Looking to get maximize your use of Instagram for business?

With a billion users and counting, and with more business options on the way, it makes sense to give Instagram more consideration in your process, and how it can potentially help you connect with your target audience.

To help with this, the team from TechWyse have put together this new infographic overview of Instagram business profiles and ad options, with a range of stats and insights to help you make best use of each.

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Smith had a Twitter meltdown this morning in response to some relatively gentle and polite criticism from me. Smith is a perfectly respectable journalist in his day job — a purveyor of tediously predictable received opinion, to be sure, but there is room for all kinds. Online, he is transformed through the emotional alchemy of Twitter into a deranged, masturbatory, feces-flinging rage monkey straight from Hell’s own zoo. He is, amusingly enough, so enraged that he cannot even get straight what he himself has written.

I hope readers will forgive the brief point-by-point here. I promise it adds up to something.

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Once you have decided to invest in social media marketing, your next key challenge is to decide which platforms you should be focused on.

This used to be relatively easy - you started a Facebook Page, set-up a Twitter profile, and then added others over time. But now, things have changed. Instagram is a much bigger consideration, Facebook's dwindling organic reach means it may be less of a priority, Twitters algorithm changes the equation, and LinkedIn's seeing more traffic. Pinterest, too, is on the rise, while if you're going to create video content, then YouTube definitely should be on your radar.

But you can not be active on all of them all the time - so which platforms are right for your business and marketing efforts?

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The U.K.s new special cyber operations unit, 6 Division (6 Div), will move beyond the typical cyber capabilities within the military sphere into full-blown social media "information warfare." And here the primary adversary is Russia, which has turned the dark art of peddling fake news and political propaganda across major social media platforms into a national security strategy.

Much of the work of the new unit will be relatively traditional signals activities—jamming and intercepting enemy comms, supporting the field world of allied intelligence agencies.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigations aims to acquire access to a social media early alerting tool that will help insiders proactively and reactively monitor how terrorist groups, foreign intelligence services, criminal organizations and other domestic threats use networking platforms to further their illegal efforts, according to a request for proposal amended this week.

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Few companies have been as instrumental in the growth and development of social media as Facebook. From its rise to popularity out of a student dorm room, all the way to its purchases of rival social media giants, Facebook has, in large part, built the social media world that we live in today.

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Social media continues to surge as a channel for businesses to market themselves and engage with customers. And with its continued growth and popularity, there is no shortage of social media “how-to” advice out there directed at businesses trying to scale up.

If you make it a point to keep up with social media trends, you’ve likely found at least some overlap in these tips—but every so often, there are unconventional or uncommon practices that can lead to great results. As experts in social media marketing, the members of Young Entrepreneur Council shared their most surprising social media tips—that truly work—and how you can take advantage for your business.

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Predicting the future of social media is always fun.

Emerging platforms, secured patents, new tactics and demographic shifts are just a few things to consider when making a prediction.

So, what is next with social media as we look ahead to 2020? Here are four big predictions on the future of social media in 2020.

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1. Plan a content strategy and create an editorial calendar for your social channels.
Marketers are sometimes at a loss at what to post on social media.

Successful social media marketing doesn't happen on accident -- there's a strategy in place, just as there is with a blog.

Look at the big picture and come up with social content that will resonate with your audience.

Map out seasonal content, as well as content related to events or launches your company is planning.

Work closely with your editorial and marketing teams to know what's coming down the pipeline and strategize the best ways to promote it.

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How have the rise of social media and spread of misinformation changed the news media landscape?

As a major election year nears and the public questions the role of Facebook in combating misinformation, Andrew Pergam, director of governance and strategic initiatives at Facebook, gave a glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes at the social media company during a symposium at the University of Utah on Friday.

Misinformation is one of the companys most pressing and scrutinized issues, he said. We are under an immense amount of pressure to do more to tackle viral information more quickly.

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A sound, effective strategy involves these four steps.

A whopping 3.2 billion people, or 42% of the world's population, uses social media. On average, people spend over two hours of their day messaging and surfing social media networks.

After having a positive experience with a brand on social media, 71% of people will often recommend the brand to their friends and family. On top of that, 49% of people are taking their cues on what to buy from social media influencers.

Based on these statistics, it's crucial for businesses to have a solid social media marketing strategy in place. Unfortunately, many business owners have no idea how to handle social media marketing.

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When you really think about it, marketing has come a long way in just a few decades. Marketing tactics are more sophisticated (and more effective) than ever before, and social media marketing has ensured that every business on the planet has a voice.

There is just one problem. In a world where every business on the planet has a megaphone, how can you make sure that your voice is heard?

Having a strong brand seems to be the only way to consistently get ahead of the competition, but it is not easy.

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Gig workers who are totally localized (caterers, electricians, painters, plumbers, wedding planners, etc.) often discount the value of using social media for their marketing. Why? Because these platforms are at least national, if not international and what would be a use for a local business?

Indeed, localized SEO and local advertising can drive you a steady stream of traffic and revenue. But you should not discount social media as a good tool for your marketing. Here are five actionable social media marketing tips for local contractors and other gig workers.

1. Geo tagging and targeting is your allies

Social media platforms may have global reach, but they also allow you to go very granular with your marketing.

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According to the National Center for Health Research, people who visited social media platforms 58 times or more per week were three times more likely to feel socially isolated. The center also found that heavy social media users are 2.2 times more likely to have eating and body image issues than moderate users.

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There is a good reason people call Twitter the hell website.

Cynicism, egos, unprovoked hostility, unchecked propaganda, sexism, bigotry, and outright hate—Twitter is as full of it as virtually anywhere online, and worse, it is unbearably nonstop. The design of the place feels uniquely unhealthy due in large part to its speed and unrelenting stream. Opening up TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client favored by maniacs like me thanks to its real-time updating feature, can seem like stepping into an oncoming tidal wave and getting swept out to sea. Before too long, you feel exhausted and ready to give up.

Many of us have to be on Twitter due to our jobs, some of us just feel like we have to be.

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For the past decade, brands have been capitalizing on the pervasiveness of social media in consumers’ daily lives and shopping habits. And this past year was no different.

Social media analytics company Unmetric found that brands that promoted messaging with edge, savvy, conviction—and occasionally dogs—won the marketing game.

Of that messaging, video—particularly those with memorable storylines, guest appearances or creative approaches to addressing social issues—reined as the overall best-performing format for branded and original content, a consistent trend in their numbers since at least 2015.

The Most Captivating Brand Campaigns We Saw on Social Media in 2019

With another US Presidential election on the way in 2020, we can expect the debate around fake news to once again ramp up, and become a key focus of discussion as we look at how political influence spreads online.

What if Fake News Is Not the Real Problem on Social Media?

Updating your brand bio can be a great, simple way to boost engagement, especially heading into the new year. Your profile bio can play a key role in perception, and in driving subsequent action, so it is worth reviewing your details and ensuring that everything is as you want it.

Writing a Great Social Media Bio for Your Brand [Infographic]

Do you feel bad after using social media? If you do, chances are you don’t have healthy habits when it comes to using it. So when you use social media, you’re harming your wellbeing in the process.

Luckily there are a few things you can do to develop the right mindset and healthy habits to make you a happier, healthier social media user. Here are a few tips.

1. Moderate your use.
Social media is an excellent tool to not only connect the world, but give creators freedom to express themselves and build communities around their work. However, it also has a dark side.

4 Ways to Develop Health Social Media Habits

Michael Bloombergs presidential campaign is hiring hundreds of workers in California to post regularly on their personal social-media accounts in support of the candidate and send text messages to their friends about him.

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Despite what companies like Apple and Facebook claim, you do not need a giant corporation telling you what news stories you should read every morning. Nearly every website (worth reading) still operates an RSS feed. And now one of the oldest and most robust RSS readers, NetNewsWire, is back from the dead and worth your consideration again.

Over the years, NetNewsWire has changed owners a few times, but in late 2018, former owner Black Pixel returned NetNewsWires intellectual property to Brent Simmons, which he now uses as the name for an open-source Mac RSS reader he has been developing for about five years.

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Google has used links to determine the authority of websites since its early days: the idea of webpages casting votes” for other pages by linking to them is at the core of the PageRank algorithm. This led to the rise of numerous manipulative link tactics.

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Are you looking for ways to generate more engagement on social media? Want to ensure you’re posting at the best times for your audience?

While the exact right times to post will vary based on each unique audience group, the team from CoSchedule have put together a guide, based on a range of studies and reports, which highlights when brands in a range of sectors tend to see the most engagement on each of the major social platforms.

Again, there are unique variables for each business, but this overview could serve as a good starting point for planning out your social posting strategy, and maximizing engagement.

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This year is likely the last one ever in which you can say that more than half the planet is not on social media.

Hootsuite just released a massive digital state of the union report. Some of the high-level findings:

5.2 billion of us now have phones globally
4.5 billion are connected to the internet
3.8 billion are active social media users

That 3.8 billion is 49% of the planets population, and it grew 9% over the past year. That means it is extremely likely that sometime this calendar year, more than half of all of us will be active social media users.

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In your personal life, reading peoples minds is a questionable superpower; but the business benefits of being able to listen in on peoples thoughts are infinite. And while social media monitoring is not exactly about reading peoples minds, it is as close to it as it gets.

Social listening gives you access to what people are saying about your brand, industry, or competitors across social media and the web – often without them being aware of you listening. If you know how to word your queries and filter the results, you will end up with the most authentic, unbiased insights you can get as a business.

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Imagine you got a spike of traffic from Facebook amounting to hundreds of thousands of visitors — but only a trickle of them converted.

And lets assume all the moving parts in your funnel are working properly; you’ve got a fast- loading website, great conversion copy, and well-functioning sign-up or contact forms.

Yet, with all of these things, your conversion rates from that spike of traffic were nothing to write home about. And what exactly could cause that?

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A new service called Mailbrew is live that lets you created automated email newsletters. You can set them up from multiple sources including Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, RSS feeds, and more.

Mailbrew aims to save you time by rounding up the news and updates you care about from a variety of sources and popping it in a daily, weekly, or monthly automated email newsletter.

To start, you can create custom brews, choose from pre-made ones, or make use of both. You even get to choose the layout you’d like to use for the newsletters.

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Latest added Global Social Network Marketing Market research study by HTF MI offers detailed product outlook and elaborates market review till 2025. The market Study is segmented by key regions that is accelerating the marketization. At present, the market is sharping its presence and some of the key players in the study are Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest & Tumblr etc. The study is a perfect mix of qualitative and quantitative Market data collected and validated majorly through primary data and secondary sources.

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The total number of social network users in China will grow 4.8% to 859.1 million in 2020, and by 2023, nearly all internet users (96.8%) will be social network users, according to our forecast. Though the growth rate of social network users in China is slowing, there will be at least 30 million more social network users added annually between 2020 and 2023.

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A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center showed that 51% of the people surveyed said they were uncomfortable with being tracked and categorized by Facebook.

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Due to the coronavirus pandemic think tanks around the world are working under quarantine and have cancelled all events in the coming months. They will have to rely more on social media to get their messages across. How successful are free-market think tanks today in trying to attract traffic to their websites, as well as views and followers on other platforms?

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Social media has been one of only a handful of sectors that is benefiting from the stay-at-home environment. Social distancing has forced social interactions online for the time being, but investors looking to capitalize on the surge in social media usage be surprised at the big winner.

On Friday, DataTrek Research co-founder Nicholas Colas said the biggest social media winner from the COVID-19 era is not Facebook, Inc.
FB , its subsidiary Instagram, Snap Inc  SNAP 0.06% or Twitter Inc TWTR 0.02%
.
Instead, teen-oriented video platform TikTok has seen the biggest surge in Google search volume over the last 90 days. TikTok is owned by the private Chinese company ByteDance.

Social Media Search Numbers
Colas said Facebook and Twitter saw only a small bounce in worldwide Google search volume since global lockdowns went into effect. In the chart below, searches for Snapchat have demonstrated a similar trend, while searches for TikTok have steadily risen over the last 90 days.

When most people talk about social media, they are usually referring to platforms like Facebook or Instagram, but rarely think of LinkedIn as part of the vast array of social media platforms available.

We tend to assume that LinkedIn is not such a valuable place to be and often, even businesses make this mistake, assuming that it would be far more beneficial to focus on their presence on Twitter, for example. There is a logic behind this – LinkedIn is a place for businesses, but I’m looking to advertise to real people, and they are going to be on other, more laid-back platforms, so I might as well go there, too.

This logic is flawed. Why? We are just about to show you.

On LinkedIn, you can build your brand.
This is true both for individuals looking to expand their job potential, and for businesses wanting to grow their brand. As an individual, where can a possible employer find you? On Facebook or Instagram. But do you really want them to see that snapshot of you in your undies at the beach, or the dirty joke you posted last night?

Probably not. These are personal details about you that chip away at your professional brand.

With most Americans under orders to stay at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, many people are turning to social media for a fun distraction. Taking a Facebook quiz about how well you know a friend or what character from your favorite TV show best matches your personality may seem like a harmless way to pass the time while quarantined, but it could also give scammers your personal information for nefarious purposes.

Not all social media quizzes are data collection scams, but some quizzes collect personal information by asking questions like: What is your mothers maiden name? or What is the name of the street you grew up on? These are common security questions for banking and credit card accounts. Sharing this information can lead to your accounts being hacked and your personal and financial information being stolen. It also can enable a scammer to impersonate you to your friends and family.

Tips to avoid social media scams:

• Be skeptical. Before you take a quiz, figure out who created it. Is it a brand you trust? Just because something appears to be fun and innocent, doesn’t mean there isn’t an inherent risk.

• Adjust privacy settings. Review your social media accounts privacy settings and be strict about what information you share — and with whom you are sharing it.

In Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin elaborate on why Instagram is more than just a social media platform: instead, it has become an icon that has altered understandings of visual social media cultures. By doing so, they focus on different aspects of Instagram, such as its aesthetics, cultures, ecologies and economics, supported with real-life examples and cases.

Instagram has tried to keep itself distinct from Facebook and other social platforms.

An Italian-based artificial intelligence company is regularly analyzing social media posts about the coronavirus for their emotional content.

Why it matters: Classifying tens of thousands of posts by their emotional tone provides a snapshot of how people feel about the pandemic. Spoiler alert: not great!

How it works: Expert System specializes in semantics and natural language reading, a branch of AI involving computer systems that attempt to make sense of written language.

In doing so, a computer can rapidly analyze vast amounts of the written word — like, for example, a day's worth of social media posts about the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the past few weeks, Expert System has been collecting English language social media posts each day that feature frequently used hashtags like #coronalockdown and #covid19. Its AI can extract the emotional content of those posts, which is then analyzed and interpreted by Sociometrica.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has issued a warning about sharing too much information on social media while being at home.

The FBI specifically is warning about trends such as posting your senior picture and graduation year.Officials also say beware of social media games that require you to tag a parent or post a picture of your first car.

They say these are often the answers to security questions and hackers can use the information to reset your passwords and get into your accounts.

Barker Library - TA354.S77 2019

The return of migrant workers to West Bengal has become another flashpoint between the Centre and the TMC-led state government with home minister Amit Shah alleging that the state government is not allowing special trains. However, the TMC government accused the Centre of "lying" and said they have planned eight trains to ferry migrants.

The West Bengal government on Saturday said it had brought back around 6,000 residents stranded outside the state and ensured safe return of people of other states stuck here due to the lockdown, virtually refuting the claims of non-cooperation made by Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

The evaluation for class 10, 12 board exams will be done by teachers at their homes and 3,000 schools have been identified as exam centres to deliver the answer sheets to them, Union HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank' said on Saturday. He said 1.5 crore answer sheets of already conducted class 10, 12 exams will be delivered to teachers.

Two Indians, who were among the 363 nationals brought back to Kerala from the Gulf, have tested positive for Covid-19, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said on Saturday. With this, the total number of active cases has climbed to 17 in the state. The patients have been admitted to hospitals in Kozhikode and Kochi.

The NFL schedule just dropped which means we're one step closer to football. Here's what we know about the Ravens upcoming season.

Fred Warner has watched Super Bowl LIV a few times, and he knows what went wrong against the Chiefs.

The New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens both suffered disappointing defeats in last season's NFL playoffs, but they appear headed in opposite directions as the 2020 campaign approaches.