Kotler, Philip, author

In order to engage your followers, we all know you need to share interesting content with them regularly. Of course, there are plenty of tools that help you schedule and share content, such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial. But what about finding content your audience will love?

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LinkedIn may have started out as a simple way to build professional connections and share contact details, but more users are looking to share articles that interest them, the Digital Media Europe conference heard today.

Isabelle Roughol, France editor for LinkedIn, told delegates that, compared to five years ago, there are five times as many people coming to the site for content than for jobs searches.

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You may have RSS feeds accumulating dust over time, but that unfortunately does not mean the number of unread items will kindly reduce for you.

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RSS feed aggregators require precision, user-friendliness, and overall quality to win the hearts of those who live by them.

These RSS feed aggregators can be difficult to come by, but there are a few out there that have withstood the test of time.

With the departure of Google Reader, it has become important to see who has survived and who was flushed away with this move as collateral damage.

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When it comes to content marketing, your results do not only come from the content you create—your blog can also help you build a haven to nurture your current and future customers. In this post, we are going to look at the benefits of having a community for your blog, the challenges blog moderators face, and how to create an engaging space for your readers.

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I am looking for a way to get an RSS-Feed that serves the same content as the main view on Twitter. I am following about 20 people at the moment and I could of course get an RSS-Feed from each of them separately, but I do not want my RSS-Reader to be cluttered with 20 Feeds if I can aggregate them into a single feed.

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Have you considered RSS Mesh?

Visual marketing is an integral part of reaching customers today. For brands concerned with SEO, however, it brings a wide variety of challenges. Search engine algorithms look for specific words, which makes it difficult to challenge competitors by coming up with better photos and videos to dominate search rankings.

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Facebook refused to fill its site with flashy animated banner ads for a decade. Zuckerberg thought these interrupted the user experience, and could stunt growth. But after reaching near ubiquity and acclimating users to video ads, today the company tells me it’s relaxing its standards and starting to allow businesses to post GIFs as ads and Page posts.

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If you have noticed the apparent omnipresence of cell phones, as most of us surely have, it likely will not surprise you that about 86% of the worlds roughly seven billion people have access to a mobile phone, or that 80% of cell phone owners use their devices to send and receive text messages. You may also be unsurprised to learn that the vast majority of texts are sent by teenagers under eighteen, and that the average teen from this group sends over 3,300 texts each month.

Is Text Messaging Ruining our Youth?

You are definitely not alone in feeling the RSS information overload. As wonderful as it is to be able to tap into all the information in the world, there are only so many hours in the day to spend consuming it all. Not to worry: With a little pruning, filtering and prioritizing, we can turn the deluge of data into a nice, manageable stream of content.

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I was interviewing Antonio Lucio, the CMO for HP, for my CMO Insight series (see article here), when we started talking about social media. For perspective, Lucio has over 33,000 Twitter followers, has a 62 Klout score, and is the 4th most influential CMO on Twitter (see list here). I asked him why he is so personally involved in Twitter. Very few CMOs tweet and of those who have a lot of followers, few tweet themselves, instead delegating the task to somebody on their marketing team. His response to my question was fascinating, and an important one for any CMO or aspiring CMO to hear.

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Mobile users spend little time viewing web content on their mobile browsers, preferring to read most of it through their social networks. As a result, publishers are losing control of their content, and users are overloaded with content sources.

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What was once a world of snail mail, magazines, and newspapers is now a world of cell phones, email and social media. There is no mistaking the up rise and importance of new technology in what is now a digital age. In the past, advertising was a more simplified process. You could advertise in a newspaper or magazine, or leave flyers on someone’s doorstep or mailbox. You could buy air time for a commercial or buy space on a billboard. However, as technology grew and evolved, so did our methods of advertising.

What should I do to advertise my business?

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As of this year, about 81% of the United States population uses at least one social media platform. That number is growing by roughly 5% per year. At this rate, 100% of the United States will have a social media profile on at least one platform by 2021.  

Businesspeople searching for the ideal marketing channel to engage prospects should look no further than social networks. Social media provides companies with ample information to create messages targeted to valuable niche audiences, and given the statistics, it is inevitable that the audience you are trying to reach is on at least one social network.

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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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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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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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Imagine if someone could scan every image on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, then instantly determine where each was taken. The ability to combine this location data with information about who appears in those photos—and any social media contacts tied to them—would make it possible for government agencies to quickly track terrorist groups posting propaganda photos. (And, really, just about anyone else.)

That is precisely the goal of Finder, a research program of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's dedicated research organization.

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Qu Toutiao, which means Fun Headlines in Chinese, is reportedly making its own fun headlines these days, telling sources that it is eyeing an initial public offering that could value it as high as $3 billion.

If successful, it would be an extraordinary valuation for a company, a news and video aggregation mobile app popular in mostly rural areas of China, that was launched less than 2 years ago. The company is considering an IPO in New York as soon as early this year, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

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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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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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People are angry at Facebook. People are angry at YouTube. People are angry at Twitter.

With Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set to testify before Congress less than a week after an enraged YouTube user wounded three people before killing herself at the companys headquarters, the growing debate over what Silicon Valley’s social media giants do with the content and information we give them has hit a new pitch.

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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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A US law gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids.

The Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, imposes certain requirements on operators of websites and online services -- including social media sites -- so that personal information from children under 13 is not collected, disclosed or used without parental consent.

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This month marks the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which was first coined following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the course of those five years, #BlackLivesMatter has become an archetypal example of modern protests and political engagement on social media: A new Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets finds the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter – an average of 17,002 times per day – as of May 1, 2018.

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While responding quickly to incoming customer inquiries has almost become table stakes in social media, many sophisticated brands have learned that proactive customer care can provide additional benefits to both the company and the customer.

Proactively contacting prospects and customers can create a surprisingly positive customer experience, provide marketing benefits like brand awareness, and even save servicing costs. It can also Proactively listening to prospects and customers on social media can identify key trends, new product opportunities, and customer pain points.

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Talent drives engagement when it comes to posts from social media accounts owned by TV shows and networks.

According to Nielsen, which earlier this year started measuring Owned Account Performance as part of its Nielsen Social Content Ratings talent accounts generated almost 20 million engagements for their associated TV programs.

That represents about 30% of all owned engagement for series and special programming.

For a three-week period during this year’s fall series premieres, Nielsen Social Content Ratings measured over 160,000 pieces of TV content and over 250 million engagements coming from thousands of active owned accounts.

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Every parent that has a teen or a preteen should have both Snapchat and Instagram on their phones. If their child uses those applications, you should follow your child on those applications and I think having constant conversations with kids about responsible social media use is important, said Haase.

If they want their child to use social media responsibly, Haase said the parent needs to model good social media behavior as well.

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Tip:
A good social media manager will be able to adapt to your brand’s voice and understand how to connect with your ideal audience on social media.

Is this person capable of managing multiple channels?
If you want your business to make a big splash on multiple social media channels, you will need a social media manager who can juggle multiple different accounts. An effective social media manager will not rely just on a sharp memory and good multitasking skills; this person should be familiar with the tools that will make his or her social media management more productive.

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Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it’s not necessary for most users.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

Some users may like the idea of subscribing to Instagram users using RSS. While that is good only for public posts that these users make on Instagram, it is a great way of keeping an eye on new posts of any number of users.

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We have brought together some of our favorite hello 2019 images in order to honor the coming year, which will bring with it plenty of joy.

The beginning of a new year brings with it plenty of hopes and dreams that could completely change the course of your life for the better if you discipline yourself, put the work in and try your hardest to make those changes happen. In the long run, keeping your New Years resolutions could be the thing that helps put everything into place for you.

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Brands were more creative than ever in their social media posts this year and connected with audiences by raising awareness of social issues, according to social media analytics company Unmetric.

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If you opened up Instagram today and found that your timeline orientation was totally switched, you were not alone. It appears that quite a few users had a timeline that moved left to right, where posts could be tapped through as they can be in stories.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

Some users may like the idea of subscribing to Instagram users using RSS. While that is good only for public posts that these users make on Instagram, it is a great way of keeping an eye on new posts of any number of users.

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When it comes to video content on landing pages, marketers tend to either totally crush it, or completely bomb.

Your landing page videos may fail for several reasons.

Typically, this is because the videos on landing pages are:

Too long.
On the wrong section of the landing page.
Missing a key component (like a call-to-action).
Do not make these same mistakes!

This article will explain why landing page videos are so important, and share 11 landing page video best practices that will help increase conversions.

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GitHub is the number one signal in my API world. The activity that occurs via GitHub is more important than anything I find across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social channels. Commits to repositories and the other social activity that occurs around coding projects are infinitely more valuable, and telling, regarding what a company is up to than the deliberate social media signals blasted out via other channels. I’m always working to dial in my monitoring of GitHub using the GitHub API, but also via the RSS feeds that are present on the public side of the platform.

I feel RSS is often overlooked as an API data source, but I find that RSS is not only alive and well in 2018, it is something that is actively used on many platforms.

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I say social media engagement metrics, what comes to your mind first?

Most likely it will be likes, comments, and shares.

While these certainly are high-level indicators of content engagement, and (presumably) the effectiveness of your social media efforts, they are far from the only metrics you should consider.

This section will help you understand the full spectrum of metrics available to you for evaluating your content and social media marketing, the meaning and importance of each, and how to use and improve them.

Few will need to keep track of all these metrics, so choose the mix that gives you the most valuable information.

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Just because you are not on Facebook or Twitter does not mean your data is safe from the social media giants or their prying algorithms. A study from the University of Vermont adds yet more evidence to the argument that your privacy is no longer in your hands, even if you abstain from social media.

Researchers from UVM's Department of Mathematics and Statistics published a paper in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Human Behaviour demonstrating that social media users not only generate substantial behavioral data about themselves but also about members of their social circle.

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Facebook, it seems, has noticed. Last week, The New York Times reported that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg plans to unify Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram messaging on the backend of the services. This would make it possible for people relying on different flavors of Facebook apps to all gorge at the same messaging table. On the one hand, the move is truly Facebookian—just try to extricate yourself from Facebook, and it will try every which way to pull you back in. On the other hand, it makes sense for Facebook for a few reasons.

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Schools can not do it all. We have known this for a long time, yet we often seem to deny this reality in policy and action. For decades we have piled expectations onto our schools, asking them to develop scholars, citizens, and workers and to provide for the academic, nutritional, social, and developmental needs of children. Schools, as critics are quick to point out, invariably fall short of these expectations.

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Turn on the news, scroll through Twitter or chat with a friend these days, and you are likely to hear about yet another brand or individual suffering yet another social media-induced crisis of some kind.

It seems that every day, every hour, theres some other social media disaster. Does this mean that brands are suddenly behaving more poorly, or is this the state of how we live now?

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Did you know that you can subscribe to any Instagram user using RSS directly using any RSS feed reader?

Instagram happens mostly on mobile devices where users subscribe to users, post new media to their own accounts, and use other functionality to interact with other users or content on the site.

While there is an Instagram website as well for browsing user posts and tags, voting and downloading activity, it is fair to say that most user activity happens on mobile devices.

complete article

Wish you could follow a couple of Twitter or Instagram users, without setting up an account? Create an RSS feed for them.

RSS Hub is an open source project that creates RSS feeds from a wide variety of websites, including social media pages. You can install this on your own server, but it is not necessary for most users.

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In March, in the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting, I tried to distinguish between internet problems and platform problems. Internet problems arise from the existence of a free and open network that connects most of the world; platform problems arise from features native to the platform. The fact that anti-vaccination zealots can meet online is an internet problem; the fact that Facebook recommended that new mothers join anti-vaccination groups is a platform problem.

The recent rise in white supremacist violence around the world has given us fresh reason to ask which aspects of the problem belong to the entire internet, and which belong to our biggest social networks. It seems apparent that the internet is cultivating loose but potent networks of extremists. But what are the mechanics of this radicalization? And what role could platforms play in discouraging it?

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Abeyagoonasekera, Asanga, author

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Procedure Committee, author, issuing body

Australia