Twitter Testing Automatic In-Stream Image Previews on Twitter.com, and Other Marketing Stories of the Week

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There’s been a lot of buzz about social media this week, especially around social search and visual content. Companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Microsoft have all made some great new additions to their features to improve the social experience for their users. Some of these new features might not have come as a surprise, but we’re certain they’ll give marketers a leg up on their campaigns and strategies. So to make sure you get that leg up on the latest and greatest in marketing, here's what happened this past week.

Facebook to Review Which Pages and Groups Can Show Ads After Complaints About Inappropriate Content, The Next Web

After a huge controversy last month about Facebook's ad content policy, the social network is cracking down on which Groups and Pages are able to display ads alongside their content going forward. This upcoming week, Facebook will manually remove ads from Pages and Groups that feature controversial, violent, graphic, or sexual content. 

Marketers everywhere, rejoice! With these new changes, you won't have to worry about your ad appearing next to controversial content that your brand wouldn't support. Instead of spending time getting out of sticky situations, you can focus on really getting a return on your Facebook ad investment. Learn more about Facebook's review process at The Next Web.

This week Bing announced that it is adding a new social element to its search pages called Bing Boards. Curated by bloggers, experts, and social influencers, Bing Boards will display a collection of images, links, and videos to the right of Bing's organic search results. According to Bing, the Bing Boards could be curated about a variety of topics including politics, hobbies, social issues, and pop culture. 

With Bing’s new Bing Boards, marketers will have another opportunity to improve their search results rankings if they are chosen to be featured. Since there is no algorithm to increase the chance of being featured, marketers should focus on creating original and creative content (as always). Microsoft also mentioned that Bing Boards are just the first of several new social and community experiments coming in the near future -- so marketers should keep an eye out for them in case they present new marketing opportunities. Learn more about Bing Boards at Search Engine Land. 

It seems as if Square is looking to take on Amazon in the ecommerce space. After having been quite successful in the mobile payment systems space, Square launched an online marketplace where merchants can open up virtual stores for free -- however, Square will take a 2.75% cut of every item sold.

With so many brands migrating to the virtual marketplace, Square’s ecommerce venture will offer another marketplace for companies to explore. We don’t know if Square will really be able to take down a giant like Amazon, but it does indicate a trend that retailers are moving away from physical stores. And this is great news for marketers -- with a virtual store, it's much easier to track the conversion path throughout your entire marketing funnel. Learn more about Square's marketplace at Mashable. 

Marketing for ecommerce companies isn't like marketing for brick-and-mortar shops -- with different business needs, ecommerce shops need a personalized marketing playbook. If you're an ecommerce business struggling with making the most of Facebook, you should check out our most recent ebook offer. We’ll show you how to plan your Facebook strategy, direct fans to your website, and turn leads into customers so you can hit the ground running with your ecommerce marketing efforts. Download the ebook today!

LinkedIn has been making some design changes over the past few months. This week, the social network added two new features that could be extremely useful for marketers ... but might end up being a bit creepy as well. The new enhancements to the LinkedIn homepage will include a “Who’s viewed your updates” section, which will allow you to see the performance of your updates and details on which profiles have viewed your status updates. The second addition is the “You recently visited” section, which tracks the personal profiles you have viewed while browsing through LinkedIn.

These new enhancements are great news for marketers. Not only can you get an idea of which content resonates with your LinkedIn connections, but you can also use the new features to identify new business opportunities with leads and customers. Maybe someone views your profile after they commented on your latest blog post -- and if you notice that that happened, you could take your professional relationship to the next level. Learn more about LinkedIn's update at TechCrunch.

With visual content on the rise, it’s about time Twitter started integrating visual content more seamlessly within the social network. This week, a few Twitter users have been included in a test roll-out of automatic in-stream image previews. The new feature removes the need to click on a tweet to see a posted image. Although a number of third-party apps already offer the feature, Twitter.com will hopefully be rolling this out soon to improve its user experience.

For marketers and brands, this means that visual content will play a much heavier hand in attracting and engaging Twitter users. Text tweets are much easier to glance over and less appealing than an in-stream image, so marketers should step up their visual content creation game if Twitter decides to roll out this new feature to everyone. Learn more about Twitter's experiment at The Next Web.

Interested in hearing what the CMO of HubSpot has to say about the stories in this week's roundup? View our Marketing Update podcast below for a taste of the latest inbound marketing news from our CMO Mike Volpe and his co-host, HubSpot Inbound Marketing Manager Rebecca Corliss. You can also subscribe to this weekly video podcast through iTunes if you can't imagine a Sunday without some inbound-themed video antics.

What other stories did you hear about this week that we didn't include?

Image credit: niner bakes

 

Mettant en valeur des sites Web qui intègrent des Tweets Twitter mises en chantier

Twitter is a cool platform, but it has had some problems. It is so crowded, you know? He is so happy and it is therefore based on text, it is quite difficult to get people happy to scroll this hectic timeline of Twitter.

But Twitter it gets. And I think that's why we were seeing so many experimentation on their end in the past months. For example, not too long ago we started seeing multimedia content embedded in tweets. Cool... not a bad not to incorporate more visual content throughout this text. And we also saw the advent of lead cards Twitter generation - it is true, that they're helping companies generate leads more easily via the Twitter timeline, too. And now, according to TechCrunch, they begin to experiment a new feature of embedded tweet which will help you make the most advantageous for the brands share content (if the feature is always deployed full scale).

Again, this is just a test right now, so you will not see this device deployed on behalf of Twitter for your brand that you can see what pops up with some tweets from your timeline. It seems that Twitter is testing a feature in which a tweet that has been incorporated elsewhere lists websites the tweet embarked on. Here is an example:

Twitter has always shown where individual tweets are integrated on? pic.twitter.com/Th5y94omPZ

-Mikko Hypponen ? (@mikko) July 1, 2013

See there down? Where it says 'Embedded in these Web sites? These are the sites that have incorporated this particular tweet - so, theoretically, HubSpot should appear in this tweet now, too. (By the way, I checked, and so far it is not... I'll update you if he makes it, however.)

So if this feature takes place at all, if you embed a tweet on your Web site, then your website should appear at the bottom of this tweet when it is seen on Twitter.

Why is this cool new feature? Because it would be more advantageous for the sites to share the contents of someone else - and share a tweet, specifically, instead of saying... a link inbound to a blog post. It is getting people to use Twitter to find content to link to, since they could get greater visibility by incorporating tweets. It doesn't hurt Twitter, either, as it tinged people to use the functionality of tweets incorporated instead of just take a screenshot of a tweet. Adoption of functionality is a very good thing for the little blue bird.

Twitter said, however, that it is testing a ton of new features like this. So that it can get the axe, while others that we have not yet seen could appear. In itsr blog post, "Innovate experimenting," which was actually released for more than a year to respond to these types of pop-ups from feature, Twitter writes, "we often test hundreds of variants of new features and models of small groups of users...". These experiments we help to understand what experiences of people like best or use most often. When an experiment ends, we study the results and ride the most successful variation of all worldwide as soon as we can." Sounds familiar? If you are a buyer of agile, I think you will recognise approach to Twitter.

What do you think? These tests help Twitter add more value for users and brands? Are they helping to improve the consumption of content of experience?

Image credit: marek.sotak

 

 

10 Quick Tips for Getting More Business Value Out of Twitter

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Social media, especially Twitter, requires a lot of effort in order to extract business value. But with over 200 million active users, the probability that your prospects, leads, and customers are using the Twitter is high. This means conversations that could drive business value are happening; they're just surrounded by irrelevant clutter. 

So how can marketers navigate this social network and prioritize their time so they're only reviewing the tweets that are most important to them? The key is dissecting the Twitterverse into specific segments that are most relevant to your business and using your marketing data to create those groups. And we're going to tell you how.

Let's take a simple case: Wouldn't it be great if your social media manager spent more time tweeting at your leads instead of combing through tons of off-topic posts? Yes, I mean exclusively interacting with people who have already showed interest in your company, perhaps to help guide them further down your marketing funnel. If you knew who on Twitter fit into that specific segment, you could get so much more value out of your social media efforts by focusing more time on that important group of people.

The following list is full of social media tips to help you focus your social media efforts on the right conversations and interactions. We'll describe how a marketer can implement each tip, as well as how a current HubSpot customer could do it using our new social media monitoring tool, Social Inbox. By focusing on targeted Twitter activities like these, you're sure to get more business value out of your time in social media.

As you can imagine, how you communicate with someone who is currently considering your product or service should be different than how you talk to a random person in your network. You should focus on building rapport and strengthening your relationship with your opportunities, and you can do that by paying attention and being gracious.

In the event one of your opportunities comments on, shares, or replies to a piece of your content on Twitter, you should respond. Thank the person, ask them what they learned, or share their tweet with your own followers. In order to find and follow these people in the first place, export a list of your current opportunities and add them to a Twitter List on Twitter.com. Then check in on them every day.

HubSpot customers can easily do this in their Social Inbox by creating a list of their opportunities in HubSpot (perhaps by segmenting by lifecycle stage), and then setting Social Inbox to monitor the tweets of those people in that list. You can also specify that you only want to see messages containing certain keywords, like your company name or your blog. Now you'll see whenever an opportunity mentions you, so you can follow up. 

The marketing process doesn't end once a new customer signs up for your product and service. It's also important to nurture and support your customers in order to retain their business long term. Kick off that relationship by thanking them for choosing your company and greeting each new customer with a friendly tweet.You can do this by having a sales or account management rep send a tweet as soon as a new customer signs up for or purchases your product/service. Make sure to keep track of your customers' Twitter usernames in order to make this easier. For HubSpot customers, our software collects contacts' and customers' Twitter account information to make this type of engagement even easier. Take initiative to collect social media contact information from your visitors and leads so you have accurate Twitter information for each of your contacts. You can do this by adding a new field to the forms on your website. This information will help you implement many of the tips on this list, as well as make sure your information is 100% accurate.If you don't want to add a Twitter username field to every form, perhaps use that particular field on lighter, more top-of-the-funnel offers that an individual might download earlier on in the marketing process. For HubSpot customers, our software will keep this information handy in a prospect's contact record for when you want to target and nurture those people in social media.This is a great tip for local businesses or sales reps who are targeting sales in a specific territory. Twitter tracks its users' geographic information (for those users who have enabled it), which helps you understand where the people you're interacting with are located. While monitoring, prioritize interactions based on where they're tweeting from.

On my way to #SMSSummit New York for day two! Speaking on social + lead gen at 3pm.

— Rebecca Corliss (@repcor) June 12, 2013

Social Inbox helps HubSpot customers target geographic areas through its option to create streams of people exclusive to specific locations. For example, if you were a building contractor who wanted to interact with users in Massachusetts about home improvement projects, you could set up that query in Social Inbox and use it to focus your efforts.Customer support is oh so incredibly important. And if a customer or client is having a problem with your product or service, that's a critical opportunity to either win their life-long support, or lose it forever. That's why it's extremely important to have a solid pulse on how users are responding and using your product. To do this, create a Twitter List of your customers, and use it to monitor their tweets on a regular basis. In Social Inbox, HubSpot customers can add a specific keyword filter to call out instances when customers tweet "help," "support," or specific names of your products or services to make it easier than manually sifting through all of the noise. Here's a thought: The keywords that drive the most traffic to your website from an SEO perspective could also be really helpful for your social media strategy. Set up keyword streams in a tool like HootSuite, TweetDeck, or Social Inbox to monitor those keywords. (For current HubSpot customers, use your Keywords tool and sort by "Visits" to see which keywords might be best to monitor in social media.)Once those streams are set up, they will help you discover people who are interested in those particular topics. Jump into the conversation and perhaps even follow those individuals. If you have content that addresses those topics, share them in the discussion. This type of activity will help you tap a new network of people who may not have discovered your website and content yet.

Wouldn't it be great to use social media to target people who have taken certain actions on your website? Perhaps you have a collection of leads that keeps viewing your pricing page, but haven't yet taken the plunge to purchase your product. 

Nurture those people in social media to give them a little nudge or offer to answer their questions. This might be tricky to do without a robust tool or the ability to track leads taking these actions in your current CRM. Professional and Enterprise HubSpot users, for example, can create a list of users who have viewed any of the important pages on their website and set Social Inbox to monitor it.What other people say about your products/services can have much more credibility than what you say about yourself. Make sure you're monitoring instances of people mentioning your company and products in a positive light. Favorite the most flattering tweets, and use them on a dedicated product testimonial page, landing page, or product page. For HubSpot Social Inbox users, if you prefer to reference quotes from a specific group of people, like customers, set up that monitoring stream based on customer lifecycle stage and filter for mentions of your company.

In which I give the biggest unsolicited plug ever for @HubSpot's Social Inbox -ow.ly/mkYwE

— Zack Bridges (@z_bridges) June 26, 2013

Last but not least, use social media to fuel your competitive intelligence and help you get a leg up on deals you could otherwise lose. If you know which of your leads are interacting with your competitors online, you can use that to modify your strategy and perhaps follow up with a lead sooner than originally planned. Don't lose the deal! Use this information to help you. Sales reps can set up a Twitter stream using a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite to monitor mentions of competitors' names, have a set plan to monitor their leads on Twitter via their own account, or, if they're HubSpot customers, could create a list and monitor their assigned leads in Social Inbox. Simply add a search filter to focus on references of key competitor names and topics that could elude to a competitive conversation. These steps should help you focus your social media efforts to be more relevant and business-focused. Whether you're a HubSpot Social Inbox user or not, be smart about your social media monitoring so you get the most value out of your time.How do you target your social media efforts? 

The History of Advertising: How Consumers Won the War for Their Attention [SlideShare]

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You'll never believe it, but there was a time when humans lived without being blasted by advertising everywhere they turned. In fact, before brands started cramming messages into every communication channel on earth (some even in outer space), "advertising" was simply a helpful suggestion for something you might need -- like soap, for instance.

But over the span of several centuries, basic human needs were met. Industry niches filled up with multiple companies, each competing for a few seconds of your time to meet every conceivable need you had (or that they claimed you had). Suddenly, advertising became ubiquitous, appearing everywhere you looked, listened, moved, called, read, drove, flew, worked, and played. Buy this! Buy that! Free sample! Call us! Email us! Visit us! Follow us!

UGH. How did this happen? Why is it so uncomfortable? And who wins this constant, insufferable war for consumer attention?

We set out to answer these questions and much more in a comprehensive look at the history and evolution of advertising. We went back centuries, examining human communication and civilization as well as key advertising campaigns from each era -- and we packaged it into a SlideShare for you to peruse. As you’ll see, advertising starts to look a lot like marketing, and marketing starts to look like being a great company. And that’s a beautiful thing.

1) Advertising has existed as far back as 3000 BC! (Tweet This Fact)

2) 63% of consumers need to hear company claims 3-5 times before they actually believe it. (Tweet This Fact)

3) You’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad. (Tweet This Fact)

4) The first newspaper ad was in 1650 to offer a reward for 12 stolen horses. (Tweet This Fact)

5) The first professional advertising agency was launched in 1841 in Philly. (Tweet This Fact)

6) Advertising first became an academic discipline in 1900 at Northwestern. (Tweet This Fact)

7) Unilever & JWT first partnered in 1902, creating the longest relationship in advertising history. (Tweet This Fact)

8) A baby formula brand was the first to sponsor a blimp (in 1902). (Tweet This Fact)

9) The first ad agency to launch a product was JWT on behalf of P&G in 1911, for their product Crisco. (Tweet This Fact)

10) The first radio ad spot was offered in 1922: $100 for ten minutes! (Tweet This Fact)

11) In 1929, Lucky Strike spent $12.3M on ads, the most in history to that point to promote just one product. (Tweet This Fact)

12) The first TV ad was for Bulova Clocks & reached 4000 TVs. (Tweet This Fact)

13) In 1946, the U.S. had 12 TV stations. By 2011? 1,700. (Tweet This Fact)

14) Caller ID has been around to spot telemarketers since 1981. (Tweet This Fact)

15) In 1993, the entire internet had 5 million users -- or 0.45% of Facebook’s current user base. (Tweet This Fact)

16) The first email spam was sent by Canter & Siegel law firm in 1994. (Tweet This Fact)

17) In 1998, the average consumer saw 3,000 marketing messages per day. (Tweet This Fact)

18) In 2009, the FTC instituted a series of regulations banning untruthful customer testimonials. (Tweet This Fact)

19) In 2011, there were over 1 trillion pages online. That’s 417 pages for every 1 person! (Tweet This Fact)

20) Google's Eric Schmidt cites that “Every 2 days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” (Tweet This Fact)

Imagine a peace treaty drawn up on Madison Avenue, signed by companies and consumers everywhere. It would surely quote the following:

“If the truth isn’t tellable, fix it so it is.” - John E. Powers, 1870

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” - Herbert Simon, 1971

“You have to turn attention into permission, permission into learning, and learning into trust.” - Seth Godin, 1998

These thinkers tell us all we need to know. First, create great products so your marketing rings true. Being full of baloney simply doesn’t work anymore.

Second, understand that in a world so full of information, the consumer has all the power. They can choose where they spend their time because options are everywhere -- overwhelming, but also empowering them. This means that if they don’t want to pay attention to an interruptive advertisement or marketing message, they can simply choose to spend their time elsewhere.

Lastly, once we build great companies and products and understand that consumer choice trumps marketing, we can begin to build real trust. We can attract attention by creating content that consumers actually want. We can then connect and engage with our customers by adding value in that content through learning or entertainment. And we thus delight our customers because they feel their choice was well worth it and their time well spent.

This is how real trust and loyalty are built. Quite literally, centuries of human evolution are begging companies to do this. It’s time each and every one of us embrace the course of history so we’ll survive in the future.

Want to learn more about the evolution of advertising? Download the free presentation and timeline for an even more in-depth look into how consumers have changed their research and purchase habits!

 

The Ultimate Editing Checklist

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As we all know, content creation isn't as simple as just stringing together a few words and clicking "publish." At least all high-quality content creators know this.

From start to finish, content creation has quite a few steps if you really think about it -- concepting, production, and the whole editorial process. Unfortunately, it's that last one that often gets undermined/rushed through/swept aside, as content creators hurry to get things out the door. But if you really want to ship a remarkable, high-quality piece of content, you can't afford to overlook the editing process. 

And during that editorial process, where there really is a lot to consider, it can be difficult to remember everything you should be thinking about before a piece of content is truly ready to rock. So in an effort to make things a little easier on you, we decided to compile a checklist you can use to make sure your next piece of content is ready and raring to go, whether it be a simple blog post or something longer form, like an ebook.

Bookmark this post, or download this Word Doc with just one click, which you can print out and customize with any additional considerations specific to your own editing process. This way, you can be sure you're not overlooking anything important in future content.

Consider these high-level questions at the beginning stages of the editorial process. (Tip: Ask contributors to run a working title/brief outline for the piece of content by you before they start writing so you can steer them in the right direction and save writers' time.)

  Does this topic align with our content strategy? Will our readers/personas care about it?   Have we covered this topic comprehensively in the past? Will it add anything new and interesting to the noise created by all the content on the web?

30-Day Challenge: 8 Little Changes to Your Marketing That'll Make a Big Impact

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You've all heard of TED Talks, right? Their tagline is "Ideas Worth Spreading," and some colleagues of mine have surfaced one of their talks that I think has an idea worth spreading to a lot of our readers.

So, I'm blogging about it. Like bloggers do.

The TED Talk is from Google's Matt Cutts, and the central idea is that you can do anything for 30 days. "Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life, and try it for the next 30 days," Cutts says. "If you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days."

The 30-day timeline seems, to Matt, to be the perfect amount of time to add a good habit to your daily repertoire -- or subtract a harmful one. I think this is a fantastic challenge for anyone on a personal level, but I also thought maybe inbound marketers could take on the challenge in an attempt to improve their marketing.

In our office, some of us have taken on our own personal 30-day challenges (which I'll share with you at the end of the post) but I wanted to put forth both the video that explains the challenge, as well as some ideas that inbound marketers could possibly try out for the next 30 days. Monday is the start of a new month, after all, so I thought this would be a good time to noodle over what we could do every day for the next month to improve our marketing.

Here is the video clip (it's short, just a couple minutes), and some possible 30-day inbound marketing challenges we could take on below it.

Many inbound marketers cite content creation as a challenge, which is why I was immediately struck by an example Matt gave in his TED talk:

"Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own fifty thousand-word novel from scratch in 30 days. It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day, for a month. So I did. By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. You might be sleep deprived, but you'll finish your novel."

This really resonated with me as a content creator, because when you're suffering from writer's block (or just really don't want to write), the best solution truly is to just do it. So, consider writing 500 words a day for one month. You could use the content for an ebook, blog post, whitepaper -- whatever. Heck, some of it might be total rubbish that you never even publish. But you'll get used to writing content, and after 30 days, I have a hunch you'll feel a lot less intimidated about content creation, and be much better and faster with it, too.

... or another visual content editing or creation tool, if Photoshop isn't your jam. We all know visual content is hot, but we don't all know how to take advantage of it in a practical way -- because we're not all designers, and we can't all afford to hire one. At the end of this post is a free visual design crash course. That's a good place to start if you're looking to up your design chops, and maybe center your 30-day challenge around improving your ability to create visual content.

Effective inbound marketers make data-driven decisions. If you're comfortable using Excel, you can do a lot of really cool number crunching that sheds remarkable insights on your marketing activities. Spend 30 days trying to learn new Excel functions -- you can start simple, and as you get more comfortable crunching numbers, experiment with weirder and geekier functions. Your marketing will certainly thank you.

Marketers are typically pretty closely aligned with their sales organization -- or at least they strive to be -- but its easy to forget about leads once they become customers. But if you're truly practicing inbound marketing, you're trying to solve for the customer, not just the close. So perhaps a month of talking to customers could help you get back in touch with what it's really like to use your product or service, if you feel out of the loop. For instance, our CEO Brian Halligan makes it a habit to speak to at least three customers every week. It's an invaluable source of feedback that can help you make better Marketing and Sales decisions.

Or perhaps you don't feel as connected to your sales organization as you wish. Spending a little time every day listening in on a sales call is an excellent use of time to get some insight into the kinds of questions Sales is fielding. You could use the information to guide your content creation, SEO, and sales enablement strategies.

Sometimes people give up on those things too fast. We just don't have the time, you know? It might be time to give one of those new social networks the old college try, though. See if Pinterest really could work for you. Or Twitter. Or LinkedIn. Or Quora. If you don't put in a concerted effort on a consistent basis, it's really hard to make anything work well.

A/B tests help inbound marketers make incremental improvements to their marketing -- backed by data, not feelings. Imagine if you ran a new test every day for a month. The impact on your marketing would be huge! If it seems insane to run that many A/B tests, just check out this blog post -- there are 25 experiments in there that you can run on your email marketing alone.

It's so easy to get into work, open your email, and dive into your work -- tasks, calls, meetings, etc. Before you know it, your day's over, and you start it all over the next day. When do you have time to actually learn new things, though? Challenge yourself to spend 30 minutes a day just ... reading. Industry news, inbound marketing news, a book, or even brand new sites you've never heard of before. I even recommend reading stuff that has nothing to do with marketing or your industry at all. It gives you perspective that helps you do your job better, spurs ideas for new types of content, and keeps you sharp when you're working with people outside the four walls of your company.

A group of us are supporting our fundraising campaign for our partner, charity: water. We're taking on more personal challenges -- things like no sugar or no coffee (aaah!), or adding in things like reading 20 pages or working out every day. Any day we fail to live up to the challenge, we're donating a dollar to our #failwhale jar, which you can see to the right. So, you know, it makes failure a little less dire. ;-) I, personally, am taking on a 30-day challenge to not slouch, and a marketing challenge to not leave work until my inbox is under 20 emails (when you work in editorial for an inbound marketing department, that is a very real marketing-related challenge).

Whether you choose to do a personal challenge or marketing-related one, take one last piece of Matt Cutts' advice to heart:

"When I made small sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. There's nothing wrong with big crazy challenges -- in fact, they're a ton of fun -- but they're less likely to stick ... The next 30 days are going to pass, whether you like it or not. So why not think about something you have always wanted to try, and give it a shot for the next 30 days?"

So, what will you try? Share your ideas in the comments -- or, if you've already done this challenge in the past, share what you did, and whether you stuck with it after the 30 days were up!

Bye Bye, Google Reader: 3 Viable RSS Reader Alternatives You Can Use

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On July 1, 2013, Google Reader will be shutting down for good. It seems like forever ago that we wrote about this (in reality it has only been about 3 months), but since most people do things at the last minute, I figured it was pretty likely you haven't switched your RSS reader over to something else. I certainly haven't.

So, if you're in a last minute panic about how you're going to surface the day's content, here are some of the RSS reader options out there for you. I've tried to provide the most critically acclaimed ones, but let me know if you use something else that people should consider trying out.

Feedly is one of the most frequently cited alternatives to Google Reader, probably because it has been around for a while -- so it has had time to work out kinks and establish a large user base from which to draw feedback to inform their product development.

You'll find the experience using Feedly very similar to your experience using Google Reader, so if you're averse to change, this might be the best option for you with the least amount of learning curve. (For those who see this as an opportunity to try something new, you might want to move on to some of the later options.) In Feedly, you'll be able to customize your feed to look pretty similar to Google Reader -- for instance, you can just get a list of post titles to scan through if you like to scroll through content quickly in the morning. You can also organize your content how you wish -- it lets you create new categories based on, well, whatever you want, really. There is, of course, also a free app for iOS and Android.

It's easy to get set up with Feedly -- it offers a one-click Google Reader import. So it takes about five seconds to get set up. Then, you can organize your content however you wish by simply dragging and dropping your content into new categories.

Digg is probably better known for its link sharing product, but it's a natural jump for the company to create a reader of its own. A little less established than Feedly, Digg Reader was released in beta after working on it for a few months. You might want to sign up for a beta of the tool if you're one of those people looking to experiment with something new. Digg is said to have some pretty cool stuff in the works -- one of the cooler features is its attempt to make RSS readers more social by letting you know what content is the most popular in your social network and even ranking the popularity of articles so you don't miss out on the biggest news items.

This is all very cool stuff, but the only shortcoming here is that the product is really only a few months old. If you're cool with some potential bugginess, though, Digg might be the right new reader for you to try out. Like Feedly, Digg Reader allows for Google Reader imports, so it should be easy to get set up. It also has an iOS app, but the Android app isn't quite there yet -- it's slated to be out in about a month.

(Image credit: Mashable)

If the idea of paying for an RSS reader seems insane, this is not the option for you (although it really only boils down to $2/month if you're using the Premium version). But NewsBlur is an option very well suited for anyone who likes to do a lot of online reading -- or just likes to look like they do, I suppose.

NewsBlur has about 7,500 people using Premium accounts, and another 11,000 or so users of the free version. When you pay for an account, you get unlimited sites, access to all your stories at once, and more frequent updates. The free version only allows 64 sites, and only displays 10 stories at a time. If you're not looking to pay for a reader and/or don't need that much content, that quickly, that often, I'd say the free version isn't as good as Feedly -- this is really best for someone who wants turbocharged reader features and is willing to pay for them.

It does, however, have a pretty cool training feature that trains the RSS reader to know what kinds of stories you're likely to be interested in -- so if content discovery is important for you, NewsBlur is worth a look-see. It also conveniently offers a Google Reader import option, and access across web, Android, and iOS.

There are a lot of other alternatives out there trying to get in on Google's RSS reader space now that it's bowing out of the game. Let us know if there are other serious contenders people should consider. And if you're considering AOL's reader as a replacement ... well, just know that people are having some serious import issues, and citing problems across both Chrome and Safari, too. So. You know. Maybe stay away from that one.

What reader are you switching over to? Or are you just abandoning RSS readers entirely?