Monday, March 31, 2014
38 Gifted Poets on Twitter
April marks the 18th annual National Poetry Month, a 30-day celebration of poets and poetry established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. Every year, schools, organizations and individuals take advantage of this time to create a dialogue around poetry's cultural importance.
To get you geared up for a month of verse appreciation, we've rounded up a list of poets you should follow on Twitter. Poets use the social platform in a variety of exciting ways, whether it's to promote poems, disperse literary news or just as extensions of their personalities.
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It's Time for a YouTube Competitor
It was reported last week that Yahoo is getting into the online video business by courting YouTube stars and networks. The move could mark one of the biggest challenges to YouTube's audience dominance and create serious competition in the online video world.
As of September 2013, more than 17% of all Internet traffic was going to YouTube. The only site to have more traffic than that was another streaming video behemoth — Netflix. With so many Internet users looking for video content, and with so many video creators left unhappy due to changing content ID rules and low monetization rates, it only makes sense that competitors should start to rise. Read more...
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Report: Google+ Brand Posts Get Twice the Engagement of Tweets
We've all heard the claims that Google+ is a ghost town and that the network's population is artificially inflated, but a Forrester Research analyst says marketers are crazy to ignore it.
The analyst, Nate Elliott, based his assertion on a study of 60,000 online adults in the United States. The report found that 22% of those adults had visited Google+ within the last month
"That’s the same number who told us they use Twitter, and more than told us they use LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Instagram," Elliott wrote. "That means you can build a real follower base on Google Plus: On average, top brands have collected 90% as many fans on Plus as on Twitter. (In fact, the brands we studied have more followers on Google Plus than on YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram combined.)" Read more...
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15 Stunning Instagrams of the Eiffel Tower
Bon anniversaire, Eiffel Tower! The famous Parisian landmark is celebrating 125 years of being open to the public on Monday.
Named after its designer, Gustave Eiffel, the monument is one of the most photographed icons in all of France
To delight your inner Francophile, we've rounded up 15 incredible Instagram photos of the popular French tower
Curious angles
Black and white
All of the lights
Hyper filters
Classic
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. Read more...
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5 Tips for Interacting with People You Admire on Twitter
Twitter is quickly becoming the latest and greatest trend for careerists to communicate with people they admire in the workforce. Plenty of professionals boast that it’s more personal and directed than LinkedIn, and you can probably learn a lot more about a person from his or her Twitter feed than most places on the web.
But of course, one major question comes to mind: What exactly does it mean to “communicate" with someone on Twitter—and how can you do so without coming on too strong?
Though a response isn’t always guaranteed, there are a couple of things you can do to really get influencers talking. Read more...
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Saturday, March 29, 2014
3 Ways to Enjoy the Kid's Choice Awards Online
Transformers: Age of Extinction actor Mark Wahlberg will host Nickelodeon's family friendly Kid's Choice Awards on Saturday starting at 8 p.m. ET, with performances from Aloe Blacc and American Authors. The red orange carpet begins at 7:30 p.m. ET.
"This year, not only will kids decide who wins the coveted orange blimps, but they have the opportunity to influence the show through a series of live votes," Matthew Evans, senior vice president of digital at Nickelodeon, told Mashable. "We feel the experience on-air and online should extend to all the touch points used by every member of the family." Read more...
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30% of U.S. Adults Use Facebook for News, Study Says
Social media permeates everything we do, so it's no surprise that it's also changing the way we consume news
A new study from Pew Research shows that out of the 64% of American adults who use Facebook, nearly half (30%) use the social network to keep up with news.
On YouTube, 10% of U.S. adults use the video platform to get news, while only 8% look for news on Twitter.
While these percentages, compared to each social network's overall user base, are impressive, they're still small portions of the U.S. adult population. Still, as digital and social media evolves, we can expect social news consumption to advance alongside it. Read more...
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Friday, March 28, 2014
Put a Unique Twist on Portrait Photography for Our Challenge
Photograph a faceless portrait for this week's Mashable Photo Challenge, guest-hosted by freelance photographer Chris Cody. The 24-year-old Texas native started this creative trend earlier this year
"I had never seen anything like it done before," he said. Cody features many fun examples on his Instagram account
Cody joined the Instagram community a few years ago. "I heard about it from a coworker while I was working at Starbucks," he said. "She explained it to me like it was a haven of inspiration that gave a peek into people's lives."
He downloaded and explored the app, and was impressed that so many users were doing incredible things with just a mobile phone. At first, his account was filled with selfies and typical inspirational quotes. Then he started to put more thought into the composition of the photos he was sharing Read more...
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'Twitter, Mtwitter!': Turkish Prime Minister's 9 Craziest Quotes About Social Media
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan really doesn't like social media.
Four days before the municipal elections, the Turkish strongman has blocked Twitter and banned YouTube after corruption allegations surfaced on the two social media platforms.
Here are some of Erdoğan's best quotes about social media — from the "scourge" that is Twitter, to the case of the "smeared housewife." Read more...
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Thursday, March 27, 2014
How Are Millennials Coping With Cancer?
Cancer is a complex and harrowing disease that affects people of all age groups — both patients and their loved ones. But those who are diagnosed in their twenties and thirties face unique struggles, and many need to set aside life milestones for treatment and recovery.
We learn about the millennial cancer patient in Iris Mansour's recent Mashable Spotlight story, which explores how young adults relieve the loneliness of their illnesses. The piece follows 29-year-old cancer survivor Jenna Benn, whose deeply human struggle shows us why the invincible generation isn't ready for cancer, and how we might work to change that. Read more...
More about Twitter, Health, Social Media, Social Good, and Cancer
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How Sevenly Became America's Most Social Small Business
This month, Mashable announced Sevenly as the winner of America's Most Social Small Business. The three-year-old social good apparel company has gone from a closet office with four employees to a 33-person operation that's raised more than $3 million for charities around the world. Read on to learn how Sevenly harnessed the power of social media to change the way people think about — and wear — charity.
Sevenly co-founder Aaron Chavez isn’t your typical entrepreneur.
At the age of 18, Chavez paid for part of his junior college by creating a social media consulting business — one that eventually paid him a six-figure salary. (To put that feat into context, convincing a small business owner in 2010 — when Twitter was more of a buzzword than a ubiquitous marketing tool — that they should pay a teenager to tell them how to use a website was, at best, a tough sell and, at worst, a Sisyphean task.) Read more...
More about Social Media, Small Business, Charities, Social Entrepreneurship, and Business
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Facebook Paper: The Inside Story Is Not What You'd Expect
Paper doesn't quite fit the typical Facebook mold.
For starters, the standalone app took the company nearly 30 months to build — a lifetime by Facebook's "move fast and break things" standard. When Paper was finally unveiled, many users were pleasantly surprised by the app's design, which is image-heavy and — with the exception of a few buttons in the upper righthand corner — looks next to nothing like the Facebook app with which we've grown familiar.
While not unexpected, the app was still uncommon. Facebook has built five other standalone apps over its 10-year-existence, including the traditional Facebook app. That group includes one app you've probably never heard of (Facebook Pages Manager is just for Page admins), and another Facebook hopes you never will (Poke, a Snapchat look-a-like intended for the general public, hasn't been updated since its release in December 2012). Read more...
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60+ Events in Analytics, Marketing and More
The Mashable Events Board is a great place to find leading conferences in your industry, whether it's advertising, technology, media or public relations. This week, we're highlighting five events that we think can help move your career forward, from those in Chicago to London. If you don't find something that's right for you, check out more than 60 events featured in our complete listing.
On the Events Board, you can sort listings by date added, get discount codes as a Mashable reader and watch videos of past events to get previews of what to expect. You can also follow @MashableEvents on Twitter to catch the best events before they sell out. More about Events, Marketing, Conferences, Social Media, and Analytics
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20 Lovely Cherry Blossom Photos to Bloom Into Spring
Signs of spring are out in full force — none more obvious than the fully-bloomed pink and white cherry blossoms.
From late March to mid-April, and sometimes even early May, Japan is covered in lush pink flower petals from sakura, or cherry blossom trees
Each year, the Japanese gather in large numbers wherever these blooming trees are found. There, they practice Hanami, the centuries-old tradition that involves picnicking beneath sakura.
If you can't book a ticket to see them for yourself, stroll through these 20 beautiful photos from Instagram users who are taking advantage of this stunning springtime show. Read more...
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7 Reddit AMAs That Went Horribly Wrong
Before you say "ask me anything," you should really mean anything.
That's one of the many life lessons Reddit has taught us. The online community and self-proclaimed "front page of the Internet" has created a popular series called "Ask Me Anything," a Q&A format hosted by celebrities, activists, regular citizens with interesting stories and more.
Users of the site are invited to engage with AMA hosts, but sometimes things don't go so well. The AMA format is a demanding, open forum and questions will truly run the gamut. If you aren't willing to answer a bevy of random queries thoughtfully, you aren't going to do well. Bad Reddit AMAs have even been the topic of a thread on the site itself, where users gripe about the worst Q&A sessions in the site's history. Read more...
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Optimize Your Social Presence With These App-on-App Strategies
Wherever social media goes, hundreds of apps will follow
There’s a major trend in the tech world to build partnering apps for outlets such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Each platform has dozens of outsider tools that revolve around optimizing your experience. They tell you who to follow, schedule your posts and generally organize your day-to-day social activity.
But you might be wondering: Do we really need all of these burgeoning apps? With hundreds of options to choose from, it can sometimes feel like social media overkill
To help you decide, we've gathered up some of the most popular tools out there and the ways you can use them. Read more...
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Twitter Lets You Add 4 Photos to Tweets, Tag Anyone in Them
In case anyone doubted Twitter's commitment to photo-sharing — or to becoming more like Facebook — the company added a couple of features Wednesday that made its direction clear.
You can now add four photos to a single tweet and for the first time, you can tag up to 10 friends in a Twitter photo, without taking away from your 140-character count.
The photos you add will appear as a four-part collage in your timeline. If anyone clicks on one of them, they'll get the full picture. In Tweetdeck, however, the pictures appear to simply follow one after the other. Read more...
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