More than a game, Fortnite is emerging as the best new social network

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The wild popularity of the shooter game is a reminder that socializing is way more fun when you’re actually doing something with your friends.

It has more than 200 million users, up to 8 million of whom are online at any one time. Most spend six to 10 hours a week on the platform. And half of teens say they use it to keep up with friends.

Snapchat? Instagram? Twitch?

Nope. Fortnite. The wildly popular online video game has quietly become one of the planet’s biggest social networks. Not in a traditional sense, of course. Fortnite Battle Royale is, first and foremost, a last-man-standing, shooter-style game, especially popular among teens and twentysomethings. (Disclaimer here: I’m not a hardcore Fortnite player, though I know plenty of people who are.) In the game, 100 players at a time jump out of a flying bus and onto an island. Combatants are left to duke it out, Hunger Games-style, with a variety of weapons, armor, “healables,” and other tools at their disposal. Though the premise is violent, the game itself really isn’t, with none of the gore or blood of more graphic offerings. Eventually, the final combatant claims the coveted “Victory Royale.” All told, each match lasts around 20 minutes.

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20 expert predictions for the future of customer service

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” ~ John F. Kennedy

Preferences and expectations are changing and growing among consumers just as quickly as advancements in technology, encouraging (if not demanding) that brands embrace a strategy of non-stop adaptation to the next generation and the next big thing.

 

 

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Top 10 social media power tools

How do you turn your social network into the ultimate lead generating device?

You have an incredibly valuable resource at your disposal already when it comes to creating leads for your business: your own social network. What is the best way to leverage this resource? From discovering new leads to maintaining links to old ones, here are ten social media power-tools that will help you turn your social network into the ultimate lead generating device.

 

 

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Job-seekers with a strong online social network are 5 times as likely to find a job

Users with strong social networking ties found new jobs at a rate of 33.2 percent.

It appears that being active on Facebook can get you that new job.  According to a new study by Facebook data scientists, job-seekers with a strong, deep, and rich social network online are five times as likely to land that new job.

 

 

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App activity by Facebook users shared more than 1 billion times each day

Platform is getting major results.

Facebook said users share their app activity more than one billion times each day using the social network. These include details like the music they’re listening to (done 40 billion times so far), their reading progress (shared 40 million times), and their fitness updates.

 

 

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Facebook’s silent majority holds the key to the company’s future

If Facebook can persuade that silent majority to become more engaged in the site its future looks pretty bright.

Facebook is a pretty divisive company. One group took to the the social network, sharing their lives in updates and shifting a good portion of their social interactions onto Facebook’s sprawling social graph. The other group  took the opposite direction, avoiding the site entirely, or canceling their accounts, or griping as they came to endure Facebook as a necessary evil of being online.

 

 

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New tech boom in San Francisco brings jobs but also worries

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Twitter and other tech start-ups are gravitating toward San Francisco.

Twitter will be moving into its new headquarters in downtown San Francisco this month.  It will occupy three floors of an 11-story 1937 Art Deco building that has sat shuttered for five years. Outside, its blue bird logo will replace the former main tenant’s sign, whose analog clocks remain frozen at 9:18, 4:33 and other times past.

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Pinterest leads consumers to online product purchases

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Thirty-two percent of surveyed consumers have made a purchase after seeing an image on a social image-sharing site.

Retailers have some new social commerce opportunities on the horizon. Consumers are spending more and more time with image-sharing social networks like Pinterest and Polyvore, and they are clicking through to product websites quite frequently.

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