‘State government has to acquire land and hand it over to Centre’

Har Din Har Ghar Ayurveda announced as the theme for the year

The students are from government and government-aided pre-university colleges. The training is being given as part of the panchayat’s ‘Pragati’ programme

Her blood-testing startup claimed to revolutionise testing by detecting hundreds of medical conditions from just a few drops of blood 

Entire infrastructure could fit into a small briefcase, and it is expected to provide the much-needed breakthrough in the field of TB diagnostics

The centre is an outcome of a ₹100 crore grant to NCBS and NIMHANS for long-term research, and to build capacity for both research and practice in the mental health field

Bipolar disorder, earlier known as manic-depressive disorder, is prevalent in about 1% of the population and tends to be a lifelong illness

None of us will ever be able to read all the articles and blog posts we had like to, and RSS feeds can be an incredible source of information overload. WebWorkerDaily highlights tools and tricks that can help make RSS more relevant.

We have waxed lyrical about Yahoo! Pipes before and how Pipes can create a master feed, fetching all your news feeds and filtering them, but the topic is well worth a revisit.

With a particular emphasis on making the flow of information more manageable and more relevant to you, GigaOms collaboration blog WebWorkerDaily singles out Yahoo! Pipes for its robust filtering by various criteria and PostRank, a service that gets the top posts (by engagement score) from a particular feed. You can use PostRank and Yahoo! Pipes together to find only the most popular posts from your favorite blogs and then filter them by your keywords.

With all the social media site tools available, often the best way to be effective with your social marketing is to automate the process. First, you need to decide whether automation is right for you and, if so, which automation you should set up. Automation can be key in turning your contacts into profits because you can post less, but at the same time, you get more exposure. Social automation, however, can be considered spamming, so be careful with how you set it up.

How does social network automation work? There are tools like Hootsuite and SocialFlow where you can automate your social networking sites or TubeMogul to automate your video posting. These sites can submit a link or post to not just one or two sites but, in some cases, up to 60.

A new study led by researchers at McGill University finds that people who get their news from social media are more likely to have misperceptions about COVID-19. Those that consume more traditional news media have fewer misperceptions and are more likely to follow public health recommendations like social distancing.

In a study published in Misinformation Review, researchers looked at the behavioral effects of exposure to misinformation by combining social media analysis, news analysis, and survey research. They combed through millions of tweets, thousands of news articles, and the results of a nationally representative survey of Canadians to answer three questions: How prevalent is COVID-19 misinformation on social media and in traditional news media? Does it contribute to misperceptions about COVID-19? And does it affect behavior?

RSS Feeds are a simple way to keep yourself updated of the latest articles from your favorite sites. Some prefer desktop programs like QuiteRSS, while others prefer a web-based service.

A good browser extension can offer the best of both worlds, that is what Drop Feeds does.

The extension supports RSS and Atom feeds. Once you have installed the extension, click on its button on the toolbar. Drop Feeds has a three-pane sidebar, and a reader pane taking up the rest of the space.

A study from QUOTED reveals the average time spent on social media in North America is 2 hours and 6 minutes. Adults spend 2 hours and 55 minutes on their cell phones a day. It goes without saying that if you are not utilizing social media platforms for your business, there is major leverage that is being missed out on.

Harness the power of social media
Below is a breakdown of each of the major five social media platforms.

Instagram
YouTube
TikTok
Twitter
LinkedIn

Misjudging information can spiral out of control in hours. Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School highlight that misinformation is a major threat to global public health(opens in a new tab), especially when there is a large lag between the emergence of a disease and an effective solution. Examining COVID-19, they identified that the lag time for vaccine development has created a vacuum for scepticism to grow and misinformation to spread – which has been amplified by bots and trolls.

Social media is designed to share information we believe to be correct, quickly, and works on gut-based intuitions where patterns are rapidly recognised, and biases quickly confirmed.

Misinformation is having a serious impact on our health worldwide.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told Deborah Knight her agency can compel social media companies to remove harmful content which victimises children.

However, we now have more adult cyber abuse reports coming in than we do youth-based cyberbullying reports.

Ms Inman Grant criticised the leadership of social networks for deflecting responsibility onto victims and regulators.

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 planet’s population, and it grew 9% over the past year.

The good news is that majority group members and men have an immense source of power at their disposal to prevent and confront bias in the workplace: their social networks. Here is how you can take action.

You have a bigger sphere of influence than you realize. Most people think about their immediate circle of friends as their audience. However, research in the study of social networks has shown they are wrong. Your ideas and behaviors ripple out from you, influencing your friends, friends of friends whom you may not even know, and friends of those friends as well. In fact, a whole range of outcomes are influenced by these third order ties – your weight, your values and beliefs, even your risk of divorce. This is your sphere of influence, in both your place of work and your daily life.

~ Brands must shift from their pre-pandemic social media strategies
~ More organic and engaging approaches are crucial when it comes to winning back customers or retaining new ones
~ Select the most appropriate platform that fits the target audience, even if it’s uncharted territory for your brand
~ Authentic influencer campaigns, user-generated content challenges and conversational tones are among the most effective ways to engage with customers

Social Marketing Predictions for 2020-2025

This year has been a whirlwind, but if there’s something we all have in common – aside from living in the midst of a pandemic – it is our mutual exposure to a new age of activism. Modern social movements have transitioned online, much like the rest of our lives. With social media platforms remaining at the forefront of online communication, it has become more important than ever to reevaluate why and how we use these platforms, especially as they pertain to social movements.

Instagram, with its incredibly platform-specific-spread, has mini slideshows of infographics. Twitter and Facebook both have catchy headlines and quips, bites of information from a wide range of credible and not-so-credible sources. Almost every form of social media has a way to disseminate information in bite-size chunks; that function is central to its purpose as social media. This is fine, except when it comes to activism.

There are two sides to online activism: there are those who want to appear like they care about a cause, and there are those who actually do. A lot of the former tend to fall into the brand/celebrity/influencer category.

During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a discussion was being held about the content moderation policies of various platforms and the impact of the recent US General Election. When Senator Lindsey Graham asked both Jack and Mark about their opinion whether their platforms can become addictive for the users, both answered differently.

As per Jack Dorsey, (like any other tech) social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook can make users addicted to continue using them. His opinion is in line with the opinions of several psychologists also who say that these social media networks give the users a sense of well-being by giving them a feeling of connection with others. One post after the other, and the urge of users to keep returning to these platforms to see newer posts one after another is like a trigger for their dopamine centers in the brain. And that is why psychologists believe that all social media platforms tend to become addicting for their users.

However, Mark Zuckerberg is of a different opinion. He stated in front of the Senate Committee that he believes that all the research regarding this matter is still inconclusive, and no one can say for sure if the social media platforms are addicting or not.

While visual content provides a fun and expressive outlet for people. The experience is not the same for everyone. For a large portion of the population, some kinds of content is inaccessible. According to the World Health Organization, about 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability.

Inclusive design should start with a solid understanding of accessibility fundamentals.  Most social media platforms have guides on accessibility and offer how-tos, best practices and tools. Other resources include Federal Social Media Accessibility Toolkit and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

Have you ever heard of conversion conversations? This sales technique involves getting to know your prospect through an online messaging platform, creating a conversation, then shifting to a sale once they are qualified. The best part? It is entirely free if you do the legwork.

When choosing which social media platform to use for your messaging, keep in mind that Facebook is still the largest social media platform, used by 2.6 billion users, according to Statista. Pew Research found that 75 percent of high earners use Facebook. Instagram is more visual, so if you are selling products or services that look good in photos, or if you are targeting younger generations, go for Instagram. According to Statista, 32 percent of users are between 18 and 24, and 33 percent are between 25 and 34.

The extension supports RSS and Atom feeds. Once you have installed the extension, click on its button on the toolbar. Drop Feeds has a three-pane sidebar, and a reader pane taking up the rest of the space.

Smart RSS Reader is a feed reader extension for Firefox and Chrome.

Install the add-on and click its toolbar icon to open a new tab with the extension's RSS reader. It has three panes, each of which has a toolbar at the top. The left pane is the feeds pane and lists all RSS feeds that you are subscribed too. Selecting a feed displays the title of the articles published by the site in the center pane. It also displays the author's name and the date when the article went live.

One of the most important things to learn is that misinformation and especially disinformation do not just affect us cognitively, they affect us emotionally. They often trigger an emotional response. They can make us outraged or angry, and self-righteous. And this can activate us to do something, like press the share button. Tuning in to our emotions, to how information makes us feel, can help us recognize when someone might be trying to manipulate us into becoming part of their disinformation campaign.

Figuring out a strategy that improves social media engagement and conversion rates — and aligns with business goals — is a common challenge for marketers. There are many solutions for improving social metrics and business ROI, but no part of a digital-marketing plan works in isolation, and social media engagement and conversion rates are a perfect example. Despite being on different levels of the marketing funnel, they can improve simultaneously.

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic ramped up social media usage across all major platforms across the globe—and there's no sign of a decline anytime soon.

social network users worldwide
The coronavirus pandemic ramped up social media usage across all major platforms. eMarketer
But just how many people actually use social media? Insider Intelligence analyzed social network usage trends across multiple platforms and localizations. Here are some of the key social media stats to help navigate this shifting landscape.

How many people use social media?
Over three billion people, or 80.7% of internet users worldwide, will use a social network at least once per month in 2020. This is nearly 150 million more global social network users than Insider Intelligence's pre-pandemic estimate.

Facial recognition technology is getting more sophisticated, more reliable, and more pervasive as the world eases its way toward becoming an all-encompassing surveillance state. That surveillance state does not even have to be built; it is increasingly ready for deployment as law enforcement agencies cut deals with private companies that have already assembled the tools and databases for use. As with cell phone tracking, that plug-and-play quality does an end-run around safeguards that, at least nominally, restrict government actors, and invites legal challenges based on civil liberties concerns.

Social media moderation services gradually dominated every online business and most industries. Thanks to the unceasing number of new customers flocking to use and try it, social media became a catalyst for introducing and sustaining big and small businesses today. Several entrepreneurs and business owners have taken to the digitally fueled networking channel to spark discussions with their customers and market their brand to the people they want to be a part of their growth and success.

What is social media moderation? And why is it essential for businesses at present? Simply, content moderation enumerates what needs to be carried out to review, check, and filter posts sent by your followers to align with your company’s branding and strategy.