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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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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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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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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RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.

In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day.

Time for an RSS Revival

Fears about the potential effects of propaganda and fake news remain high, and American officials are determined to keep track of media outlets in a bid to curb these misinformation campaigns. The Department of Homeland Security has put out a call for companies that could create a database tracking over 290,000 media influencers around the world, including online news outlets, bloggers and prominent social network accounts. The system would identify contributor details (such as contact info and their employers), and would allow searching for individuals and outlets through categories like their locations, the focuses of their coverage and their sentiment.

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The appropriate frustration and disappointment resulting from the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica disclosures are making it easy to forget the personal and economic benefits of social media.

For example, let’s not forget that we choose to integrate these services into our daily lives because they allow us to deepen social connections and enable us to exercise our individual agency in a fashion that was impossible before their emergence. Or that these services have created millions of jobs, new business ecosystems and helped fuel the rise of the digital economy that brings broad societal benefit.

But it is important not to forget the learning of lessons and the hoped-for change. We are seeing some of these changes now. There is no playbook for addressing the principles at play here, and so it will not be all smooth sailing. But you can be certain that the effort will be earnest and that these services will be better as a result.

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You've probably experienced it yourself. Maybe it is the way you feel while scrolling through your Twitter feed — anxious, twitchy, a little world weary — or your unease when you see a child watching YouTube videos, knowing she's just a few algorithmic nudges away from a rabbit hole filled with lunatic conspiracies and gore. Or maybe it was this month's Facebook privacy scandal, which reminded you that you've entrusted the most intimate parts of your digital life to a profit-maximizing surveillance machine.

Our growing discomfort with our largest social platforms is reflected in polls. One recently conducted by Axios and SurveyMonkey found that all three of the major social media companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google, which shares a parent company with YouTube — are significantly less popular with Americans than they were five months ago.

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Facebook announced a new initiative today aimed at improving its policies and the role its platform plays in elections. The company acknowledged that it was slow to respond to election interference efforts that took place on its site and says it wants to learn more about social medias role in elections around the world. To do that, it's putting together a group of researchers that will then develop a research plan, get proposals for projects that address issues defined in its plan and manage a peer review process that will determine who will receive funding and access to Facebook data for their research.

The commission of experts will initially work for one year and Facebook says membership will be determined soon.

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Amy Porterfield is a social media and content creation mastermind and top speaker, trainer and consultant for young entrepreneurs and professionals looking to maximize their social media reach and engagement.

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When is the best time to post on social media? Unmetric, an AI-powered social media analytics platform, reviewed social media posts from 100 brands over a five-week period, then compiled the data into an infographic that explores the answers to that question.

The data shows...

• Surprisingly, Instagram user activity peaks at 3-4 AM on Sundays (because of global interactions, yet Instagram posts on Tuesdays received the best engagement.

• Facebook's sweet spot for engagement is on Thursdays, 9-10 AM; and weekends show lower engagement on Facebook.
• The most rewarding time for brands to post on Twitter is between 11 AM and noon.

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Most organisations believe social media has a role to play in their marketing communications, but, equally, most would struggle to explain exactly what that role is. There’s little doubt that social media takes up a significant amount of consumer time and attention but without understanding the influence and quantifying the commercial benefits for brands and businesses, no marketing activity should be above question.

Like every other marketing activity, a social media strategy must be judged on its positive impact on business or brand metrics.

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Today, seven out of 10 Americans use social media. Despite the opportunity (and in spite of the lip-service paid to social), more marketers are skimping on their approach. Reposting 30-second TV spots to YouTube and uploading billboard or print ads to Instagram are commonplace, and a detriment to your brand.

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

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According to the same Kaplan survey mentioned above, the percentage of college admissions officers using social media for admissions criteria went down from 40 percent in 2015, to 35 percent in 2016, to 29 percent in 2017. Students seem to be making it more difficult for college admission personnel to check them out on social media.

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Blockchain has gained increasing popularity over the past year. Having begun as the technology behind cryptocurrency exchanges, it has now shown promise in almost every other sector of the economy as it’s a secure, reliable and tamper-proof way of recording transactions and exchanging data.

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Mozillas current plan aims for a removal of both features in Firefox 63 or Firefox 64, out October or December 2018. The change won't affect the current Firefox 60 ESR version but the next Firefox ESR after Firefox 60 ESR won't support both features anymore as well.

We published an overview of Live Bookmarks in 2014, but Firefox supported the feature for much longer. Live Bookmarks allowed Firefox users to subscribe to a site's RSS feed so that new articles would be displayed in a bookmarks folder in the web browser.

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The societal and psychological consequences of social media in the information age are emerging slowly. The consequences of the headline-grabbing examples above are fairly obvious, but other implications might not be as immediately apparent.

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Social media has been a rising player in the digital marketing game for so long now that many are wondering when it’s going to start losing steam.

The answer to this question? Not anytime soon.

People are in love with social media platforms.

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The conventional thinking is that social media conversations about brands are representative of broader consumer sentiment in the overall market. However a new study from Engagement Labs, appearing in the Journal of Advertising Research, finds online discussions and sentiment are not necessarily predictive of offline brand outcomes.

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The network theory of attitudes is a simple idea that has profound implications, if true. This is the theory that when two people hold the same attitude, they are linked together as a result, like two people holding strings to the same balloon. When different people are holding the same bunch of attitudes, they are grouped together and different groups are distinguishable by the different sets of attitudes they are holding.

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Keeping tabs on the rich, famous, and just-plain-cool is nothing new, of course. But social media can take that fixation to a pretty dark place. The feeling is common enough that some doctors are calling it social media anxiety disorder (SMAD) – although what most kids have is more like FOMO ... on steroids. While it is tough to see your kid in despair, there is a good solution that doesn't require an all-out social media ban: Just help your kid clean up their feed.

Self-comparison is a natural part of the tween and teen years. And for most kids, so is social media. While there are plenty of good things kids get out of their online connections, sometimes the combo can lead to a negative feedback loop that gnaws away at them.

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However, social media marketing efforts can span far beyond the core four: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. In fact, these popular platforms see such high users yet have such stringent algorithms that it can be hard to ensure your followers see your organic content, much less that your content helps you capture new consumers.

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Every social media has two sides — bright and dark. It can either be a help or a hindrance depending on the way how students use it. It is a known fact that social media is being used for hiring, as an educational and entertainment tool.

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To excel at social media, you must be a social media expert, right? While this is true in some respects, having narrow social media knowledge can also be limiting. A social media-only focus can actually hold back your social media strategy from reaching its full potential. You are building more than a social media presence -- you are building a brand. Social media is not an end unto itself. Vanity metrics -- followers and likes -- may be early indicators of good content, but the true test of social media is business impact. Management will eventually stop paying for social media activity that does not lead to bottom line action.

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Some social media-content is easy to evaluate. Cute cat pictures? Great. Helpful how-to videos? Perfect. Unfortunately, parsing posts gets a lot more complicated when the content flowing through the tubes of social media involves news. Earlier this week, the House Judiciary Committee brought in representatives from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to discuss the companies policies and practices for evaluating and moderating content (mostly political in nature) and the internet scourge that is fake news.

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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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If there are tech ideas that refuse to die, then Moodle is the land of the undead. Moodlers have access to a delightful and eclectic variety of tools whose time in the spotlight happened a while ago. Email, Forums, Wikis, Blogs. SCORM could not go without mention. No matter how hard Moodle tries to add a fresh face to it, most Moodle experiences today are evocatively reminiscent of a simpler past. To nicely tie up the rooms in nostalgia, its core is built in PHP, the language that refuses to die.

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Today, almost every business has a website -- the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker alike. If you are happy with the number of customers you currently have, then do not read this article. If you would like to bring your products to new markets, read on.

There is a catch: Getting more quality traffic means you will have to do some work.

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Are you ready to boost your web traffic? If you are relying on people to find you through the internet, then Search Engine Optimisation should be at the top of your priority result. You can’t be able to generate more leads to your business if nobody finds you.

Do you know about 93% of experiences on the Internet start with a search engine? So what happens after someone search the internet? The top results on Google have higher chances of getting clicked. If you are not on the top of the list, you have missed potential traffic. What is even more surprising is that about 75% people won’t even move to the second page of the search results.

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RSS is the standard for the syndication of published content across the open web. For law firms, RSS is how their content reaches many readers, especially their blog content.

But of late, I am finding many law firms not using RSS in publishing, even in their blogs.

Other firms have their RSS feeds set up incorrectly. All of their blogs in one RSS feed so users receive content they do not want. RSS feeds kicking out some content, but missing other content – almost like a magazine with blank packages here and there.

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Enterprise marketers face more challenges than ever in executing their customer-driven, high-ROI strategies. When customers search nowadays, they are looking for more complete and more specific answers provided for their queries: whether they are searching on a smartphone, looking for results specific to their city, or keeping up with the news of the minute. And Google is constantly improving how it delivers those results.

Conductors goal is to make sure the marketing team has all of the data and insights, features, and reporting capabilities customer need—so marketers can deliver for their customers and achieve above and beyond their goals.

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Podcasting is going Hollywood.

Over the past year, HowStuffWorks, Gimlet and Wondery have stepped up their search for content that can be adapted into film, television, or even books as production studios snap up podcasts for high-profile films and cable TV series with A-list talent like Julia Roberts, Connie Britton and Eric Bana.

Gimlet Media, the startup that began selling film and TV rights to its shows last year, has already exceeded every 2018 goal it had set for Gimlet Pictures, said its head, Chris Giliberti.

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A lot of business owners think SEO--search engine optimization, or the art of promoting your content on search engines without paying for it--and keywords are something you can sprinkle onto a website like magical fairy dust after it is built. Unfortunately, that is just not the case. To rank on Google, search engine optimization needs to be more than an afterthought—SEO needs to be built right into your website’s structure.

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Once upon a time, sitting at your desk liking and swiping was a good way to annoy your boss. Most companies saw social media use as a distraction or a risk to be managed, and many banned Facebook and Twitter from their networks. Yet today, some of the world's biggest employers are doing the opposite: coaxing and cajoling workers to sign up to a new form of social media designed for the workplace.

Among the first was Yammer, a Facebook clone for companies and teams launched in 2008 and bought by Microsoft in 2012. Then there was Slack, the quirky office chat app which spread like wildfire through the tech industry, roughly doubling its revenue each year. Microsoft responded by launching Teams, a collaboration and chat tool tied in to Microsoft Office which now has 200,000 firms on board.

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In recent years, social media platforms have evolved from simple communication channels to full-blown news and entertainment hubs. From Facebook Watch to this years innovations like IGTV and Snapchat’s Story Ads, social platforms are stepping up the game to keep its users engaged and entertained -- and your company should not be too far behind.

If you want to keep up with the latest social media trends, you will have to reevaluate your strategy with an eye toward the future of this ever-evolving industry. Below, Forbes Agency Council members share 13 ways to step up your social game in 2019.

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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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Those viral videos really are giving you all the feels.

New research from the Netherlands suggests that we mirror the emotions of those we see in videos.

Tilburg University researchers studied more than 2,000 video blogs (aka vlogs) on YouTube, focusing on the more popular channels with at least 10,000 subscribers. They analyzed the words and emotions being expressed by the vloggers in their clips, as well as the emotional language of the online comments left by people who viewed the videos. And they found that when a YouTuber posted a positive video, the audience responded with more heightened positive emotions; but if the video broadcast negative emotions, the audience responded in kind.

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There are very few industries these days that change as quickly as social media. Every new discovery or algorithm update has the potential to shape the future of how we connect with each other and our clients. This past year has been an exceptionally tumultuous one for social media networks, even for an ever-changing industry. We have seen a huge paradigm shift in social media in 2018 toward consumer awareness and expectation. It’s bound to have a major effect on how brands will connect with their customers through social media in the future.

As we wrap up the year, lets take a look back at what has changed in social media in 2018 and how it will impact social media marketing strategy building in 2019.

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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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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking to get its hands on a product that will help its agents investigate tax dodgers who have set up shop on social media, according to a request posted to the federal government’s procurement website, FedBizOpps.

The post indicates that the IRS, whose under-equipped enforcement agents ferret out financial crime related to the tax system, is looking for a new way to investigate potential tax cheats based on their social media usage, citing as one example the ubiquity of online stores. The IRS currently has no formal tool, it says, to comb through social media feeds.

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Most modern businesses understand the importance of using social media to promote their brand and interact with consumers. Indeed, social media is at the core of many companies’ digital strategy, often delivering measurable results in terms of sales, leads and customer service. That said, there are many social media mistakes that we see time and time again: strategic errors that leave leads on the table and opportunities unexplored.

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Google Assistant will soon be capable of delivering a personalized audio news feed after users say OK Google, play the news.

This new feature is a collaborative effort with publishers around the world, which brings the artificial intelligence of Google News to the voice context of Assistant.

Google Assistant will be able to assemble an audio news playlist on demand when users issue the appropriate voice command.

News feeds will be created based on what the individual user cares about. Similar to what happens when opening the Google News app.

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Entrepreneurs who are cheating taxes with online stores, beware: The IRS is looking for new ways to catch suspected tax cheats over social media.

Specifically, the IRS wants a new tool to help it check public social media feeds and websites for details on people already suspected of not complying with the tax code, the tax-collecting agency said in a Dec. 18 request for information from vendors.

Social media could provide investigators with a treasure trove of data, showing where taxpayers live, what they drive and what they are selling online. That data could be useful to the IRS as it tries to catch people cheating on their taxes — if the agency can figure out how to collect and use it without running afoul of its own internal rules.

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One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes—not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything.

In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don’t want to hear about.

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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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AI plays a huge role in how Spotify delivers personalized playlists to users, so it's somewhat fitting that the companys new partnership with Microsoft is focused on messages about how AI can impact all aspects of life -- including education, healthcare and philanthropy. Those messages are going to be showing up in the Discover Weekly playlist for free users, the first time that Spotify has lets brands have full customization and control over advertising in that feed.

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