Have you noticed more photos and videos popping up in your Twitter feed? Well, that's because--as Michael Sippey explained in a blog post--the company is making an effort to make your Twitter experience more visual. According to the post, users will also be able to reply, retweet, or favorite a Tweet without leaving their feeds. Mobile users will need to update their iOS and Android apps to see the change.

Pinterest is not just taking over all your spare time, it has also raised a confirmed $225 million according to AllThingsD. Fidelity Ivedtments led the round, along with a number of other investors that have been part of Pinterest's previous fundraising efforts.

Do you miss the days when MTV actually showed music videos? Do you spend have your day searching for your favorite artists' videos on YouTube? Well, then we have some good news for you. Billboard is reporting that YouTube is introducing a subscription music service that includes video.

Digimind, a social media monitoring and competitive intelligence company, announced the launch of Digimind Social. Digimind Social incorporates data from both social platforms and search engines. This gives brands a more complete picture of their digital footprints, and helps them better anticipate audience needs based on search behavior. Digimind Social is now widely available for the first time in more than 195 countries and in 80 languages.

It's time for another social media IPO. Twitter is expected to makes it S-1 filing public this week. Valued at a reported $15 billion, Twitter filed with the SEC quietly in July and did not provide a timeline. Some worried that a government shutdown could delay the IPO, but according to Quartz - which originally reported the story - the SEC confirmed that it could stay open for weeks in the event of a shutdown.

Social media stops for no man, but what if resources are suddenly scarce due to an unforeseen crisis? Here are four things you can do to keep digital communities humming along even if the "front office" is temporarily closed.

As content providers, it's critical to find a balance between making your presence known on a myriad of channels and spamming already drowning consumers to the point of annoyance (and possible brand detriment). It's also vital that the quality of the content produced doesn't suffer in the race to make it seen.

Back in May, Social Media Today compiled case studies from several reputable sources regarding the correlation between blogging and sales for businesses. Unanimously, studies show that maintaining an active blog can provide an increase in traffic of up to 210% to a website. Clearly, blogging still remains one of the most commonly produced and read forms of content marketing (in fact, many experts find that blogging is the first thing someone thinks of when mentioning content marketing). And, just like any other form of marketing, the blogosphere is evolving.

Publishers aren't alone in their quest to determine what resonates with their audiences as they attempt to use various social media tools to connect with and engage them. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced that it is in the market for a digital tool to help monitor how effectively it's reaching its audience with its messages and whether their response to these messages are positive or negative. And when you aren't pushing content views as your primary goal, it can be hard to know exactly what your social media metrics are and what they mean.

As social media continues on its quest to dominate the way we interact with the web, users benefit from inventive new tools, resources, and capabilities as well as greater specialization and focus. But it's not just the Facebooks and Twitters of the world that offer value and innovation. Often, it's the smaller players that infuse creativity and practical ingenuity into the social space, especially for niche audiences.In particular, three relatively new social platforms merit a closer look based on their distinctive features, approaches and functionality-and for garnering increased attention from social media experts.

In August of 1981, a fledgling cable TV channel launched that forever changed music, television, advertising, marketing, and pop culture. The format was pretty simple: play popular videos around the clock that are introduced and commented on by live hosts and fill around the edges with original programming. Now, 32 years after MTV's arrival, the focus is on social, not music videos, and another revolution is underway that may completely redefine how we think about, consume, and interact with live and prerecorded visual content-courtesy of HuffPost Live (HPL).

As companies large and small have developed active Twitter and Facebook profiles, their ability to interact directly with their client base has reached an unprecedented level. Given how frequently people are on social media-according to Statistic Brain, there are approximately 9,100 tweets sent per second-it may be tempting to reach out to this clientele as often as possible. But an ill-timed or misguided use of social media can lead to angry customers, potentially lost sales, and embarrassing headlines.

It's a question that's been posed since the dawn of the commercial web: Is the internet, long a stronghold for direct marketing, any good for brand advertising?"The question has always been whether brand advertising really works online and whether that money has ever really migrated online," observes Steve Smith, columnist and digital media editor for Media Industry Newsletter (min), and a consultant to web publishers and interactive ad agencies.

As the internet exploded and more and more sites have constant streams of news and commentary on everything from world politics to which celebrities are dead (dead-celeb.com), the importance placed on content curation was, perhaps, inevitable. Separating the wheat from the chaff is sometimes so important to people, they're willing to pay for it.

America loves its Facebook. According to comScore, Inc., the social network had 158.01 million unique visitors in the U.S. in May 2012. Believe it or not, that represented a slight decline in the number of visitors. Despite its popularity, Facebook has some competitors out there, and they may just be stealing a bit of attention from the leader in social networking.

In her annual presentation on the state of the internet, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' analyst Mary Meeker teased out a single theme that will challenge content providers for another generation. The proliferation of devices in the last 5 or 6 years has created a massive new flow of data. But this time that data is coming more from the users than from traditional content providers. The amount of data being created and shared increased nine times in just 5 years to almost 2 zettabytes (or 2 trillion gigabytes) in 2011. That will increase to 5 zettabytes by 2015. The number of photos uploaded and shared each day has gone up from about 200 million in 2010 to more than 500 million (projected) per day this year.

Facebook had a rough start on the stock market, due-in part-to its monetization strategy (or perceived lack thereof). In mid-June of this year, a year after the Facebook initial public offering (IPO), Wall Street got bullish once again when it came to Facebook. The reason is simple. After years of struggling to devise a business model that pleases advertisers and the all-important users, the company has introduced a strategy for monetizing the dynamic social interactions that occur at the heart of the platform-in the newsfeed (this is something I urged the company to do in a piece published in MediaPost back in 2010).

The power of communication is evident throughout the history of humankind. Whether it's Biblical stories about the Tower of Babel, misinterpreted spies in courts of old, or even modern day marketing gaffs in foreign countries, the struggle to be understood continues to this day. In a recent Spiegel article, Franz Josef Och head of Google Translate, laid out his vision for what's next. Och wants to build a perfect translation machine that will instantly translate any text or audio fed into it. And current tools show that we may not be too far away from that dream becoming a reality.

Last month, the Census Bureau released data showing that 38 million Americans speak Spanish at home. This finding places the U.S. fifth on a list of countries by number of Spanish-speakers. Even more interesting among the Census Bureau's findings was that most Americans who speak Spanish at home also report speaking English "very well" (as identified by the findings). Perhaps the most striking among the findings was that 3 million non-Hispanic people reported speaking Spanish at home. The reality reflected in these findings is that Spanish continues to be an integral part of the national fabric.

Last month, the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup Final between Brazil and Spain, aired simultaneously on Univision and ESPN, providing a stark reminder of how important Hispanic Americans are to the continuing growth of soccer in the U.S. While viewership was down 45% for ESPN from the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup Final, viewership for Univision was up 34%. Univision viewership during the match soared to 4 million.