Back in the late 90s, when standards were proprietary and communication protocols complicated, two data formats appeared on the horizon. The first was the extensible markup language, born as an extension of an existing markup language standard (XML), and designed (by an open committee) with the purpose of storing and defining documents and data through the optional use of a schema.  The other, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), born out of a programming language, was almost the exact opposite – a serialization format with requirements so simple they fit on the back of a business card. XML exploded in application development and communication platforms in the 2000s due in large part to the sheer demand for a human readable, vendor-neutral data format that was easy to read, write and share. As applications and platforms evolved and efficiency grew in priority, APIs evolved to become leaner, and JSON overtook XML as the preferred data interchange format among developers across many technology stacks.

JSON vs. XML: The battle for format supremacy may be wasted energy

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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Social media is everywhere. The big players in the industry carry billions of users and boast massive layers of data and content. These days, though, social media may be in for a major change, possibly due to the rise of blockchain.

Will Blockchain Reinvent Social Media?

Content marketing paved its way into the global village a decade back and has immediately shone up to fame with the coming of new media. Business houses across the globe are increasingly developing solutions for content marketing.

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It takes time to build an audience: you need to attract them to your site, which they’ve likely never heard of, and convert them into loyal readers, so they come back and tell their friends – and eventually turn into customers, which is the whole goal of content marketing.

The Truth About Content Syndication and Duplicate Content

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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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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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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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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With more and more brands trying to connect with audiences across an array of social channels, the attention span of people is on a decline.

Businesses need to quickly figure out what’s best for their audiences in order to generate better engagement and increased brand loyalty.

Here are five crucial social media trends that will have the maximum impact on your social media strategy in 2018 and ahead.

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Facebook is adding to its collection of apps. This time, a social network called tbh, popular with teens.

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Some people might think that online privacy is, well, a private matter. If you don’t want personal information getting out online, then you can just not put it out there. Right? Wrong. Keeping your information private isn’t solely your choice anymore. Friends can play a big role in your privacy, new data show. And the more they share on a social network, the more that social network can figure out about you.

Someone who joins a social network — such as Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook —wants to find their friends. Often, the social network can help. Many apps offer to import contact lists from your phone or e-mail. These apps then use that information to find matches with people already in the network, and suggest them to you.

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Twitter has been in hot water as more evidence emerges showing how Russia used the social network to influence public opinion. Ahead of a November 1st Congressional hearing on Russian manipulation, Twitter has introduced sweeping new rules for how it shares data on political posts. The network will launch a Transparency Center that lists all ads appearing on Twitter, including promoted ones that previously only appeared to targeted demographics, and will clearly label them when they appear in user feeds.


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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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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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Decisions made by Facebooks human content moderators to weed out hate speech posts are often inconsistent, causing some offensive content to wrongly remain on the platform, according to investigative journalism group ProPublica.

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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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Did you know that the average CTR for any form of online advertising went from 0.09% to 0.05%? For this trend we are to blame the rise of social networks and ad blockers which helped consumers successfully fight the unwanted ads.

Where does this leave marketers?

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Just how dominant a business tool was social media in 2017? Despite being involved in an investigation by Congress, Facebook reported its highest earnings ever in Q3, up nearly 50% from a year ago.

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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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RSS is no more gone than email, JavaScript, SQL databases, the command line, or any number of other technologies that various people told me more than a decade ago had numbered days

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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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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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Sure, we all get information from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

But a growing trend of law enforcement using social media to communicate with the public has led to growing concerns that they are not responding to questions from journalists or not being fully transparent with the public.

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Have you ever seen someone on social media, maybe someone in your profession, with a hundred thousand followers and wondered, how the heck did they get so popular?

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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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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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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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The next money-maker could be this tool for connecting marketers to social media creators so they can team up on sponsored-content Facebook  ad campaigns. The Branded Content Matching search engine lets advertisers select the biographical characteristics of creators fans they want to reach, see stats about these audiences, and contact them to hammer out deals.

Leaked screenshots of Facebook’s promotional materials for the tool were first attained and published in German by AllFacebook.de.

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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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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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Every social media network relies on certain metrics to measure their social media success. Each of these social media metrics plays a critical role in the modern marketing strategy. Global brands utilize social media marketing tools to engage their customers effectively, informing them about the products and services accurately and with better relevance. Companies not using social media analytics for their marketing campaigns find it harder to connect to their online customers, leading to a vortex of unaligned marketing campaigns.

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Blockchain has gained increasing popularity over the past year. Having begun as the technology behind cryptocurrency exchanges, it has now shown promise in almost every other sector of the economy as it’s a secure, reliable and tamper-proof way of recording transactions and exchanging data.

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A US law gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids.

The Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, imposes certain requirements on operators of websites and online services -- including social media sites -- so that personal information from children under 13 is not collected, disclosed or used without parental consent.

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The conventional thinking is that social media conversations about brands are representative of broader consumer sentiment in the overall market. However a new study from Engagement Labs, appearing in the Journal of Advertising Research, finds online discussions and sentiment are not necessarily predictive of offline brand outcomes.

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Keeping tabs on the rich, famous, and just-plain-cool is nothing new, of course. But social media can take that fixation to a pretty dark place. The feeling is common enough that some doctors are calling it social media anxiety disorder (SMAD) – although what most kids have is more like FOMO ... on steroids. While it is tough to see your kid in despair, there is a good solution that doesn't require an all-out social media ban: Just help your kid clean up their feed.

Self-comparison is a natural part of the tween and teen years. And for most kids, so is social media. While there are plenty of good things kids get out of their online connections, sometimes the combo can lead to a negative feedback loop that gnaws away at them.

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However, social media marketing efforts can span far beyond the core four: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. In fact, these popular platforms see such high users yet have such stringent algorithms that it can be hard to ensure your followers see your organic content, much less that your content helps you capture new consumers.

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Take time to organize your social media updates and create a social media calendar before you schedule them.

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Some social media-content is easy to evaluate. Cute cat pictures? Great. Helpful how-to videos? Perfect. Unfortunately, parsing posts gets a lot more complicated when the content flowing through the tubes of social media involves news. Earlier this week, the House Judiciary Committee brought in representatives from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to discuss the companies policies and practices for evaluating and moderating content (mostly political in nature) and the internet scourge that is fake news.

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While responding quickly to incoming customer inquiries has almost become table stakes in social media, many sophisticated brands have learned that proactive customer care can provide additional benefits to both the company and the customer.

Proactively contacting prospects and customers can create a surprisingly positive customer experience, provide marketing benefits like brand awareness, and even save servicing costs. It can also Proactively listening to prospects and customers on social media can identify key trends, new product opportunities, and customer pain points.

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As Reuben alluded and our sources VERIFY, the claim is false. Facebook did announce, in January, it would be changing its status update philosophy.

The social network explained it is going to try to show users more posts from friends that have "meaningful interactions." It plans to do that by reducing the number of articles and videos that appear on news feeds.

But, Facebook never said it is limiting news feed updates to 25 friends. Rather, the social network is just prioritizing the statuses users will be more inclined to see.

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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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Are you ready to boost your web traffic? If you are relying on people to find you through the internet, then Search Engine Optimisation should be at the top of your priority result. You can’t be able to generate more leads to your business if nobody finds you.

Do you know about 93% of experiences on the Internet start with a search engine? So what happens after someone search the internet? The top results on Google have higher chances of getting clicked. If you are not on the top of the list, you have missed potential traffic. What is even more surprising is that about 75% people won’t even move to the second page of the search results.

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Enterprise marketers face more challenges than ever in executing their customer-driven, high-ROI strategies. When customers search nowadays, they are looking for more complete and more specific answers provided for their queries: whether they are searching on a smartphone, looking for results specific to their city, or keeping up with the news of the minute. And Google is constantly improving how it delivers those results.

Conductors goal is to make sure the marketing team has all of the data and insights, features, and reporting capabilities customer need—so marketers can deliver for their customers and achieve above and beyond their goals.

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