1. Avoid use of headlines and writing of tweets that misrepresent and/or oversimplify the content of linked-to articles. Headlines matter as they frame the stories for users.

2. Call racism racism.

3. Call sexism sexism.

4. Call terrorism terrorism, and be consistent in the use of the term regardless of the ethnicity, religion, national origin and ideological motivation(s) of the perpetrator(s).

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No matter how popular your blog is, it won't make money if you do not monetize it. And even a well-designed and monetized blog can not make money if you do not know how to promote it. Too many recent posts on this topic have failed to point out that what works for the rich and famous is unlikely to work for your small business.

When Neil Patel writes about how to create a blog and mentions that his site earns over $1 million dollars a year, I hope people realize that even when he did this with a brand-new blog, he is still the well-respected, world-famous Neil Patel.

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Most of us think of Search Engine Optimization as a feat of technical wizardry, and it can be. From using proper keywords to using tools to automate publishing to social media, being tech savvy plays a big role in getting traffic. The mistake is forgetting that readers do not just have favorite blogs; they have their specific interests. Taking your content and commentary beyond your blog can help build authority and drive a lot of traffic your way. Thats where guest blog posts can be an effective tool. In 2014, Googles Matt Cutts declared guest blogging dead because it had become too spammy. So why do it? Because Google rewards quality, and a comprehensive, high-quality guest post that links back to your site is at least equally good for SEO as a great post on your own site.

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Chances are if you are in sales, social media is already a prominent part of your personal life. And now, thanks to social selling, it is hopefully a big part of your professional life as well. Incorporating social media into the workplace has brought many opportunities, but also many questions. You may be wondering how to best navigate social networks with your sales prospecting goals in mind.

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Chances are if you are in sales, social media is already a prominent part of your personal life. And now, thanks to social selling, it is hopefully a big part of your professional life as well. Incorporating social media into the workplace has brought many opportunities, but also many questions. You may be wondering how to best navigate social networks with your sales prospecting goals in mind.

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Podcasting is hard, time-consuming work, and it can be incredibly frustrating when your shiny new episode only gets a handful of downloads.

There are many different strategies you can use to build your audience, but today we're going to focus on guest podcasting, which I will lovingly refer to as guesting.

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Not familiar with RSS feeds? It is where you compile all of your favorite internet content into one feed, so you do not have to individually be keeping up with health-exercise websites, food blogs, travel diaries, and so on. When you sign up for an RSS feed reader, all those things are in one place.

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Displaying your social media network activity on your website can have tremendous advantages. It shows your readers that you are an active participant in your niche and helps you establish yourself as a thought leader. The best part is that displaying your activity is fast and easy in WordPress.

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Now, analysts at New Yorks University of Rochester are fighting back with an AI of their own.

The team collected about a quarter of a million unique English tweets from between Sept. 23—the first reported incident of hate-code words—and Oct. 18—a week after the second US presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

There were some interesting observations that we noted.

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Many information junkies keep up with their favorite Web sites by subscribing to their RSS feeds, pulling the latest updates from those sites into a central location for efficient perusal.

I rely heavily on RSS to keep me abreast of the latest tech news. I am also addicted to political sites during this years bizarre presidential election, and I have tapped into a host of feeds to keep me up to date on the latest antics from the candidates.

Feed Hawk Is Useful But Not Essential for RSS Junkies

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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Have you tweeted, posted an Instagram photo or just generally engaged in social media before? Then it’s possible you have been part of a research experiment of sorts. Think that raises some ethical questions? You are not the only one.

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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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Social networking sites have moved to the foreground of news consumption for the masses. Politicians now take to Twitter to reach citizens directly: Facebook has algorithms to decide what news will encounter the highest click baits and Snapchat offers ‘snap’ news stories at the bottom of your friends update

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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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Over 90% of medium and large businesses have used social media in their marketing for five years or longer. Yet the CMO Survey reveals that nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments. That’s why, no matter what your social media strategy is, it is always a good idea to go back and make sure you have the basics covered. Your company may discover that it needs a strategic do-over.

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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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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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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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Ten years ago if we told people that social media management will be a full-time job, they might have laughed at us. As simple as they are to use, managing a number of platforms for businesses can be quite challenging. With so many platforms and changing algorithms, and hashtags to choose and use, you can easily feel that things are getting out of control.

I spoke to my colleague Sarah who manages different social media accounts for our clients and asked her about the common mistakes that people make when managing their brand accounts, and what should business owners avoid doing on social media:

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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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As you get older, one of the ways life remunerates your increasing irrelevance is you gain a measure of self-knowledge. And I know my brain is, essentially, like a bird pecking at a mirror.

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Of course using something like IFTTT you can convert this RSS feed into a different format if you prefer: send the feeds to a read-it-later service or a Google Sheet, for example. The beauty of the RSS format is you can queue up all of your web search hits in the background and then check in on them when you’ve got the time.

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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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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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According to a new study, people with certain personality traits are more likely to develop a social media addiction.

The study found that three personality traits in particular — neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness — were related to social media addiction. Two other personality traits, extraversion and openness to experience, were not linked with social media addiction.

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Qu Toutiao, which means Fun Headlines in Chinese, is reportedly making its own fun headlines these days, telling sources that it is eyeing an initial public offering that could value it as high as $3 billion.

If successful, it would be an extraordinary valuation for a company, a news and video aggregation mobile app popular in mostly rural areas of China, that was launched less than 2 years ago. The company is considering an IPO in New York as soon as early this year, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

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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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Everybody uses Facebook because everybody uses Facebook.

But lately Facebook — and all the other social networks, for that matter — seems to be turning into a distracting, time-wasting and manipulative surveillance machine that does more harm than good.

This is a huge problem for professionals and businesses of all sizes, including enterprises.

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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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The perfect social network would have the following characteristics:

It would have a lot of users — at least as many as Facebook.
It would filter spam and harassment, but otherwise not algorithmically sort or filter.
It would enable us to interact with people on all the social networks.
It would have no advertising.
It would be user-controllable and user-automatable.
It would be usable on both mobile and desktop.
It would have great search (unlike Facebook).

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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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Facebook purged  583 million fake accounts in the first three months of 2018, demonstrating the amount of spam, violent content and hate speech that gets smeared across the social network.

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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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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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Most organisations believe social media has a role to play in their marketing communications, but, equally, most would struggle to explain exactly what that role is. There’s little doubt that social media takes up a significant amount of consumer time and attention but without understanding the influence and quantifying the commercial benefits for brands and businesses, no marketing activity should be above question.

Like every other marketing activity, a social media strategy must be judged on its positive impact on business or brand metrics.

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Across 39 countries, a median of 53% say they use online social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. However, that figure conceals large differences around the world, and the relationship between social media use and national wealth is not as strong as it is for overall internet use and smartphone ownership.

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Why would these companies pay when so many of us are willing to do it, as you say, for free? When big tech wants the public to generate a new set of data for them, they design a fun new device designed to train us to do it. And we pay them for the privilege! More and more people have either the Apple, Amazon, or Google home assistant, which we know is already recording our passive conversation for use in improving each company’s voice recognition software and AI.

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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 ever-expanding size of the world wide web has caused an explosion of content in different horizons. Be it the case of videos, music, or text-based content, billions of netizens gobble loads of content every day.

There is an uncountable number of websites ready to feed you with the daily dose of their interesting articles. You can count us in the list if you want. But how would single human visit tons of websites to slurp all the information? Thankfully, there are ways to so.

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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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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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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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The network theory of attitudes is a simple idea that has profound implications, if true. This is the theory that when two people hold the same attitude, they are linked together as a result, like two people holding strings to the same balloon. When different people are holding the same bunch of attitudes, they are grouped together and different groups are distinguishable by the different sets of attitudes they are holding.

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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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