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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The feed now dominates online content consumption, from the news we read on our mobile devices to the social networks we check constantly throughout the day, as well as the ads that integrate onto those platforms.

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Microsoft is also opening its Health Cloud platform to outside developers, allowing them to integrate fitness data into their Microsoft Band apps.

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Microsoft is letting developers create apps for its Band fitness tracker that convey information pulled from RSS feeds and display it on the devices screen.

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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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What if you want to see a particular news feed on your home screen... say, one that does not connect with the built-in news feed tools?

You turn to RSS. That is right, we are going old school.

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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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Enter search word to search preset RSS Feeds.

Feedly has become one of the best ways to keep up with your RSS feeds. One key feature that’s been missing, however, is the ability to bulk share a collection of sources. Now, Feedly is adding this feature to Feedly Pro.

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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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  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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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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