Social media is everywhere. The big players in the industry carry billions of users and boast massive layers of data and content. These days, though, social media may be in for a major change, possibly due to the rise of blockchain.

Will Blockchain Reinvent Social Media?

It takes time to build an audience: you need to attract them to your site, which they’ve likely never heard of, and convert them into loyal readers, so they come back and tell their friends – and eventually turn into customers, which is the whole goal of content marketing.

The Truth About Content Syndication and Duplicate Content

JSON Feed is a new take on the web syndication format, but unlike RSS and Atom it's in JSON, not XML. So what does it try to do better?

Mainly overcome the perils of XML; it's 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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Time is an entrepreneurs most valuable and elusive resource. Seizing the day seems like an impossible task, and staying organized is a constant battle. Many software solutions have tried to solve the eternal entrepreneurial bottleneck, and some of them have succeeded in creating effective solutions

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Unlike traditional news feeds that invade user privacy, show ads, and track users across the web, Top Bottom Center is a new content feed that bursts filter bubbles by providing the smartest, funniest, and most flexible news feed ever. Private content feeds give the best information and entertainment, all in one feed.

Content is pulled from a variety of diverse, top-tier sources to give broader perspectives directly from the world's leading thinkers, entertainers, and content producers. Stories feature information from politically and socially diverse sources right next to each other to remove the echo chamber and ideological bubbles of social media.

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Are you still using RSS? If you are (and you should be, as we’ll 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.

The latest version of Feed Hawk can even find feeds for YouTube channels. That, in case you are wondering, is huge.

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Currently, the world’s population is 7.5 billion, 3.8 billion are internet users and 2.8 billion of them are social media users. 1.8 billion of the entire world population is made up by teenagers from the ages of 13-19 years old. Instagram alone has 500 million active monthly users. Instagram users have shared over 40 billion photos to date and share an average of 95 million photos and videos per day. Snapchat has 166 million daily users. Although adults do also use some social media, teenagers are the majority of users.

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2018 is only four months away, and brands have to prepare to take advantage of the opportunities social media presents -- or their competitors will.

When it comes to reaching audiences, effectively distributing your content, and building a following around your brand, social media offers a wealth of possibilities. It's where your audiences already live and engage with content, which makes it a convenient platform for brands. Its built-in analytics allow you to track and improve your efforts over time. Plus, all the free social-media tools make it easy to use and maintain an active presence.

As you look ahead to 2018 and begin planning for ways to strengthen your social strategy, it is important to keep a pulse on trends.

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It is important for entrepreneurs to understand how social media is evolving and changing -- 2.8 billion people use social media. In terms of advertising new products and services, there are few things more potent and ubiquitous than social media.

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You would be forgiven for thinking RSS died off with the passing of Google Reader, but our old friend Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) still has a role to play on the web of 2017. It is faster, more efficient, and you will not have to worry as much about accidentally leaking your news reading habit to all your Facebook friends.

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Have you tweeted, posted an Instagram photo or just generally engaged in social media before? Then it’s possible you have been part of a research experiment of sorts. Think that raises some ethical questions? You are not the only one.

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With more and more brands trying to connect with audiences across an array of social channels, the attention span of people is on a decline.

Businesses need to quickly figure out what’s best for their audiences in order to generate better engagement and increased brand loyalty.

Here are five crucial social media trends that will have the maximum impact on your social media strategy in 2018 and ahead.

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RSS offers an efficient way to stay in the know, but the right newsreader can make a big difference. Here are five outstanding Android apps that should do the trick.

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While there may be businesses that specify in SEO, to many, Google Search Engine Optimization remains a mystery. In fact, Google is constantly making changes, refining how they want results to be displayed to its users.

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Those of you who are in a habit of maintaining an RSS reader to consume information from worldwide publications, authors and people you’re interested in hearing from, here is a tool to help you do so on Twitter.

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Your Twitter feed is going to get even busier thanks to the microblogging service unlocking auto-playing video ads for advertisers. Starting today Video Website Cards are available to every ad-buyer. In limited beta tests (like the one embedded below; videos do not seem to work with embeds), Twitter has found them pretty successful, with a 200 percent higher clickthrough rate compared to the leading standard. So yeah, expect to see an awful lot more of these coming soon.

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Remember the good old days (a la 2009) when social media was fun?

Think back to a time before all talk turned to fake news, algorithm hacks and carefully curated influencer feeds.

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For a growing number of people, their activities online have become their real jobs. Achieving influencer status on Instagram or YouTube can help a onetime enthusiast who filmed videos from his childhood bedroom earn a legitimate six-figure salary. Today, social-media stardom is no longer a springboard to a mainstream career but a career in and of itself. For these tech-savvy self-promoters, there’s a lucrative world of freebies, sponsorships and other moneymaking opportunities at their fingertips.

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Social networking sites have moved to the foreground of news consumption for the masses. Politicians now take to Twitter to reach citizens directly: Facebook has algorithms to decide what news will encounter the highest click baits and Snapchat offers ‘snap’ news stories at the bottom of your friends update

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Some people might think that online privacy is, well, a private matter. If you don’t want personal information getting out online, then you can just not put it out there. Right? Wrong. Keeping your information private isn’t solely your choice anymore. Friends can play a big role in your privacy, new data show. And the more they share on a social network, the more that social network can figure out about you.

Someone who joins a social network — such as Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook —wants to find their friends. Often, the social network can help. Many apps offer to import contact lists from your phone or e-mail. These apps then use that information to find matches with people already in the network, and suggest them to you.

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Twitter has been in hot water as more evidence emerges showing how Russia used the social network to influence public opinion. Ahead of a November 1st Congressional hearing on Russian manipulation, Twitter has introduced sweeping new rules for how it shares data on political posts. The network will launch a Transparency Center that lists all ads appearing on Twitter, including promoted ones that previously only appeared to targeted demographics, and will clearly label them when they appear in user feeds.


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What if users did not have to come to your WordPress site in order to read your articles? That would certainly make it easier for users since they would not have to navigate to ten of their favorite blogs and news sources to get their daily information. It would also be nice for the website owners, since it would allow you to distribute your content in a more efficient manner, delivering the content to where the customers want it to be.

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Over 90% of medium and large businesses have used social media in their marketing for five years or longer. Yet the CMO Survey reveals that nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments. That’s why, no matter what your social media strategy is, it is always a good idea to go back and make sure you have the basics covered. Your company may discover that it needs a strategic do-over.

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For retailers, the line between online and offline shopping experiences no longer exists. Todays consumers expect consistent branding and service across all platforms, whether they are physically in a store, browsing products on a website or reaching out on social media.

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If you get the urge to revisit that cute photo you posted some time last year, you'll have to scroll through your timeline for what feels like hours to track it back down. Instead, when you share a post on social media, also save it to your phone for safe-keeping. This will not only save your social media hits for posterity, but also make them easier to find if you ever need to rediscover them.

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Instagram is starting to roll out recommended posts directly into users’ home feeds, according to TechCrunch.

Previously, the home feed was dedicated to posts from accounts that users follow as well as ads, whereas recommended posts were located solely in the Explore tab.

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Decisions made by Facebooks human content moderators to weed out hate speech posts are often inconsistent, causing some offensive content to wrongly remain on the platform, according to investigative journalism group ProPublica.

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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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RSS is now competing for my time with Twitter, Reddit, internal Verge chats, and other news sources

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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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CJ Marple wanted to teach his young students how quickly information can spread on the Internet.

So earlier this year, the third-grade science teacher wrote up a tweet with the help of his students, asking for other users to retweet the message, or even reply to the message with their location.

The Kansas teacher says he expected 1,000 or so retweets, but within days the tweet went viral and gained more than 227,000 retweets and 75,000 replies from users all over the world. His students, who are probably a little too young for their own social media accounts, learned a lot that week about the power of social media.

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Social media is great for keeping tabs on your old college roommate or staying in touch with that aunt who lives in another state. As millennials, we’ve grown up with social media being part of our daily lives. It’s probably rare you go through your day without checking your accounts.

In this day and age of having everything a click away, have you considered the opportunities that could be at your fingertips? Outside of keeping in touch with your friends and family, social media can do wonders for your professional network. Social media has been one of my go-to tools to make connections and grow my network.

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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.

complete article

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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Social media marketing plans can decide the future of a business and a brand. As the technologies advance, the boundary between social media marketing and mainstream marketing is becoming more blurred than ever. Chalking out a social media plan is no easy task for a first timer, but getting a few tips from the pros certainly helps. Very simply put, every social action must culminate to a larger social media marketing strategy. People, their likes, shares, replies, and posts should all be a part of a larger plan that generates leads, drives sales, or contributes in other ways to a business goal.

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Nothing lasts forever, I suppose. In what could be construed as a cruel joke, Digg is pulling the plug on Digg Reader, the company’s answer to the demise of popular RSS service Google Reader. Digg Reader will shut down on March 26th, 2018, giving you just enough time to export your data before the service goes dark.

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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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In another blow to RSS fans everywhere, Digg announced that it would soon be shuttering Digg Reader.

As of March 26, the RSS service will no longer work on the web or in Digg's mobile apps. The company didn't say why it was closing the service, which it started in response to Google killing off its own RSS service in 2013.

Naturally, the news was pretty upsetting to Digg Reader fans who had turned to the service as a replacement for the once beloved Google Reader.

But if you are one of the many folks still clinging to RSS feeds in 2018, you are not entirely out of luck. There are a number of capable alternatives out there. Here are five of our favorites.

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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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For years, we have known that social media platforms inspire jealousy. A 2013 study showed that people fall into a spiral of envy when Facebook reveals that their friends are excelling or leading glamorous lives. Scientific American reported that many studies indicate that spending a lot of time on Facebook is linked to diminished well-being, with Facebook-inspired envy increasing feelings of depression. FOMO (fear of missing out) has become a very real thing

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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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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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