own social platforms. This is due to the fact that whatever an employee says outside of work publicly can have a significant impact on the organization.

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In the nature of making your 2015 as successful as possible, I want to share a few of my favorite marketing tools that I use on a daily basis. They make my make life easier, decisions more data driven, and my content more creative. We all have our own marketing toolbox, here is a look into mine. Here are my top 8 tools that are going to make your life as a marketer easier in 2015.

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The marketing world is on an absolute tear automating menial, mundane, yet necessary tasks.

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Looking to give your Etsy Shop a boost? Want a fast and easy way to showcase your products to your Twitter and Facebook audience? Promoting your Etsy items across social media is simple.

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When was the last time a social media campaign made you really feel something, whether it was happiness, hope or fear?

Below are five of the most successful social media campaigns of 2014, each of which was able to tap into genuine emotion to make a lasting impact on consumers.

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Recently, Copyblogger made a shocking announcement: they were killing their Facebook page, even though they had 38,000 fans. Interestingly, this follows their decision earlier this year to close comments on their blog as well.

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People define negative SEO in a variety of ways. Some consider it the malicious efforts of your competitors to either build unsavory links to your website or steal the best links from your website. Others would add website hacking, content theft, brand impersonation, and similar strategies to the list. I consider negative SEO anything that could harm your reputation, visibility, or traffic in search. With that in mind, here are some tools and services you can use to monitor negative SEO activity and the harm it does to your website and brand.

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Learning in Hand created an infographic that ties in the value structure presented by SUCCES in with how the model can contribute to the success of a podcast. And while video will always garner a strong viewership, choosing to go the audio route is just as successful. Apple announced this year that they surpassed 1 billion subscriptions for podcasts through their iTunes app with additional apps like Soundcloud and iHeartRadio cropping up as a means to listen to even more podcasts hosted to the sites and major networks and celebrities getting on the podcasting bandwagon as well.

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Automatically post to Twitter when an Amazon RSS feed is updated.

IFTT Directions

Always willing to help out a fellow blogger, I gladly pass along the information. But then gee golly one morning bells and whistles went off! Why don’t I create a tutorial showing others how to truncate their posts?

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When it comes to content marketing, your results do not only come from the content you create—your blog can also help you build a haven to nurture your current and future customers. In this post, we are going to look at the benefits of having a community for your blog, the challenges blog moderators face, and how to create an engaging space for your readers.

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Every blog has an RSS feed but with Mailchimp you take your average RSS feed up a notch. By using a newsletter service like Mailchimp you can take your standard feed and turn it into an email campaign. This might sound confusing but Mailchimp helps make this process easy and this post will walk you through the process step by step.

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IFTTT Recipe for RSS to Buffer

Twitter has permanently disabled the Twitter RSS Feeds, but thanks to Amit Agarwal from Labnol, he has come up with an alternate way to create Twitter RSS Feed using a Google Script and Twitter widgets.

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The national Amber Alert system for missing children -- already on highway billboards, mobile phones and the Internet -- is extending its reach to Facebook, the globes biggest social site.

The Menlo Park social media giant announced Tuesday that it is partnering with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to send geographically targeted Amber Alerts to the members of the U.S. Facebook community.

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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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A new year has begun, and it is promising to bring further advances in technology and changes in the way we work online.As marketers, we already need to be aware of the many different marketing outlets available – whether on or offline – and know how to take advantage of them.

When it comes to the web, though, things are often in a much greater state of flux. So really, what are some of the best ways to keep up with a living, breathing beast like the internet?

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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?

According to a recent social-media engagement study, Americans now spend more time on social media than any other Internet activity, including email. Social media is not going anywhere and businesses, small and large, are now recognizing their online presence is an essential part of their marketing strategy. Eight out of 10 small to medium-sized businesses now use social media to drive growth for their business, and three out of five say they have gained new customers through social media marketing.

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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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Compared to the best-known RSS feed readers on the market today, News Notifications is as straightforward and uncomplicated as its drab title implies.

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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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Marketers are spending millions of dollars creating compelling content for everything from DIY videos on YouTube to posts about the latest trends on their blogs. But, many are still not curating all that content under a single roof. Mobile is the answer to that problem for many.

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Whether you are still struggling to get over the loss of Google Reader or you want to try out RSS subscriptions for the first time, you can set up Gmail as a makeshift feed reader in just a few minutes. We have outlined the steps you need to follow to turn your inbox into a news ticker below.

While it was not built as an RSS reader, Gmail certainly does a fine job nevertheless. You can filter your feeds as you like, star articles for later reading, catch up on mobile devices, and use the apps powerful search capabilities to browse through archived content.

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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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One of the interesting qualities of freelancing work is that you may never meet your clients in real life. Perhaps more than any other job market, freelancers rely heavily on their online image- an aggregate of their resume, portfolio and personality to set themselves apart and attract new clients who may very well be located on the other side of the world.

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n a recent research study, we spoke with dozens of professionals about their use of social media, and were struck by the variety of approaches they are using.

Some professionals, we found, still manage to avoid social media altogether. But most see that as unrealistic in many occupations, and are unwilling to be deprived of the advantages social media affords in terms of connecting to people and collecting information.

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In 2014, consumer shopping behavior evolved rapidly. Shopping online and through mobile devices is the new norm, and the experience has become increasingly more social with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. These platforms, in turn, have launched new commerce capabilities like the buy button.

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Android 5 Lollipop has finally brought about lockscreen notifications – preview cards of the users most recent texts, emails, missed calls, and any other messages.

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Whether you want to sell products, gain subscribers, persuade followers to a point or sway the hearts and minds of readers to your cause, they have got to know who you are in the first place.

Your ability to encourage any of these actions comes from your brand’s authority -- and one of the best ways to build that is through the savvy use of social media. In fact, recent research from Econsultancy shows that 71 percent of brands plan to invest more heavily in social media in the coming year to reach new followers and build brand reputation.

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A trio of social media stocks is getting pummeled this week, a sign that Wall Street may be unwilling to overlook missteps at some of its Internet darlings.

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Running a successful social media campaign can be difficult, especially when your brand wants to run the same campaign across multiple networks. An infographic from MarketingInColor outlines the steps your brand needs to take to remain cohesive.

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The most significant marketing change in the past decade was brought about by social media. Before Facebook or Twitter, brands could not dream of building such close connections with their audiences or

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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 is a really simple explanation of Really Simple Syndication.

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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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YouTube is also a site filled with video content which can be extracted via RSS. You might be keen to share YouTube RSS feeds of your own content or you might want to get RSS feeds of things that interest you.

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Despite being difficult to measure, the growing impact of social media on brands is undeniable.

In fact, analysts from Social@Ogilvy recently surveyed more than 5,500 social media users across 11 countries in an attempt to find out how brands should be using social to make a true impact on shoppers.

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Through its latest update, Newsify has been enhanced with its very own companion app for Apple Watch. The extension lets you quickly access the latest articles from your feeds right on your wrist, with indications for unread items and time since last sync.

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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?

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Create a social network or risk everything.

That was the original pitch for Googles Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network's chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the companys top brass.

Gundotra, described by colleagues we spoke with as charismatic and politically-savvy, eventually persuaded Larry Page, the Google cofounder who returned as CEO at the beginning of 2011 after a decade behind the scenes, to turn the company upside down for this cause.

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Consider your brand across all visual touchpoints, suggests WebDAM. Include logos, typography, press kit, photography, and icons.

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What if you want to see a particular news feed on your home screen... say, one that does not connect with the built-in news feed tools?

You turn to RSS. That is right, we are going old school.

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