HOOTSUITE.COM — Social paid advertising has seen increased investment as brands look to expand customer engagement and ROI beyond organic social posts. According to eMarketer, by 2017, social network ad spending will reach $35.98 billion, representing 16% of all digital ad spending globally. Today, to engage…

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.startup funding hub. After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5.2 billion so far this year, on track to be the highest annual total in years.

SEARCHENGINELAND.COM — Having a fast site is important, since faster sites are rewarded with improved search engine optimization (SEO) and the ability to drive more visits and conversions. More people visiting your site can lead to more sales, signups or traffic in general. That’s a true win-win. Of course, where there’s a positive, there is always a negative.

ADESPRESSO.COM — With the ever-growing list of social media sites available to start marketing on, it’s often difficult to choose which ones you want to actually prioritize.Facebook is almost always a given for brands to start with, and Instagram and Twitter are normally ranked high too.Pinterest marketing has…

IDEOU.COM — This post comes from Unstuck, a site dedicated to providing tips, questions, and points of view to provoke insight and action. Unstuck is an initiative of SYPartners and part of the Kyu Collective—a group of diverse creative companies, including IDEO, committed to addressing the most significant…

TECHCRUNCH.COM — Another week, another high-profile hack. This week it was (checks notes) Reddit. What makes this one marginally more interesting is that the victims were using two-factor authentication, i.SMS codes texted to them to verify their identities when their accounts were accessed — which turned out to be little more than a speed bump for the attackers.

HOOTSUITE.COM — Over 80 percent of companies agree that social is a vital channel for delivering exceptional customer experiences. But only 58 percent of companies have a defined strategy for integrating social into their existing customer experience programs. This report reveals how enterprise organizations are…

HOOTSUITE.COM — Thanks to the proliferation of online reviews and social media, consumers are now in charge of a brand’s reputation just as much as the organization itself. By using social media to proactively strengthen and protect your organization’s reputation, you can increase your reach, establish…

JEFFBULLAS.COM — One of the many challenges that you will face when trying to raise awareness, generate leads and promote your product, is the fact that you have a rather limited resource pool to work with. SaaS products are not exactly easy to advertise on all mediums and chances are you won’t be able to do it properly on a lot of them.

MASHABLE.COM — For a brief moment of bliss, Facebook was down Facebook experienced an apparent widespread outage.Image: Photothek via Getty Images Try going to Facebook.com on your browser, and you’ll probably see nothing this morning. Just after 9 a.m. PT, users started posting on Twitter about the social…