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5 Reasons Why Social Media Buttons Hurt Nonprofit Websites

That little row of social media buttons has become a ubiquitous feature of most websites. After all, it is good to show off that you are social, and that there are channels where you can interact directly with stakeholders.

But is your website header or sidebar the best place to show that off?

Here are five reasons why having social media buttons on your nonprofits website might do more harm than good:

1) They send visitors away from your website




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Working with RSS Feeds: Maximizing Your Content Stream

An RSS feed is a means to distribute changing web content including blog posts, podcasts, news releases and site updates to related sites, blogs, online publishers and feed subscribers. It allows busy people to get the information they want without having to use email, which prevents the publisher from selling or otherwise providing their contract information to other parties.

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Millennials connect with Pope Francis on social media

As hundreds of visitors line up to write prayers on strips of cloth at the Knotted Grotto art installation at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, 18-year-old Cassie Sadie has a message of her own, typed in 140 characters or less.

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50 Apps to Improve Smart Phones

A recent study by market research firm Nielsen claimed that the average person uses 27 apps a month, which sounds like very few considering that Apple and Google’s app stores both have more than 1m apps available. The key, of course, is that the 27 apps can be almost entirely different, depending who you ask.

Some apps do have mass audiences: Facebook and Twitter in the social networking category; WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat for messaging; Google Maps for getting around; Spotify for music; YouTube for video; Kindle for reading ebooks; Instagram for photo-sharing; and so on.

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3 Tips for Promoting Your Products on Social Media

1. Plan around the online and social hit.
Craft your pitches to include elements that readers will want to share on social media. Think about a creative way consumers can engage with your product along with a campaign hashtag. Just as when you include a storyline in a pitch, including decorations on your product’s theme can help editors imagine how to photograph them. This reduces one step of the design process for the publication and gives you additional influence on how your product is presented to the world.

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Importance of Keywords in Content and Social Media Marketing

Keywords. They are still as powerful as they were in 1996 or the introduction of the Internet to the world. No matter what keywords you have, they can provide your content the kind of impact that it deserves.

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Internet of Things and Social Media

Learn how IoT, cloud, social networks and last but not least, humans, can be integrated into a seamless integration of cooperative organisms both cybernetic and biological. This has been enabled by recent advances in IoT device capabilities, messaging frameworks, presence and collaboration services, where devices can share information and make independent and human assisted decisions based upon social status from other entities.

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6 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2015

As we look to 2015, what social media marketing trends are likely to develop? Here are six that online retailers should monitor.

1. Niche Social Networks Will Emerge

Mainstream social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn will face challenges from lesser-known upstarts in 2015. One example is Ello, an ad-free social platform still in beta that has received a great deal of attention among those that follow social media developments.

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Top 10 social media analytics tools: The VentureBeat index

Consumers and businesses alike have something to learn from just about all of your social media interactions. How many people did your post reach? What sort of links do your followers like best? Does anything you do online even matter?

Fortunately, the rise of social media has been accompanied by the creation of tools to that analyze the impact of most of your social media activities.

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Is Text Messaging Ruining Our Youth?

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?




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You Can Have your Ad Blockers, I Will stick with RSS

RSS has never been fashionable — it is always been a news gathering tool for nerds, not norms. But now, more than two years after the untimely demise of Google Reader, RSS almost feels cool — like listening to vinyl or hating things on Twitter. RSS is a stealthy way to obtain news thats fast, friendly, and free from both ads and trackers. Its ubiquity makes me wonder why anyone bothers with browsers and adblockers at all, especially when mobile.

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XML Sitemaps Or RSS Feeds, Atom Feeds? Google Says Use Both For Optimal Crawling

When it comes to telling search engines about the content on a website, webmasters might be wondering if they should submit sitemaps or just setup RSS or Atom feeds.

Googles answer? Use both.

For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS or Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google to keep your content fresher in its index. Note that submitting sitemaps or feeds does not guarantee the indexing of those URLs.

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4 Tools to Display RSS Feed Updates Directly on Your Windows Desktop

In this article, I am going to cover four of the best tools to deliver RSS feed updates directly to your desktop, either through RSS tickers, or from alert boxes that display feed information right inside and scroll automatically. This way, during your workday, you can just glance over at the streaming updates and if a topic catches your eye, you can click on it and bookmark the article to read later, during your lunch break or after work.

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Warren Buffett Teaches Us All How to Use Social Media

While there are certainly dozens of insightful takeaways that could be gleaned from Buffetts 50-year career as an investor, I think everyone can benefit from learning more about one of his core principles that have guided him through good times and bad.

Reputation matters
One of my favorite all-time pieces of advice from Buffett is this: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'will do things differently.

In many ways, the sheer simplicity and common-sense nature of that statement belies its profound implications for modern-day life. Throughout his career, Buffett has used his reputation sparingly to turn around a failing business or to gain a tactical advantage.

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6 Marketing Lessons from Amazon

Creative still counts
When we think of Amazon, we tend to think about deals and shipping. Everyone from your neighbor to your grandparents knows that Amazon probably has the best price on anything you could want to buy, and they know that the companys bread and butter is shipping it to you as quickly as possible. In other words, nearly every consumer out there knows what Amazon is about.

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4 Steps to Mastering Social Media

Mention the words social media in a room full of school leaders and you’ll be met with more than a few reservations: It is too new. There are too many risks. I don’t know how to twit or tweet, or whatever. There has got to be another way.

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Great Ideas for Blog Posts

Blogs have increased in popularity because they provide a steady stream of new and unique content. The only issue presented by this quality of blogs is that it may become difficult for those who run blogs to think of interesting and novel posts. If you have jumped on the blogging bandwagon but suffer writer's block, do not panic: we have created a list of 26 ideas for blog posts.

1. Make it visual.
Include a photo or other graphic in a blog post to break up the text, attract your reader's interest, or help illustrate a point. Better yet, talk about the image you have included to further incorporate it into the post.

Great Ideas for Blog Posts




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There Is Nothing Virtual About Building Relationships on Social Media

I remember saying that if I could ever figure out how a person could be in two places at once I would retire a billionaire.

And then, I figured it out.

Because being in two places or more simultaneously is exactly what social media allows us to appear to do. With a nearly endless supply of apps designed to cross-post anything we can enter into a digital device, you would think the impossible had finally been achieved.

Certainly a lot of innovative people have ensured a comfortable retirement by making that illusion easy to create. But what is it costing entrepreneurs who fall prey to it?

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How to use Social Media to Create Happy Employees

Did you know companies with happy employees outperform their competition by 20 percent?

LinkedIn has carried out research to say that 58 percent of employees are proud of their company and are glad to tell others about it, especially on social media.

This is great news, as happier employees means happier customers, because they pass on their energy & passion in everything they do, including customer support.

But how can you create happy employees on social media?

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10 Tactics to Build Quality Social Media Presence – Startup Tips

Question for you to answer: What is YOUR goal for your business startup?

I cannot stress enough the importance of knowing the answer to that question. A defined goal helps your team plan strategic & measurable steps; while, in the process, you also keep resources in check as you strive to reach it.

It can be used as a tool to achieve either of these goals:

increased email subscribers
grow profitability
get leads
more website traffic to your website
improved customers service
increased brand awareness
…and more!

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Using Social Media for Public Good

A man suspected of a double murder was on the run, and a lot of people turned to the Knox County prosecutors Facebook page to find out about it.

Posts about the killings of Sandra Lee Stelk and Jaime Barber — who were found shot to death in a rural Knox County home on Sept. 30 — and about suspect Travis Bonham were each shared hundreds of times and reached more than 100,000 people.

This was good news to Prosecutor Chip McConville and his legal assistant and communications manager, Emily Morrison, who have worked since January to find ways to use social media that are helpful to the public.

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Social Media Quizzes Could Give Hackers Access

Social media allows you to connect with the world, but many seemingly harmless quizzes and games can really be traps laid by social media hackers.

The simple and sometimes silly surveys that pop up on Facebook feeds often ask simple questions that may appear simple enough: What's your favorite color? Where did you grow up? What is your spirit animal? Where did you go to high school?

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How Social Media has created a New Breed of Paparazzi

Celebrity selfies and fan-snapped shots on the Internet have cut the prices they can charge for their pictures. But those tweets and Instagrams and Facebook posts allow them to track down and trail boldfaced names like never before.

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Inconsistent Social Media Policies Problematic

A recent analysis conducted by a University of Florida educational leadership scholar indicates the lack of concrete policy on the use of social media by teachers and other school employees is increasing the potential for misuse and inappropriate teacher-student relationships online.

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Facebook Merges RSS and Push Notification

Facebook has released a new application called Notify that will allow its users to receive push notifications about breaking news, new movie trailers, and more.

The move into real-time news is significant because could help Facebook achieve two goals: It could make the company more important to the media, and it could increase the traffic it sends to publishers. Now, whether the app will be successful or just something that clogs up your phones notifications feed is another set of questions all together.

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RSS is Not Dead Look at the Numbers

RSS has taken some big hits recently. Of course, people have been announcing the death of RSS pretty much since it came into existence, but when Google Reader bit the dust on July 1st, 2013, many were ready to place a wreath at the headstone and walk away.

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5 Ways Your Social Media Accounts Hurt Your Career

Social media is a big part of many peoples lives, and it can be a great tool to help build and maintain relationships, and for general self-expression. LinkedIn has 396 million users, Twitter has 307 million active users and Facebook almost 1.5 billion active users, according to Statista.com.

However, social media can easily lend itself to blurring the line between users’ personal and professional lives. And any information — good or bad — posted to social media can be difficult to delete once it’s out there. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to become a more responsible social media user. Read on to find out how social media can hurt your career, and how to avoid social media mistakes.

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Add a custom RSS feed to your Android home screen

Android does not have a built-in RSS widget for your home screen. For that, we have to turn to the Google Play Store. The widget I happen to prefer for this is called RSS Widget. This app is free, does not have any ads, and does a great job of presenting your RSS feeds cleanly.

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Social Media Inspired Gifts

The holidays are right around the corner, but regardless of whether it is Christmas, Valentines Day, someones birthday or any other holiday, you can always surprise that special social media lover in your life -- or yourself -- with any of these awesome gifts.

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The 4 Steps of a Social Media Audit

The 4 well established steps of a social media audit include the following;

Step 1: Review your Social Media profiles

Where are you present?
The first thing to start from is mapping your social media presence. Locate all the social media accounts for your brand and write down the current status and audience size. This is a a great base to evaluate your presence on each platform at a later stage. Here’s an example from a recent social media audit for Twitter Counter.

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4 Key Social Media Marketing Trends To Lead The Game in 2016

The same laws of attraction have never governed the social media marketing scene for too long.

Just as one Tweet changes another, so does user preferences when it comes to consuming online content. New social media rise and fall quickly and this year SnapChat and Periscope already shown a great influence on the marketing landscape. With new players entering the field and old companies rushing to introduce new features and innovations, the rules of social media play hardly ever stay the same.

In 2016 we should expect to see new exciting trends and changes in the social scene and here are the top 4.

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How Can I Organize My RSS Feeds So They Are More Manageable?

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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How to Know What You Need to Know - All the Time

If you want to have mastery of all the news, information and updates about yourself, your business, your industry and your areas of specialty, then this may be the most important column you will read all year.  I'm going to show you how to build the ultimate information dashboard that will sit on your desktop or live in your mobile app and will update you in real time whenever anything of interest happens anywhere on the Internet.

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Time to Prune

New Years is a great time to prune your RSS feeds so that they continue to load quickly.




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Revamping Your Social Media Sites for the New Year

The end of the year is drawing near, which means its time for fresh starts and new beginnings. While that does apply to whichever New Year’s resolution you plan to make in 2016 (and, in all likelihood, abandon by February), it applies to social media sites as well.

Unfriend and Unfollow
The new year is the perfect time to go through your friends list with a fine-toothed comb. Here is a quick guide for whether you should be friends with someone online: Do you know who this person is? Have you seen him or her in the last year? Do you honestly think you’ll need to talk to him or her in the future?

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This Chrome Extension Replaces Facebooks Trending Topics with any RSS feed

Are you tired of Facebooks trending section in your News Feed? Celebrity news getting annoying? Would you rather have legitimate news? Introducing Fluffblocker.

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Ping.it

Ping.it, a Web-based RSS reader that lets you create tailored feeds by keywords and popularity.

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Get Organized: Clean Up Your RSS Feed Reader

Nothing motivates me to clean up like having to move. When I move house, which I do more often than I like, I see it as a time to purge junk and scrub the new place from corner to corner before moving in any of my stuff.

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35 Ways Social Media Marketing Improved in 2015 and How to Make the Most of it in 2016

In 2015, we have seen several major changes and improvements to the way we conduct business on social media. We have seen brand new networks rise, while others have fallen. We have watched popular networks pivot, and promising networks not take off as expected.

This years social media ad revenue is estimated to total $23 billion.

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The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources

Never again will mankind have to look for RSS info in more than one place...ok, we're kidding, but we've aimed to create a near comprehensive list of all the RSS readers, tools, browser plugins, tips, hacks and directories available on the web.

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Charities Use Social Media

Charities are turning to online stars with large YouTube audiences, following an approach increasingly used by big brands to reach new donors and volunteers.

The Make-a-Wish Foundation, for children with life-threatening illnesses, DigDeep, the non-profit organisation focused on water, and Los Angeles-based anti-poverty group United Way are among the charities using a new technology platform designed to let this new kind of minor social media celebrity do their marketing for them.

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6 Ways to Enhance Social Media

Luckily, there are ways that you can improve your blog posts and other content to make them more shareable on social media. If you implement these tips when creating content and posting on your blog, you might be surprised by the number of shares that you get. In no time, you’re sure to be pulling more traffic from social media than ever before!

1. Optimize Your Images for Social Media

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5 Things Entrepreneurs Should Not Forget About Social Media

Social media has become a popular (and profitable) marketing tool for new and experienced entrepreneurs. Establishing an account and building an audience organically costs only time, and most platforms offer reasonably priced advertising options for those who want a little extra push.

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SEO Benefits to RSS Feeds

  The RSS feed is really something we see as more of a technical help to crawl and index the content a bit better.  So if you have a website that is changing content fairly quickly, a news website, a blog with a  lot of new content, maybe even a shop that has lots of new content, then the RSS feed really helps us stay on top of things so we can pick up on all of those new URLs and crawl them as soon as we can.

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Facebook Tests Multiple News Feeds Based on your Interests

The social network is testing multiple News Feeds inside its mobile app, as the feature is live for select users. In addition to the main feed, tabs for specific topics like Style, Travel and Headlines line the top of the interface. When you select one, the feed is distilled down to relevant posts from your friends and Pages you follow. Facebook says the feature is in the testing phase, so it could be a bit before it is open to all users.

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JustCast Turns A Dropbox Folder Into A Podcast RSS Feed

JustCast is built as a simple way to create a feed for your own podcasts without dealing with hosts, but it is just as good for making your own private feeds of various audio files you need to listen to.

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LinkedIn for Lawyers: Newly Issued Ethical Guidance Makes Social Media Use Less Risky

The ethics guidance interpreting Attorney Advertising rules in the social media context continues to evolve, but this time the evolution appears to be for the better, taking into account the realities of the growing use of social media. As you may recall, early last year, the New York County Lawyers Association weighed in on the ethical implications for lawyers using LinkedIn and suggested that attorneys using the self-proclaimed Worlds Largest Professional Network needed to beware that their posts on that site, even the most casual, did not run afoul of the attorney advertising rules.

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Keep your Business Relevant on Social Media

Social media is driving our lives right now. You may say that is untrue, but I say you are in denial unless you are one of those emasculated men who share a Facebook account with your wife or you are part of the 1 percent who spends little to no time online. This is 2016 and Facebook has more than one billion daily active users. One billion. Daily. Active. Users. Amazing.

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Science Related RSS Feeds

You can keep up-to-date with the content posted on Science Journals by subscribing to our E-mail alerts and our RSS feeds.

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Munch is a fast efficient RSS Reader for Android

Feeds are added one after the other to Munch which is the program's greatest shortcoming, especially if you have an opml file full of feeds already that you would like to import.

This means that you need to add feed after feed manually in the application which is a problem considering that you need to get hold of feed urls first somehow to do so.

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