Verizon Business today released findings from a recent survey, Small Business Response to COVID-19 to better understand the impact small business owners and decision makers feel COVID-19 has had on their businesses. The survey, conducted by Morning Consult, focused on 500 small and medium businesses that are currently open or plan to reopen. One of the survey’s key results is that small businesses have renewed confidence, with 68% believing they can recoup COVID-19 related losses.

Key Survey Findings:

As businesses grapple with the economic impact of COVID-19, these responses highlight the assistance small businesses feel they need, the communities they feel most supported by, and the changes they have made to adjust to the new normal.

1. A Renewed Confidence
The small businesses that have weathered this pandemic to date express an overall optimism and the financial wherewithal to eventually reopen.

68% of small businesses believe they can recoup COVID-19 related losses
46% (nearly half) of small businesses that remain open say their businesses will be able to stay open for more than six months if the pandemic continues in the same way
48% of small businesses say it’s unlikely they will need to resume operations with a smaller staff
While 78% of small businesses indicate declining sales, less than a quarter (24%) say that they have missed or withheld any payments of bills (rent, utilities, etc.).

It was back in 1999 that RSS feeds originated as a way of getting an overview of new articles and blog posts. They are still around today and can still be useful if you want to tailor and streamline your reading content.

RSS feeds can be used to bundle news from any number of websites within a program, browser extension or app. The only requirement is that the pages must support the.rss or.xml file extensions.

The advantage of RSS feeds and readers is that not only are they often free of charge, they also reduce your data use, as only a section of the article is loaded, Neuhetzki says.

In addition, the user does not have to provide personal information such as an email address or register in order to use a feed.

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

Social virtual reality, or social VR, has seen an increase in users too. Social VR apps like Rec Room, BigScreen, VRChat, and AltSpace have all seen an increase in traffic. AltSpace is even hosting one of Burning Man's virtual worlds from this year's virtual event. This week, Facebook announced the launch of the public beta for its social VR experience, Horizon.

Sneak peeks of Horizon screenshots are flooding social media. Facebook dropped the gameplay trailer for Facebook Horizon after months of anticipation. The trailer shows avatars playing games in Horizon, building their own worlds, and having fun with other avatars. Facebook Horizon's beta access is currently invite-only.

Like any Fortune 500 company, public safety agencies should be active users of social media if they want to thrive in todays information-rich environment. Content on the big four platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube—is accessed by more than a billion people worldwide. For many people social media is the first thing they check in the morning and the last thing they see before they sleep at night.

While most of us all have personal social media accounts where we post our cat videos and vacation photos, there are still agencies that don’t have official social media presences. My argument is that all public safety entities should maintain an active presence on at least one of the larger social media platforms, because the benefits of doing so far outweigh the costs in time and effort.

While there are many reasons why every agency should have a vibrant presence online (many of which are unique to individual departments), my favorite benefits all relate to recognition: staff recognition, agency recognition, and interagency recognition.

Social platforms are still reporting robust growth — yes, even Facebook — despite a growing chorus of opposition. Social conversation continues to shape everything from culture to the media cycle to our most intimate relationships. And we now spend more time than ever on our phones, with endless scrolling through our social feeds being a chief reason why.

But dig a little deeper, and a more nuanced picture emerges about social media users today that has important implications for the ways in which brands reach customers. Specifically, when you look at who is — and more importantly, who is not — driving the growth and popularity of social platforms, a key demographic appears to be somewhat in retreat: young people.

For example, 2019 findings from Edison Research and Triton Digital show social media usage overall among Americans 12 to 34 years old across several platforms has either leveled off or is waning, while 2019 research from Global Web Index suggests that the amount of time millennial and Gen Z audiences spend on many social platforms is either flat, declining, or not rising as greatly as it has in years past.

Convenience, but not only
At first glance, it could be said that the price of the product and its technical characteristics are decisive aspects when it comes to an expenditure. When two products have the same level of performance, the quality-price ratio always wins. But this is not true! The market is full of examples of products that are more popular even though there are competing goods that have similar characteristics.

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.

It was back in 1999 that RSS feeds originated as a way of getting an overview of new articles and blog posts. They are still around today and can still be useful if you want to tailor and streamline your reading content.

RSS feeds can be used to bundle news from any number of websites within a program, browser extension or app. The only requirement is that the pages must support the.rss or.xml file extensions.

For example, if you just want to read headlines on the go, there are smartphone apps such as Feedly, Newsblur, Inoreader, and Feeder.

These applications have modernised the classic RSS service and offer, for example, the synchronisation of the RSS feed between smartphones, desktop computers and laptops.

The modern type of RSS feed reader also offers other advantages. Providers like Feedly also make suggestions about possible feeds based on keywords or interests, Neuhetzki says.

Privacy-protecting browser Brave is introducing a new news reader, Brave Today, per Ars Technica. Brave’s news reader masks users’ reading behaviors by divorcing IP address details from content delivery requests. Once a user clicks on a news item in the feed, Braves reader directs traffic to publishers own pages. Brave Today is supported with privacy-protecting offers and promoted content.

This all sounds vaguely reminiscent of an RSS reader, and Brave is not the only one revisiting the potential for news aggregation. Substack has also launched at creating a distraction-free space to consume email newsletters that isn’t the inbox.

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.

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.