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

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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Time is an entrepreneurs most valuable and elusive resource. Seizing the day seems like an impossible task, and staying organized is a constant battle. Many software solutions have tried to solve the eternal entrepreneurial bottleneck, and some of them have succeeded in creating effective solutions

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I am going to mostly skip talking about what RSS is beyonds a lightweight summary of web site news stories, blog posts. An RSS reader allows you, in one interface, to quickly skim the recent publications for mayne 100s of web sites.. without having to visit them.

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Currently, the world’s population is 7.5 billion, 3.8 billion are internet users and 2.8 billion of them are social media users. 1.8 billion of the entire world population is made up by teenagers from the ages of 13-19 years old. Instagram alone has 500 million active monthly users. Instagram users have shared over 40 billion photos to date and share an average of 95 million photos and videos per day. Snapchat has 166 million daily users. Although adults do also use some social media, teenagers are the majority of users.

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How did Mark Zuckerberg change the world? He built a global community that brings people closer together. The origins of Facebook are available to the general public. Everyone is familiar with the story of building social network platform that will greatly impact human relations and economy. Mark's vision of community opened a door to many variations of social media network platforms that today exist. Jack Dorsey created Twitter in March 2006. Rome may not have been built in a day, but Twitter was built in just two weeks, says Jack.

A few years later Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built a pared - down photo app today known as Instagram.

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2018 is only four months away, and brands have to prepare to take advantage of the opportunities social media presents -- or their competitors will.

When it comes to reaching audiences, effectively distributing your content, and building a following around your brand, social media offers a wealth of possibilities. It's where your audiences already live and engage with content, which makes it a convenient platform for brands. Its built-in analytics allow you to track and improve your efforts over time. Plus, all the free social-media tools make it easy to use and maintain an active presence.

As you look ahead to 2018 and begin planning for ways to strengthen your social strategy, it is important to keep a pulse on trends.

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RSS offers an efficient way to stay in the know, but the right newsreader can make a big difference. Here are five outstanding Android apps that should do the trick.

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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.

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Your Twitter feed is going to get even busier thanks to the microblogging service unlocking auto-playing video ads for advertisers. Starting today Video Website Cards are available to every ad-buyer. In limited beta tests (like the one embedded below; videos do not seem to work with embeds), Twitter has found them pretty successful, with a 200 percent higher clickthrough rate compared to the leading standard. So yeah, expect to see an awful lot more of these coming soon.

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Remember the good old days (a la 2009) when social media was fun?

Think back to a time before all talk turned to fake news, algorithm hacks and carefully curated influencer feeds.

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What if users did not have to come to your WordPress site in order to read your articles? That would certainly make it easier for users since they would not have to navigate to ten of their favorite blogs and news sources to get their daily information. It would also be nice for the website owners, since it would allow you to distribute your content in a more efficient manner, delivering the content to where the customers want it to be.

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For retailers, the line between online and offline shopping experiences no longer exists. Todays consumers expect consistent branding and service across all platforms, whether they are physically in a store, browsing products on a website or reaching out on social media.

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If you get the urge to revisit that cute photo you posted some time last year, you'll have to scroll through your timeline for what feels like hours to track it back down. Instead, when you share a post on social media, also save it to your phone for safe-keeping. This will not only save your social media hits for posterity, but also make them easier to find if you ever need to rediscover them.

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Instagram is starting to roll out recommended posts directly into users’ home feeds, according to TechCrunch.

Previously, the home feed was dedicated to posts from accounts that users follow as well as ads, whereas recommended posts were located solely in the Explore tab.

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Happy New Year! Are you looking to reach and engage with customers in a new and exciting way? This is going to be the year your business embraces content marketing in a real and serious way. Why is this going to be the year of content marketing?

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When effective content marketing meets your customers, the magic happens. Before we dive in to the secret sauce behind the magic, what comes first, content or the customer? That is not a trick question. It’s a real test to see which direction your content marketing is headed. If you’re not sure about how this should play out for the benefit of your marketing and your customer…read on.

As a marketer and a consumer, I always think about the value content plays in a marketing strategy and campaigns.

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Writing sells.

You don’t have to be the worlds foremost wordsmith to produce effective content, but improving your writing will make you more successful at work.

Here are some tips:

1. Know your audience.

You are not just writing for yourself, are you? You should be creating content for others, and it’s imperative to understand the people you are writing for. Whats useful for them? What might help them in their jobs?

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Google News will be deprecating their old RSS feed subscription URLs by December 1, 2017. That means if you have Google News RSS feed subscriptions from a year or so ago, you will need to go through all those subscriptions and update them.

To update your RSS feeds, you need to go to https://news.google.com and select the section you want or create a custom section. At the bottom of the section’s page, click RSS. This will make the feed appear. Copy the URL from the address bar to get the new URL for the RSS feed.

Google told us the old RSS URLs will no longer work effective December 1, 2017.

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CJ Marple wanted to teach his young students how quickly information can spread on the Internet.

So earlier this year, the third-grade science teacher wrote up a tweet with the help of his students, asking for other users to retweet the message, or even reply to the message with their location.

The Kansas teacher says he expected 1,000 or so retweets, but within days the tweet went viral and gained more than 227,000 retweets and 75,000 replies from users all over the world. His students, who are probably a little too young for their own social media accounts, learned a lot that week about the power of social media.

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Social media is great for keeping tabs on your old college roommate or staying in touch with that aunt who lives in another state. As millennials, we’ve grown up with social media being part of our daily lives. It’s probably rare you go through your day without checking your accounts.

In this day and age of having everything a click away, have you considered the opportunities that could be at your fingertips? Outside of keeping in touch with your friends and family, social media can do wonders for your professional network. Social media has been one of my go-to tools to make connections and grow my network.

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As of December 2017, the new Google Sites lets you embed HTML and JavaScript, as well as other websites. That is a big change from a year ago when the new Google Sites mostly let you share items from Drive, YouTube, and a few other Google sources.

The changes make the new Google Sites an even more useful website and intranet site creation tool.

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Social media marketing plans can decide the future of a business and a brand. As the technologies advance, the boundary between social media marketing and mainstream marketing is becoming more blurred than ever. Chalking out a social media plan is no easy task for a first timer, but getting a few tips from the pros certainly helps. Very simply put, every social action must culminate to a larger social media marketing strategy. People, their likes, shares, replies, and posts should all be a part of a larger plan that generates leads, drives sales, or contributes in other ways to a business goal.

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In another blow to RSS fans everywhere, Digg announced that it would soon be shuttering Digg Reader.

As of March 26, the RSS service will no longer work on the web or in Digg's mobile apps. The company didn't say why it was closing the service, which it started in response to Google killing off its own RSS service in 2013.

Naturally, the news was pretty upsetting to Digg Reader fans who had turned to the service as a replacement for the once beloved Google Reader.

But if you are one of the many folks still clinging to RSS feeds in 2018, you are not entirely out of luck. There are a number of capable alternatives out there. Here are five of our favorites.

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As Facebook fights its own fake news problem, Twitter looks like it's interested in finding more ways to push news content to its microblogging service. According to a report at BuzzFeed, Twitter has confirmed that it is testing new algorithm-curated timelines when big events happen, then putting tweets from news organizations and other users at the top of your timeline. So far, Twitter says humans are involved in story selection, but a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed that it could be come only algorithmic in the future.

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Facebook began testing a  breaking news label for developing stories back in November, and now the social network is expanding the option to more publishers. Starting this week, the company says 50 more outlets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Australia will be privy to the tag. That is in addition to the small group of local and national publishers that are already using it. If all goes well, Facebook said it may offer the option to even more publishers in the future.

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Imagine if someone could scan every image on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, then instantly determine where each was taken. The ability to combine this location data with information about who appears in those photos—and any social media contacts tied to them—would make it possible for government agencies to quickly track terrorist groups posting propaganda photos. (And, really, just about anyone else.)

That is precisely the goal of Finder, a research program of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's dedicated research organization.

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Techmeme, the online aggregator of record for technology industry news, is adding some audio in the form of a podcast: the Techmeme Ride Home.

Beginning today, the site’s new podcast will appear at 5 p.m. every weekday. Over 20 minutes, host Brian McCullough (from The Internet History podcast) will summarize the day’s top tech news and commentary from around the web and social media.

Plain-vanilla news aggregation is unusual in podcasts. Even in tech, podcasts tend to be personality-driven, more often involving hosts providing commentary on the big news of the week rather than just the news itself. McCullough thinks Techmeme can offer something different.

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Instagram announced some changes to user feeds today, but before you get too excited, no it is not a return to the chronological feed.

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Reading the RSS Feeds is a way to keep track of all your favorite blogs and websites. No matter how many websites you have subscribed to, the RSS Feeds bring all the updates in one location for you to read. On the other hand, for the bloggers and website owners, RSS Feeds are the great marketing tool to spread their content to the readers and potential customers. It helps them get a loyal readership and grow their website and businesses.

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People are angry at Facebook. People are angry at YouTube. People are angry at Twitter.

With Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set to testify before Congress less than a week after an enraged YouTube user wounded three people before killing herself at the companys headquarters, the growing debate over what Silicon Valley’s social media giants do with the content and information we give them has hit a new pitch.

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Facebook announced a new initiative today aimed at improving its policies and the role its platform plays in elections. The company acknowledged that it was slow to respond to election interference efforts that took place on its site and says it wants to learn more about social medias role in elections around the world. To do that, it's putting together a group of researchers that will then develop a research plan, get proposals for projects that address issues defined in its plan and manage a peer review process that will determine who will receive funding and access to Facebook data for their research.

The commission of experts will initially work for one year and Facebook says membership will be determined soon.

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It appears inevitable that censorship is coming to social media. The political head of steam behind the idea is such that it’s going to happen. Oh, sure, it will be voluntary codes of conduct, fights against fake news, but it will amount to much the same thing – it will be possible to say some things on Facebook, Twitter and the like, and not others.

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Amy Porterfield is a social media and content creation mastermind and top speaker, trainer and consultant for young entrepreneurs and professionals looking to maximize their social media reach and engagement.

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There are some new products and services that are very obviously good  — a cure for a deadly disease, for example, or some other type of medical innovation. But other innovations have value that is more uncertain, such as an unproven technology. In her latest research paper, Wharton management professor Valentina Assenova examines the role of social networks, both online and offline, in the spread of these complex innovations.

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Half a million doctors worldwide are sharing their knowledge on a social network for medics to find answers for their patients.

On MedShr, set up in 2014 by a London cardiologist, doctors can post details of cases and other medics can give their input.

A doctor treating a young Afghan refugee in Serbia, who needed plates and pins in his legs, received advice from other specialists that helped formulate a plan to help the boy walk again. In Kenya, hospitals run by junior doctors are able to get remote support from seniors.

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When is the best time to post on social media? Unmetric, an AI-powered social media analytics platform, reviewed social media posts from 100 brands over a five-week period, then compiled the data into an infographic that explores the answers to that question.

The data shows...

• Surprisingly, Instagram user activity peaks at 3-4 AM on Sundays (because of global interactions, yet Instagram posts on Tuesdays received the best engagement.

• Facebook's sweet spot for engagement is on Thursdays, 9-10 AM; and weekends show lower engagement on Facebook.
• The most rewarding time for brands to post on Twitter is between 11 AM and noon.

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Against the backdrop of social media controversy — remember Facebook, of course, and 87 million users’ data exposed to Cambridge Analytica — oversight is tightening in Europe.

The regulatory gaze become more fully trained on social media as in Germany, intelligence official Hans Georg Maassen said last week that regulation may be needed for social media companies if the European Union finds that more transparency is needed.

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According to a survey in 2017 by the Royal Society for Public Health, Britons aged 14-24 believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have detrimental effects on their wellbeing. On average, they reported that these social networks gave them extra scope for self-expression and community-building.

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With the new Google News, they did not just drop the standout tag and editors pick but it seems like the direct method to subscribe to Google News via RSS and Google News keyword searches is gone. There are still ways to subscribe, but the buttons seem to be gone in the new design.

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According to the same Kaplan survey mentioned above, the percentage of college admissions officers using social media for admissions criteria went down from 40 percent in 2015, to 35 percent in 2016, to 29 percent in 2017. Students seem to be making it more difficult for college admission personnel to check them out on social media.

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As Facebook fights its own fake news problem, Twitter looks like its interested in finding more ways to push news content to its microblogging service. According to a report at BuzzFeed, Twitter has confirmed that it is testing new algorithm-curated timelines when big events happen, then putting tweets from news organizations and other users at the top of your timeline. So far, Twitter says humans are involved in story selection, but a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed that it could be come only algorithmic in the future.

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The biggest mistake people make when promoting their brand, company or even themselves on social media is thinking that simply posting is enough. However, that’s far from the case. Managing a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter account means having to strategize ways to keep your current audience captivated, while simultaneously attracting new users to your page.

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Mozillas current plan aims for a removal of both features in Firefox 63 or Firefox 64, out October or December 2018. The change won't affect the current Firefox 60 ESR version but the next Firefox ESR after Firefox 60 ESR won't support both features anymore as well.

We published an overview of Live Bookmarks in 2014, but Firefox supported the feature for much longer. Live Bookmarks allowed Firefox users to subscribe to a site's RSS feed so that new articles would be displayed in a bookmarks folder in the web browser.

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A good way to go about automated tweeting is to use Google News. However, that should be used only if you’re in for a niche subject. If you use a keyword like technology, there will be too much chaos and a too high frequency of content going out.

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Shares of Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. endured a surprise rout this week, as investors were rattled by signs that users are souring on the social-media stalwarts.

Twitter said Friday that its number of monthly users dropped in the second quarter and could continue to fall as it purges fake accounts, results that echoed Facebooks bombshell guidance Wednesday that its growth is expected to slow through the end of the year.

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If you want better customer service -- and who doesn't? -- there are strategies, and there are social media strategies.

Like many consumers, Ryan James, has discovered the latter lately. When he needed to arrange a wheelchair for a recent flight from Budapest to Montreal, he skipped the phone just tweeted to Air Canada.

They were so responsive, says a James, college professor from Budapest. Problem solved.

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As social media use has risen, I am not surprised that reports show a growing trend among millennials to trust influencers less and less. The hype, bragging and self-aggrandizing make it hard for any of us to believe it is authentic. While there is no harm in a little bragging, Harvard Business Review reports that too much of it or the wrong type of bragging can hurt your chances of getting a job, being trusted or being liked by strangers.

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The one constant about social media is change, so it is a good practice to step back once in a while and ensure that your companys strategy is still current and effective.

As we enter the second half of the year, it is time to take stock in the social media strategy that was probably developed in late 2017 or early 2018. Is your company up to date on all of the social media platform changes? Do you know what is working and what is not?

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