how do you tell the difference between a "ninja" and a "guru"? A "maven" and a "marketing expert"? For that, we've created a helpful guide so you can hire the social media bullshit artist that best fits your company's needs: - Pando: How to tell the difference between a social media maven, a ninja, and a guru

So, how did this local come by his expertise? Years of work in developing, implementing and managing integrated offline/online marketing strategies... Far-ranging, diverse experience in marketing? Extensive education in social media technologies and how/when/why to use them? Nope. He’s an expert because he has a popular Facebook page, which is …

With the release of its new Polls feature... you can now create super-simple polls directly on Twitter with just the click or a button or a tap on your phone... the ins and outs of Twitter polls, how to set them up, and nine engaging ways you can use polls today. - The Complete Guide to New Twitter Polls: What They Are, How They Work and 9 …

showing people what’s going on is much more important than being present in that moment ... What you fail to understand, what you’ve never thought about understanding is why you do it... Every stupid video is a waste of 3 minutes you’ll never get back, and every picture is there to show the 1% of your life where you can smile for the camera…

Social media marketing software team admits they’re failing at social media marketing...The bottom seems to be falling out across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+... The Buffer team is running some experiments to try to determine the cause of this huge loss in social referral traffic, but I have a few ideas of my own ... - OMG. Buffer…

the value of curation combined with a second, algorithmic step: personalization. Fill a barrel with the best of the best. Now when I walk in, based on insights about my taste and what I’ve selected in the past, choose *for me* from the barrel. Wow! Thanks! - Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram — Medium

you don’t have to be overwhelmed by social media change, espcially if you can get your head around some fundamental truths about how the web works... if you’re spending all your time learning the shiny new thing, are you taking energy and resources away from the stuff that is really impacting your business? - Five ways to calm down and not …

on top of Twitter, you can now create images with the perfect size and format for Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest. You can create the visuals, share them across all platforms and then analyze them with Buffer’s analytics to know how well they’re performing. - Pablo 2.0: Create Social Media Images, Perfect for Everywhere

We'll probably never get a true "dislike" button on Facebook, but the social network just started to roll out the closest thing we've seen yet. Reactions, a new feature for Facebook's ubiquitous Like button that allows you to respond to posts with emoji...: "like," followed by "love," "haha," "yay," "wow," "sad" and "anger." - Facebook React…

Do people really want to have a conversation with brands, or their government?

There are a number of effective strategies for overcoming the harm caused by a personal attack on social media. And your response can be a democratic one that includes fighting bad speech with more (good) speech. If someone’s attacked you on social media, here are four steps for responding: - How to handle personal attacks on social media | …

"Why don't we just build our community on Facebook?" Some thoughts after a month playing with Knowledge Hub

Here we look at five superb Instagram tools featuring functions ranging from time-saving scheduling to in-depth analytics, along with comments from Instagram experts: - 5 outstanding Instagram analytics tools | Articles | Home

the skills gap is an education problem .. we’re not preparing our future workforce ... although millennials collectively hold more college degrees than any preceding generation, they face record unemployment rates - The (Free) Crash Course in Social Media You Need to Land Your Next Job | Ryan Holmes | LinkedIn

most people are too busy to keep up with whatever it is you’re doing. They have their own lives and can’t be expected to sit around and click every link you post to Twitter... I don’t think you can rely on social media to do your work for you. You have to put it in front of people directly. - The Work Nobody Can See — Medium

an app that combs through your Twitter or Facebook feeds, identifying the links being shared the most by your friends... a very efficient way to use the curation you’ve already done of your Twitter followers to curate news... what we’re not doing is semantic analysis, and scanning keywords in articles. Nor are we using human editors ... If …

Had Turing executives kept mum when the news broke, it is likely that the story’s lifespan would’ve been short lived. Unfortunately for them, Shkreli opened his mouth. - The Art of Handling a PR Implosion

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

At Buffer, we create all the images for our blogposts and social media sharing without any outside design help. We rely on a handful of amazing tools and resources to get the job done, and I’ll be happy to share with you the ones we use and the extras that we’ve found helpful or interesting. - 23 Tools and Resources to Create Images for Social …

nothing about Federman’s job responsibilities at Fortune are traditional for a Time Inc. employee. He works closely with colleagues in editorial, public relations and marketing. He mines analytics for data about the best times to post stories and what’s connecting with readers. He identifies trending stories and occasionally writes one ... helps d…

FalseHilarious: “[US] Corporations on Twitter”. Worth watching if only for the humour, but it’s interesting that these sort of mistakes haven’t been made that often by the EU Institutions, as I originally feared in 2009, with the more-amusing-than-revolting exception of The Great Berlusconi TwitterWall Kerfuffle (2010).

If you stop to think about it, you might get appalled at how much time, money, and effort are meaningless for brand social marketing.... Get back to basics... It comes down to two simple mentalities. They want compelling content and they want a connection that makes sense for them, not you. - There Are Only Two Things People Want from Your B…

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

I have been under the impression for quite a while that eventually one of the large content marketing platforms...  will develop social media capabilities ... that content marketing would be the parent, and social marketing would fit underneath it. What Sprinklr is trying to do is flip the script on that, where social media becomes the parent a…

You really have two types of people you can leverage to aid your target marketing and social strategy efforts: - Influencers: Popular, well-respected, quasi-celebrities in your industry/space that share and engage in relevant content, and have a large audience and an engaged following. - Advocates: Vocal evangelists who are already a big fan o…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…

We collected a trove of interesting and actionable headline formulas from some of the best sources for headline writing, and we’ve tossed in a few of our favorite Buffer headline formulas, too. - 30+ Ultimate Headline Formulas for Tweets, Posts, and Emails — Social Media Tips — Medium

"There are times you simply need to destroy what exists in order to replace it with something better. Such is the case for social media... brand organic opportunities have disappeared and social media marketing has become entirely a paid game... Evidence of social media's remarkably poor reach is all around, and many social media marketers ar…

A tl;dr version of “From One Spokesperson To Millions” the brilliant 45-minute longread by @jessedee on taking one of the most successful campaigns of all time - Paul Hogan’s 1980s Tourism Australia campaign - and updating it for the age of user-generated content. Some key quotes:

Social and mobile have fundamentally altered attention. Platforms for self-expression and communication are the largest and most important media companies of the millennial age, dominating share of attention and engagement for young people. And the behavior of the young is predictive of the future. - May I Have Your Attention, Please? — Medium