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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Google News will be deprecating their old RSS feed subscription URLs by December 1, 2017. That means if you have Google News RSS feed subscriptions from a year or so ago, you will need to go through all those subscriptions and update them.

To update your RSS feeds, you need to go to https://news.google.com and select the section you want or create a custom section. At the bottom of the section’s page, click RSS. This will make the feed appear. Copy the URL from the address bar to get the new URL for the RSS feed.

Google told us the old RSS URLs will no longer work effective December 1, 2017.

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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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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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JSON Feed is a new take on the web syndication format, but unlike RSS and Atom its in JSON, not XML. So what does it try to do better?
Mainly overcome the perils of XML; its complex, heavyweight, difficult to parse and not in sync with the current trend wanting web data exchange happening almost exclusively in JSON document representation.

In contrast, JSON is easier to both write and parse, manipulate and consume, especially given that its data types are exact reflections of their native Javascript counterparts.

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Facebook is taking a hard look at the impact it has on the democratic process after announcing it could no longer guarantee that social media is beneficial to democracy. One critique of social media is the ability to create echo chambers -- online spaces that only surround users with like-minded people and ideas.

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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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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 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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Generally speaking, there are two main ways that you can store your RSS feed:

1) On Your Own Website (self-hosting your RSS)
2) On Your Media Host’s Website (the place where you store your files)

The reason why I have often elected for self hosting (option 1 above) is a simple one: 100% control.

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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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In this hi-tech, pre-armageddon, screen-filled modern world, social media is all pervasive.

It has sucked us in. It is the new God. We are now its slave.

That might be over-egging things slightly, but for some people, social media has become a true addiction.

So, how do you know if your social media habit has descended from a harmless pastime into a full-blown addiction?

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Facebook began testing a  breaking news label for developing stories back in November, and now the social network is expanding the option to more publishers. Starting this week, the company says 50 more outlets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Australia will be privy to the tag. That is in addition to the small group of local and national publishers that are already using it. If all goes well, Facebook said it may offer the option to even more publishers in the future.

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Earlier this week, we endured another school shooting. This time, in Parkland, Florida, where at least 17 students were killed. During the shooting's aftermath, hoaxes and disinformation spread on Twitter. It is a phenomenon that happens after every tragedy, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

As is common in these cases, many of the initial fake tweets misidentified the gunman.

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Google may be the internets greatest killer.

Between its numerous acquihires, its aggressive approach to launching (and discarding) moonshots, and its tendency to build impressive products only to kill them months later, Google's ruthless assessment (and reassessment) of ideas is one of its defining traits.

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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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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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Techmeme, the online aggregator of record for technology industry news, is adding some audio in the form of a podcast: the Techmeme Ride Home.

Beginning today, the site’s new podcast will appear at 5 p.m. every weekday. Over 20 minutes, host Brian McCullough (from The Internet History podcast) will summarize the day’s top tech news and commentary from around the web and social media.

Plain-vanilla news aggregation is unusual in podcasts. Even in tech, podcasts tend to be personality-driven, more often involving hosts providing commentary on the big news of the week rather than just the news itself. McCullough thinks Techmeme can offer something different.

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RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.

In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day.

Time for an RSS Revival

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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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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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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What predicted Facebook’s FB, +1.63%   scandal involving data firm Cambridge Analytica and the private information of 50 million user profiles without their consent?

How about the 2010 film The Social Network?

The movie, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, was a fictionalized account of how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg messily developed the social-networking site while at Harvard.

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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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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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Convinced that faith communities would want to share prayer requests, announcements and service opportunities without going to multiple platforms and without being awash in advertising, a group of friends created an app just for that.

With $2 million in seed money, Pray.com was beta tested with 100 churches in 2016. Today, 6,000 faith communities and thousands of other groups use the app to host their members’ need for prayer and offers of support, as well as to recruit volunteers for local service projects and to collect donations, said two of the co-founders.

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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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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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Cryptocurrencies are digital currency designed to represent the architecture of the internet. Rather than counting on a standard financial institution to guarantee and verify business deals, cryptocurrency transactions are examined or confirmed, by the computers of the users on the currencys network. The computers used in verifying the deals usually receive little amount of the currency as a reward.

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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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Today, seven out of 10 Americans use social media. Despite the opportunity (and in spite of the lip-service paid to social), more marketers are skimping on their approach. Reposting 30-second TV spots to YouTube and uploading billboard or print ads to Instagram are commonplace, and a detriment to your brand.

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With the new Google News, they did not just drop the standout tag and editors pick but it seems like the direct method to subscribe to Google News via RSS and Google News keyword searches is gone. There are still ways to subscribe, but the buttons seem to be gone in the new design.

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Are you still using RSS? If you are (and you should be, as we will see in a moment), then you should use the Feed Hawk app on your iPhone and iPad. Feed Hawk puts itself in your iOS Share Sheet and locates the RSS feed(s) from any website you visit. If you want, it can automatically subscribe you to the RSS feed in your RSS reader of choice.

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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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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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Mozillas current plan aims for a removal of both features in Firefox 63 or Firefox 64, out October or December 2018. The change won't affect the current Firefox 60 ESR version but the next Firefox ESR after Firefox 60 ESR won't support both features anymore as well.

We published an overview of Live Bookmarks in 2014, but Firefox supported the feature for much longer. Live Bookmarks allowed Firefox users to subscribe to a site's RSS feed so that new articles would be displayed in a bookmarks folder in the web browser.

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A good way to go about automated tweeting is to use Google News. However, that should be used only if you’re in for a niche subject. If you use a keyword like technology, there will be too much chaos and a too high frequency of content going out.

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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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Social media has been a rising player in the digital marketing game for so long now that many are wondering when it’s going to start losing steam.

The answer to this question? Not anytime soon.

People are in love with social media platforms.

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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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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, with the help of digital tools such as Hootsuite and Google Analytics, tracking social media is a little easier. These tools make it simple to measure engagement, likes and comments. Where people run into trouble though is measuring the actual sales that come from social media. In fact, a whopping 58 percent of brands say they measure engagement but not actual conversions; only 21 percent say they measure conversions.

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