As an entrepreneur, you are in a Catch-22. If you don’t spend time marketing your business, it can not grow. If you spend too much time focused on marketing, you can not develop or enhance the products or services you are selling.

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The U.S. is quickly becoming a podcast nation. According to a 2017 survey, nearly 25 percent of Americans — around 68 million — said they listened to podcasts. Forty-two percent were even willing to pay to do so. The largest contingent of podcast listeners (44 percent) are millennials, and that coveted cohort's tuned-in attention has attracted advertisers, whose podcast-generated revenue rose from $69 million in 2015 to $220 million in 2017. In the last four years alone, the popularity of podcast listening has doubled.

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Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that's riskier than White Hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines and their affiliate sites. Generally, Gray Hat SEO practices belong in neither the Black Hat nor White Hat category because the terms of service regarding the issue are unclear. In this tutorial, you will get the answers to the following questions:

What is Gray Hat SEO?
Why does it matter?
What Gray Hat SEO should mean to you

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You have none of the usual constraints of traditional forms of media in terms of length, deadlines, format or language.

Plus -- and this is no small plus -- podcast listeners are some of the most loyal consumers of any form of media available today. If they listen once, they're likely to come back, again and again.

There are multiple reasons for that, and multiple ways to do it well, which we'll explore below.

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Marketing scams have been around for years. The best ones are those that become accepted as the norm — bottled water anyone? The last 20 years, however, has given rise to a new type of online scam and no acronym in the online business world conjures up images of snake oil salesmen quite like SEO.

You’re not alone in being contacted by services claiming they will get your business website to the top of Google within a month. We get them almost daily. It’s frustrating, especially for those of us that are passionate about providing a high-quality SEO service.

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Once upon a time, sitting at your desk liking and swiping was a good way to annoy your boss. Most companies saw social media use as a distraction or a risk to be managed, and many banned Facebook and Twitter from their networks. Yet today, some of the world's biggest employers are doing the opposite: coaxing and cajoling workers to sign up to a new form of social media designed for the workplace.

Among the first was Yammer, a Facebook clone for companies and teams launched in 2008 and bought by Microsoft in 2012. Then there was Slack, the quirky office chat app which spread like wildfire through the tech industry, roughly doubling its revenue each year. Microsoft responded by launching Teams, a collaboration and chat tool tied in to Microsoft Office which now has 200,000 firms on board.

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Every time you like, comment, and share anything on Facebook, you're creating valuable data. So, what if you could get paid for it?

Blockchain-based social networks like Steemit and PermissionIO are already doing that.

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Every parent that has a teen or a preteen should have both Snapchat and Instagram on their phones. If their child uses those applications, you should follow your child on those applications and I think having constant conversations with kids about responsible social media use is important, said Haase.

If they want their child to use social media responsibly, Haase said the parent needs to model good social media behavior as well.

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Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it’s not necessary for most users.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

Some users may like the idea of subscribing to Instagram users using RSS. While that is good only for public posts that these users make on Instagram, it is a great way of keeping an eye on new posts of any number of users.

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After suspending Cambridge Analytica from its platform in March, Facebooks data management issues remained the lead social media news story throughout 2018. The companys constant stream of user privacy challenges left little space for other social platforms to make waves — but, some still managed. Twitter put its focus on election integrity and performed a massive purge of bad user accounts. While Facebook and Twitter focused on cleaning up timelines, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn continued to build out their ad offerings.

Nearly all platforms released new political advertising policies, and you could not open an app without bumping into a Story. (In fact, now that Snapchats original concept has made its way to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, the real question is why does not Pinterest have them?) In its spare time, Facebook did its best to recruit more video creators, YouTube gave its creator base more monetization opportunities, and Instagram launched a video platform. Not to be left out of the mix, Reddit wrapped up its first major redesign in over a decade.

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Social media sites and apps are constantly changing and evolving to match the needs of their user base — for good, and for ill. Whether its Facebook Watchs new shows actually making it worth using, or Snapchats reviled redesign, social media changes can be a polarizing topic for the millions of people who use the sites every day.

But sometimes, the changes just raise the whole site or app a bit, and make the experience of using them better (or mercifully less tedious). These are the best social media changes we saw this year.

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There are very few industries these days that change as quickly as social media. Every new discovery or algorithm update has the potential to shape the future of how we connect with each other and our clients. This past year has been an exceptionally tumultuous one for social media networks, even for an ever-changing industry. We have seen a huge paradigm shift in social media in 2018 toward consumer awareness and expectation. It’s bound to have a major effect on how brands will connect with their customers through social media in the future.

As we wrap up the year, lets take a look back at what has changed in social media in 2018 and how it will impact social media marketing strategy building in 2019.

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Brands were more creative than ever in their social media posts this year and connected with audiences by raising awareness of social issues, according to social media analytics company Unmetric.

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Mozilla to kill off RSS features in Firefox because they're hardly used and would take too much effort to modernize.

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Ever since it started existing, governments have had a love-hate relationship with social media. Predictably, the romance starts to sour when social media contains criticism of the government as it often does and the affair blooms when the opposite happens, in particular when sycophancy takes on gargantuan proportions. In our particular case, only days before the elections, we have a peculiar situation where social media is being manipulated with the seeming intention of bringing about a certain outcome in the polls.

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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking to get its hands on a product that will help its agents investigate tax dodgers who have set up shop on social media, according to a request posted to the federal government’s procurement website, FedBizOpps.

The post indicates that the IRS, whose under-equipped enforcement agents ferret out financial crime related to the tax system, is looking for a new way to investigate potential tax cheats based on their social media usage, citing as one example the ubiquity of online stores. The IRS currently has no formal tool, it says, to comb through social media feeds.

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Every company marketer posting on social media is curious about the best times to post their content. While each audience is unique, having a rule of thumb can be extremely helpful when you are first starting out. Sprout Social recently published the results of their Best Times to Post on Social Media: 2018 Industry Research, a report which includes preferred time slots for the big 4 — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

Some users may like the idea of subscribing to Instagram users using RSS. While that is good only for public posts that these users make on Instagram, it is a great way of keeping an eye on new posts of any number of users.

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Carmel Fire took to their Facebook page to notify people that they should not be putting their own spin online regarding situations like Wednesdays explosion at the high school. CFD went on to add that people were posting pictures of patients and minors from the scene.

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Entrepreneurs who are cheating taxes with online stores, beware: The IRS is looking for new ways to catch suspected tax cheats over social media.

Specifically, the IRS wants a new tool to help it check public social media feeds and websites for details on people already suspected of not complying with the tax code, the tax-collecting agency said in a Dec. 18 request for information from vendors.

Social media could provide investigators with a treasure trove of data, showing where taxpayers live, what they drive and what they are selling online. That data could be useful to the IRS as it tries to catch people cheating on their taxes — if the agency can figure out how to collect and use it without running afoul of its own internal rules.

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One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes—not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything.

In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don’t want to hear about.

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Firefox maker Mozilla will kill off support for RSS and Atom feeds in this December's release of Firefox 64.

Along with dropping RSS and Atom syndicated-feed support, Firefox 64 will no longer contain the Live Bookmarks feature for subscribing to RSS feeds, nor the feed-preview feature.

Instead of maintaining built-in RSS support, Mozilla believes users should install RSS-reader Firefox add-ons.

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AI plays a huge role in how Spotify delivers personalized playlists to users, so it's somewhat fitting that the companys new partnership with Microsoft is focused on messages about how AI can impact all aspects of life -- including education, healthcare and philanthropy. Those messages are going to be showing up in the Discover Weekly playlist for free users, the first time that Spotify has lets brands have full customization and control over advertising in that feed.

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Global social media and technology giants are gearing up to fight sweeping new rules proposed by the Indian government that would require them to actively regulate content in one of the world’s biggest Internet markets, sources close to the matter told Reuters.

The rules, proposed by the Information Technology ministry on Christmas Eve, would compel platforms such as Facebook, its messaging service WhatsApp and Twitter to remove unlawful content, such as anything that affected the sovereignty and integrity of India. This had to be done within 24 hours, the rules propose.

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GitHub is the number one signal in my API world. The activity that occurs via GitHub is more important than anything I find across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social channels. Commits to repositories and the other social activity that occurs around coding projects are infinitely more valuable, and telling, regarding what a company is up to than the deliberate social media signals blasted out via other channels. I’m always working to dial in my monitoring of GitHub using the GitHub API, but also via the RSS feeds that are present on the public side of the platform.

I feel RSS is often overlooked as an API data source, but I find that RSS is not only alive and well in 2018, it is something that is actively used on many platforms.

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We have all thought about it. Maybe it's time to flick Facebook. Terminate Twitter. Silence social for good, and just be a person again.

Sadly, if this dream of going off the grid is about reclaiming your lost privacy, that might not actually be possible, according to new research.

A new study by researchers at the University of Vermont shows that social media posts by people you're connected with can actually be used to predict your own future posts – and even more accurately than if your own previous posts were being mined for insights.

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I say social media engagement metrics, what comes to your mind first?

Most likely it will be likes, comments, and shares.

While these certainly are high-level indicators of content engagement, and (presumably) the effectiveness of your social media efforts, they are far from the only metrics you should consider.

This section will help you understand the full spectrum of metrics available to you for evaluating your content and social media marketing, the meaning and importance of each, and how to use and improve them.

Few will need to keep track of all these metrics, so choose the mix that gives you the most valuable information.

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We have been hearing more and more about loneliness, and the loneliness epidemic, in recent years, as research has stared to lay out both its causes and effects. There are likely many reasons for this increasing psychological/societal issue, but one that is almost certainly involved is our dependence on screens, and in particular social media. And a new study from the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University finds that social media use—or at least negative experiences on social—is linked to more feelings of social isolation, a.k.a. loneliness.

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Just because you are not on Facebook or Twitter does not mean your data is safe from the social media giants or their prying algorithms. A study from the University of Vermont adds yet more evidence to the argument that your privacy is no longer in your hands, even if you abstain from social media.

Researchers from UVM's Department of Mathematics and Statistics published a paper in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Human Behaviour demonstrating that social media users not only generate substantial behavioral data about themselves but also about members of their social circle.

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Amazon is now letting anyone create and publish Alexa skills into the Alexa skills store. Amazon first made it easy to create custom skills last year with its Alexa Skill Blueprints program, and it’s taking those custom responses and allowing them to be published in the store for everyone to download and use. There are currently more than 80,000 existing Alexa skills in the store, but todays announcement means the store will be growing significantly with user-generated custom skills.

Amazon is primarily aiming this new functionality at content creators, businesses, brands, and other organizations. Publications, local sports teams, YouTubers, and others will all be able to broadcast their latest updates by simply adding a recorded audio feed URL to a blueprint skill directly and then publishing it on the store.

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As social medias influence over politics and elections has risen, so too has our collective anxiety about it. Over the last three years in particular, the use of megaplatforms like Facebook and Twitter as vectors for misinformation has been the subject of congressional hearings and not a few columns on the websites of some of our finer magazines. And as we gear up for elections in 2019 — and, assuming we make it through this year, in 2020 — the anxiety is gearing up, too. On Monday, in anticipation of the European Parliamentary elections in May, the Mozilla Foundation, an influential internet-advocacy non-profit, released an open letter to Facebook, co-signed by 32 civil rights and transparency groups, demanding that the social network implement measures designed to increase transparency, facilitate research, and combat misinformation.

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In many ways, content on the internet is beautifully linked together and accessible, but despite the interconnectivity of it all we still frequently find ourselves visiting this site, then that site, then another site, all in an effort to check for updates and get the content we want. Thats not particular efficient and theres a much better way to go about it.

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Schools can not do it all. We have known this for a long time, yet we often seem to deny this reality in policy and action. For decades we have piled expectations onto our schools, asking them to develop scholars, citizens, and workers and to provide for the academic, nutritional, social, and developmental needs of children. Schools, as critics are quick to point out, invariably fall short of these expectations.

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Are you looking for ways to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts? Want to know if your social media campaigns are worth your time and effort?

The team from Social Success Marketing share the metrics you can, and should, track in this infographic.

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While the social media landscape is always changing, the fundamental building blocks of an effective strategy remain the same. Without them, you're likely wasting your time - or at the least, you're not seeing optimal results from your efforts to connect and engage with your online audience.

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Social media plays a vital role in our daily life. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most common social channels used to connect with our loved ones. With over 2.77 billion social media users today, such social media websites make a perfect platform for identity thefts. With huge user database of private information, it is the responsibility of social media platforms to keep personal information safe.

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With over 2.3 billion active users, Facebook has grown to become the biggest connective platform in history, and an essential part of many people's on and offline lives.

The influence of Facebook is inarguable - in fact, Facebook is so big that it's believed by some to have influenced the election of many world leaders through targeted ads and intricate campaigning. Whether you believe that or not will come down to your perspective, but no matter how you look at it, Facebook is a critical media platform, and one of the most significant tools of our time.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

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Social media offers the chance to carefully curate a public image and, while some choose to broadcast their professional success or vacations, others are keen to make a show of their moral worth.

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After a dark year, Snap is letting in some light.

Evan Spiegel, Snaps famously private 28-year-old co-founder and chief executive, took to the stage this past Thursday to deliver a keynote speech and announce a new suite of products for the company’s disappearing-message app Snapchat.

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Fiery Feeds Adds iCloud Accounts, Three-Pane iPad View, New Customization Tools, and More..

Fiery Feeds, the modern, flexible RSS client for iOS, was updated today with a variety of new features that take the app to new heights: enabling iCloud-based accounts for RSS and Read Later so you don’t need third-party services, adding a three-pane layout on iPad, offering new, configurable methods for navigation, and a lot more. There is something for everyone, from users who may be new to RSS to Fiery Feeds veterans who will appreciate the additional power offered here.

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Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it is not necessary for most users.

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One of the biggest challenges in implementing an effective social media marketing strategy is time.

When I ask people about their social media strategy for their business, I often get responses like:

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Perhaps the most remarkable but little-remembered story of Facebooks rise to social behemoth is that from 2009 to 2012 it was actually a democracy. Facebook’s users could vocalize the issues affecting them the most and issues that attracted sufficient number of users could actually be placed to a formal vote, with the results legally binding on Facebook itself. While the reality was slightly less utopian, with limits on the kinds of issues that could be brought to a vote, the process was overall a genuine form of democratic representation by Facebook’s users in the sites governance.

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Stauffer, Devin, 1970- author

Abeyagoonasekera, Asanga, author

Australia. Parliament. Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, author, issuing body

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee, author, issuing body