I’ve been recommending PostPlanner to many of my clients (and friends) for months now.

If you don’t know what PostPlanner is, it’s a way to schedule, manage and measure updates on your Facebook Page (here’s a video tutorial).

They recently added a feature that allows you to quickly see what time of day is best for you to update your Page….

NetSmart is Howard Rheingold’s latest book.    It synthesizes his 30 years of experience if being a model digital citizen and what he has learned from asking other this simple question:  How to use social media intelligently and mindfully?

[Thoughtful post on using social media by Beth Kanter - JD]

John Haydon shares eleven important thing to remember when you bring social media into your organization.

The news feed is the first thing that you see when you arrive on Facebook and it really is the fluid content rich feature that drives most of the engagement on the site. They are constantly making changes to the feed in an attempt to improve user experience (and in recent times to increase revenues through ads) and just this week Facebook introduced 3 major changes that will change what we all see in the feed….

These three tips will help you retain media professionals and help increase your chances of coverage…

A new study confirms journalist love online newsrooms. The report published by the TEKGROUP found that nearly all media professionals find online newsrooms important. And over a quarter of journalists report visiting corporate online newsrooms weekly — even daily.

Over 80 percent report that online newsrooms increase their productivity and cite “easy-to-find, relevant, timely content is certainly one way to help increase your chances of coverage.”…

For many years there was a long-running debate amongst we commentators which ran along the lines of, “Should we even be strategising and measuring social media?

[Now, there shouldn’t be an question, right? Right! JD]

PR Newswire recently took a look at how press releases sent on the wire perform in terms of number of views.  The stats are quite revealing: Need I say more?

Adding multimedia to your press releases, articles and blog posts will give you a remarkable bump in views.

And since that’s the goal of content, it’s truly amazing to me that only 55% of the PR folk recently polled by PRESSfeed about their online newsroom content, say they are using multimedia with news content. Seriously? Look at the graph again, please. A 77% increase in views.

A study of corporate websites and newsrooms shows that not many companies use multimedia with their press releases. The vast majority are text only….

Business owners everywhere need to update their level of awareness of the effectiveness of inbound marketing versus the traditional outbound marketing, and they must stay on top of the data available re the effectiveness of the key social media platforms in delivering new business leads, so that in future they can make effective marketing decisions.

A key piece of data now available to business owners, indicates that leads sources as a result of inbound marketing, are 61% less costly than leads sourced as a result of traditional outbound marketing efforts.

This excellent article (albeit a promotion piece), provides great intelligence about many aspects of lead generation, intelligence that all business owners should be putting to good use, as they plan future marketing activities….

Robin Good: Vengage is a new web app which allows anyone to created, edit and personalize professional-looking infographics by utilizing ready-made elements and an easy-to-use interface.

From the Carlispina blog: “The newest tool for creating interactive infographics online is Venngage from the Vizualize.Me team.

Building on the concepts that are at work in the Vizualize.Me infographic resume tool, Venngage allows users to create infographics on any topic with great simplicity.

Despite this simplicity, Venngage is also extremely versatile, offering 14 different infographic templates, each of which is highly customizable, including the ability to resize the overall infographic to meet your specific needs.

… a wide range of data types since it offers more than a dozen different types of charts, a host of symbols and shapes and the ability to add your own images.

Unlike many other infographic tools, Venngage also includes the ability to link to other web content directly in the infographic’s text.”

Venngage offers the option to export a .png file, to share your final work on social media, to keep private, or to embed it on any website or blog.

“Unlike image-based infographics, Venngage’s infographics are pure HTML elements and 100% search engine optimized.”

(Source: Carlispina Blog)

Find out more: http://venngage.com/ 

Hey everyone — this looks like a really great FREE tool for taking a bunch of data and creating a stunning visual story. I haven’t tested it because I don’t have a pile of data to crunch, make it look beautiful, or tell a story with it. 

But if you do, then I wanted to make sure I passed this along.

Enjoy trying it out.