These days, prospects and customers have more information thrown at them than ever before. From phone calls and snail mail to emails and social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, each new way for a person to initiate contact makes it harder for companies to break through all the noise.

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After giving it some thought, and seeking counsel from friends who work for social start-ups in Silicon Valley, I called Luca and told him that he could have a YouTube account, but with one big caveat. We would make his account settings private, so that no one could leave comments.

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How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette?

For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting, and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media, I had just the most basic rules and intuitions. Even now, I feel like I learn a new quirk or quibble on a near-daily basis.

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One of the interesting qualities of freelancing work is that you may never meet your clients in real life. Perhaps more than any other job market, freelancers rely heavily on their online image- an aggregate of their resume, portfolio and personality to set themselves apart and attract new clients who may very well be located on the other side of the world.

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When I ran a Facebook ad recently for a nonprofit where I volunteer, I was surprised how specific you could get in targeting potential customers. If I wanted to advertise the event I was promoting to women between the ages of 24 and 26 in my city who were unmarried and educated, who watched Girls, owned a dog and liked designer purses — I could do that.

Being able to target ads to a specific market can help a seller reach the people who want or need their products and services. Unfortunately, that means buyers may also be encouraged to spend more than they should if they are not mindful.

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Long gone are the days when social media was a giant question mark in terms of measurement and ROI.

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When standardized tests are shared nationwide—as they now are, under the Common Core system that's been adopted in 46 states—cheating suddenly becomes a whole lot easier. Especially since teenagers now share just about everything on social media.

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n a recent research study, we spoke with dozens of professionals about their use of social media, and were struck by the variety of approaches they are using.

Some professionals, we found, still manage to avoid social media altogether. But most see that as unrealistic in many occupations, and are unwilling to be deprived of the advantages social media affords in terms of connecting to people and collecting information.

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In 2014, consumer shopping behavior evolved rapidly. Shopping online and through mobile devices is the new norm, and the experience has become increasingly more social with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. These platforms, in turn, have launched new commerce capabilities like the buy button.

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What if there was a way to spend minimal amount of time finding and sharing the latest and greatest content produced by some of the biggest experts in your industry?

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The new launch landscape levels the playing field for brands of all sizes and industries when reaching consumers–yet the ability for consumers to share their opinions freely on social media can provide huge hurdles for brand messaging. Consumers can quickly activate other like-minded consumers to rev up the online discussion to a level anywhere from highly positive to tanking a brand.

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The simple act of having a social profile does not do a thing to help rankings. Anyone can create a profile on a social network, any time. Facebook says anywhere between 5.5 and 11.2% of their monthly active users are fake or duplicate accounts, and considering that represents 67.65 million and 137.76 million fake or duplicate accounts, it is easy to see why social presence does not equate to increased ranking.

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According to the Electronic Transactions Development Agency , a public organisation, Thais usually spend around seven hours a day online and most of that is spent on social media.

This phenomenon has had an impact on many businesses due to the time people are forced to spend on social media, especially content businesses, like news providers, bloggers and websites.

It has also affected the way people get news and other information, with rumours sometimes mistaken for genuine news reports.

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We see it happen every day. But here are some tips that will help keep your social media life from ruining your career.

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Whether you want to sell products, gain subscribers, persuade followers to a point or sway the hearts and minds of readers to your cause, they have got to know who you are in the first place.

Your ability to encourage any of these actions comes from your brand’s authority -- and one of the best ways to build that is through the savvy use of social media. In fact, recent research from Econsultancy shows that 71 percent of brands plan to invest more heavily in social media in the coming year to reach new followers and build brand reputation.

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Social media may make you happy -- or not. Like almost all human interaction, it is what you make of it.

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A trio of social media stocks is getting pummeled this week, a sign that Wall Street may be unwilling to overlook missteps at some of its Internet darlings.

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When Anil Chawla built a start-up that uses software to archive social media posts, he never imagined that his biggest clients would be government agencies.

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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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With more than 84% of brands carrying out social media marketing, the greatest challenge is to rise above all the clutter and establish your brands credibility. The effectiveness of social media marketing is highlighted by the fact that it is100 times more effective in sealing the lead-to-closure rate. Hence brands are vehemently using this channel to attain multiple business goals.

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The most significant marketing change in the past decade was brought about by social media. Before Facebook or Twitter, brands could not dream of building such close connections with their audiences or

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Chances are your small business has used social media in one way or another. There are the big guns like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And other familiar names like Instagram, Pinterest, and Vine.  However, these are just a drop in the bucket when it comes to all of the social media channels out there.

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With the widespread use of major social media platforms, it can be hard to understand why new ones keep being created. Could this be because each social network actually only fills one or two specific niches for users?

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The Federal Trade Commission rolled out its latest truth in advertising guidelines. The last time the FTC updated its guidelines for truth in advertising was back in 2010. The new guidelines may precede a crackdown for social media marketing.

Their effect on social media marketing includes how marketers handle the use of celebrity endorsements. The FTC recommends that marketers have a proper disclosure check up to make sure that their social media marketing campaigns fall within FTC guidelines.

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Despite being difficult to measure, the growing impact of social media on brands is undeniable.

In fact, analysts from Social@Ogilvy recently surveyed more than 5,500 social media users across 11 countries in an attempt to find out how brands should be using social to make a true impact on shoppers.

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Decide how you intend to use social media and to whom you will allow access, especially on Facebook. You do not necessarily need to completely sanitise all your social media profiles — because companies want to hire real people, and some companies specifically look for creativity and personality.

However, if you want to ensure a potential employer does not reject you on those grounds, make sure your online social profile depicts the type of employee a company would want to hire.

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Over the past few years, social media has given rise to a number of crazes that have quickly spread across the web; with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, a trend started in Devon can reach Delaware in a matter of minutes. In the past 5 years, social media trends have got bigger and bigger, and in some cases wackier and wackier.

From the more absurd trends like Batmanning and Cinnamon Challenge, to those with an underlying charitable cause like the Ice Bucket Challenge, social media trends spread like wildfire. Chances are you will have had at least a handful of trends pop up on your social media feeds over the years.

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A national diaper company is on the defense after a mothers video on social media went viral, claiming glass shards were in a bag of wipes. Other angry parents also took to social media to attack Huggies, showing how claims, founded or baseless, can reach thousands, even millions in just a few hours or days.

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Consider your brand across all visual touchpoints, suggests WebDAM. Include logos, typography, press kit, photography, and icons.

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Teens who feel a round-the-clock compulsion to participate on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter may pay a price in lost sleep. They may also face a higher risk for depression and anxiety, new research suggests.

British researchers surveyed nearly 470 teens to explore how 24-7 social media participation might affect their emotional health.

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It seems hard to imagine that the winner of the 2016 Presidential Election will not also win another important race… the social media race. In todays hyper-connected world, the candidate that inspires enough of the population to eventually win the election will likely also have excited enough of the public to follow her or him on their various social media networks.

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Social media has become an integrated layer in our lives, available at almost every point in your day and even in space. It is this level of integration in our lives which has also made social media so powerful as a marketing tool and why just about every business has integrated it into their overall marketing strategies.

One important element of social media, if you really want to get the eyes, ears, and mouths of the people really making an impact, is to connect and engage with the influencers of each social platform.

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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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