Marketers are complicit in the toxicity of social media, they misunderstand its function and how brands should participate in it, and yet they appear to be held hostage by it. Those are some of the main paradoxes confronting brand marketers, according to a damning new report from the social media analyst at Forrester Research.

Brands continue to invest more in social media marketing each year. In fact, HubSpot found that 74% of global marketers currently invest in social media marketing. And with this adoption, theres been enormous amounts of data collected in an effort to measure the success of social media campaigns.

But for many marketing teams, its becoming a challenge to sift through the wide range of metrics to understand if their social media campaigns are effective. Thats why we’ve asked social media experts how they determine success and what metrics you should track that actually matter.

When you want to subscribe to a podcast, it is usually as easy as clicking a link—often a link labeled Add to Apple Podcasts or to another popular podcast app, like Castro, Overcast, and Pocket Casts.

However, I increasingly find that a benefit of membership to editorial sites, many kinds of creators’ patronage campaigns, and subscription podcast networks includes a custom podcast feed tailored to you or only available to members. In order to prevent this feed from becoming widely distributed, it is sometimes made not quite as easy to add through a single click.

Get the Podcast URL
The plainest form of the URL, and the one that typically works reliably across all apps and services, starts with http:// or https:// and often ends with .rss. Custom feeds may instead end with a long code. For custom, paid, or membership feeds, the feed may be the only link or may be labeled as Subscribe via RSS.

By setting boundaries around what you post, when you're online, and who you surround yourself with in real life, you can strike a better balance between Instagram and reality

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.

Social Marketing Predictions for 2020-2025

Google Podcasts is finally getting a feature that’s already standard across most listening apps: private RSS feed support. The head of product for Google Podcasts, Zack Reneau-Wedeen, made the announcement on Twitter today and shouted out some networks that are especially reliant on private feeds, including Patreon, Slate, RedCircle, and Supercast.

To access the feature, tap over to the activity tab in the bottom right-hand corner and slide over to the Subscriptions tab, then tap the plus symbol.

Imagine how useful it would be if you could set up a Google Alert for a keyword but only be notified if that word or phrase were mentioned in a news story that had more than 50 shares on social media. And would you find it even more useful if you were notified not by email but within an RSS reader?

Consider a tool that could tell you when a news story mentioning a particular word had more than 500 Facebook likes or 100 Twitter shares.

New functionality in free tool Ping.it does just that. And it lets you to determine the number of shares, Facebook likes, Twitter mentions or comments a story has before it is flagged up.

Rather than using aggregated statistics and sentiment analysis, the research team used a qualitative approach to drill down into all the tweets posted around the two case studies, and divided them into key topics, positions, purpose and arguments, in order to determine how users engaged in the debate around sustainability and ethics in fashion.

They found that the two main ethics and sustainability issues raised by social media users were environmental concerns, in the first case study; and labor conditions in the supply chain, in the second. Analysis revealed that only a small proportion of tweets were explicitly critical and that those that were, were actually prompting a relatively sophisticated debate that fashion brands may benefit from engaging meaningfully with.

Many physicians have reported being sexually harassed and personally attacked on social media platforms on the basis of their religion, race or medical recommendations, a new joint study from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago revealed.

While the data were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings highlight the intensity of online harassment, which the authors stated has intensified since the crisis.

According to a news release, the study found one in four physicians reported being personally attacked on social media, including being barraged by negative reviews, receiving coordinated harassment and threats at work and having personal information shared publicly.

RSS feeds are great for getting alerted to new articles on your favorite sites. But your personal time should not be taken up with reading work articles. Split your professional and personal subscriptions by adding work feeds to Microsoft Outlook instead.

Managing feeds in Outlook is super easy, although it can only be done in the desktop Outlook client.

There was a time not all that long ago when Facebook was considered to be the absolute pinnacle of social media in general. Because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up being no longer the case without widespread innovation, Facebook has worked quite hard to diversify its offerings. However, recent data suggests that in spite of the fact that this is the case, Facebook has now lost its dominance among key demographics as well as social media users in general.

According to research conducted by the EdisonResearch, two very intriguing statistics have emerged. The first is that Facebook is no longer the social media platform of choice for people between the ages of 12 and 34. This is arguably the single most important demographic out there due to the reason that these are the people that the vast majority of advertisers are going to want to target at any given point in time. Only 21% of users between 12 and 34 years of age say that Facebook is their social media brand of choice.