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In the last update, Google changed the layout of posts so that you only see three lines of the original post before you see “Read more” link. In other words, your first sentence has to be a gripping teaser to get people to click “Read More.”

The ideal length of a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters To maximize the readability and appearance of your posts on Google+, you may want to keep your text on one line.

Many different studies over the years have confirmed that shorter posts are better on Facebook.

Writing for KISSmetrics, headline expert Bnonn cites usability research revealing we don’t only scan body copy, we also scan headlines. As such, we tend to absorb only the first three words and the last three words of a headline. If you want to maximize the chance that your entire headline gets read, keep your headline to six words.

some of the highest-converting headlines on the web are as long as 30 words. As a rule, if it won’t fit in a tweet it’s too long. But let me suggest that rather than worrying about length you should worry about making every word count. Especially the first and last 3.

The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words

to ensure maximum comprehension and the appearance of simplicity, the perfect line length ranges between 40 and 55 characters per line, or in other words, a content column that varies between 250-350 pixels wide (it depends on font size and choice).

Consider that shorter lines appear as less work for the reader; they make it easier to focus and to jump quickly from one line to the next. Opening paragraphs with larger fonts—and therefore fewer characters per line—are like a a running start to reading a piece of content. This style gets readers  hooked with an easy-to-read opening paragraph, then you can adjust the line width from there.

In September 2012, MailChimp published the following headline on its blog: Subject Line Length Means Absolutely Nothing. This was quite the authoritative statement, but MailChimp had the data to back it up.

Beyond the perfect length, you can also adhere to best practices. In general, a 50-character maximum is recommended, although MailChimp does point out that there can be exceptions: The general rule of thumb in email marketing is to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less. Our analysis found this to generally be the rule. The exception was for highly targeted audiences, where the reader apparently appreciated the additional information in the subject line.

The ideal length of a title tag is 55 characters Title tags are the bits of text that define your page on a search results page. Brick-and-mortar stores have business names; your web page has a title tag. Recent changes to the design of Google’s results pages mean that the maximum length for titles is around 60 characters. If your title exceeds 60 characters, it will get truncated with an ellipse.

Finding a hard-and-fast rule for the maximum recommendation of a title tag isn’t as easy as you’d think. Quick typography lesson: Google uses Arial for the titles on its results pages, Arial is a proportionally-spaced font, meaning that different letters take up different width. A lowercase “i” is going to be narrower than a lowercase “w.” Therefore, the actual letters in your title will change the maximum allowable characters that can fit on one line.

USC's report also showed that while nearly 50% of Internet users never click on Internet ads (with 70% finding them annoying), only 55% would prefer Web advertising to paid content, surprisingly

Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet.

Publishers will be able to manage the recommendations widget from their Google+ publisher accounts. From there, they can decide when exactly the widget should appear and manage a list of pages where the widget shouldn’t appear, as well as a list of pages that should never appear in recommendations.

Neuroscientists explain that synapses occur inside the brain when we’ve made a connection between various different things. The more random the components connected, the more synapses occur. Synapses are the basis of creativity. In other words, synapses firing equals creative joy. As kids, that happens all the time because everything is new. Everything is unlike. And we aren’t constrained by the rules about what “goes together.” Why else was putting the Barbie in the toy car wash more fun than putting the car in the car wash? The visual web frees us to return to this childlike state, where we can adventure through a whole array of different, seemingly unrelated images and clips--be they old, new, from a world away or own backyard--sparking our all-important synapses and helping us come up with new combinations and ideas so easily.

The only thing better than going on this journey of discovery is sharing it with others. This “gift” of sharing contributes to an energy exchange that amplifies our own pleasure--and is something we’re hardwired to do.

start thinking like a creator, less like an advertiser. While posting the glossy photos from the photo shoot or :30 spots online may be part of your approach, it shouldn’t be your entire approach. Think content, not commercials.

Help us rediscover the beauty of a forgotten familiar. Find something familiar--in your product, brand, or from people’s lives--and help us see it in a fascinating new light. It could be as simple as taking a kitchen appliance and turning it into a science experiment or reminding people to capture just one second of their daily lives and compile a beautiful montage.

Search for your brand online. Chances are your fans are already mixing and mashing your brand with something seemingly unrelated. Build on it, fuel it, steer it, and help us make more with it.

Ditch the pitch. Instead, start an energy exchange. Create content that reminds us of our own capacity for excitement, happiness, and vivacity so we want to share in it with others.

Advertising is a key way that Facebook will monetize its 751 million mobile users.   Earlier this year, the number of active daily visitors checking Facebook on mobile devices surpassed people checking the social network on the web.

Photos are still the most popular item of personal content that we share right now with nearly 550 million+ photos shared each day on various internet services and this is expected to double within the next 12 months.

Advertising in the News Feed has moved towards bigger pictures and richer media and it will continue to go in that direction.

Marketers are already confronting the implications of a more shadowy Internet, specifically the phenomenon known as DarkSocial and DarkSearch.

“DarkSocial,” estimates that 69% of the publication’s social traffic is dark--meaning users who access content by clicking on a link emailed or IMed to them. Marketers don’t know where these users came from or what exactly drove them to their website.

cloud services like Google and Apple are proactively stripping referral data out when sending users to third party sites via search. These DarkSearch visitors, like their DarkSocial counterparts, also end up in the “direct referral” bucket of analytics reporting, indistinguishable from the geography-less visitors who typed your domain name directly into their browsers to visit your site.

In the near-term, brands will have to confront a potentially darker Internet, as the roadblocks to data-driven marketing thrown up by DarkSocial, DarkSearch and an emerging DarkNet increase. There will be real consequences, including in investments in marketing, if it becomes more difficult to quantify customer engagement.

In the longer-term, we may see a nascent e-commerce system more familiar to science fiction fans (and current users of services like Silk Road, the online illegal drug marketplace). Imagine a future Amazon.com-like e-commerce site where all profiles are anonymous, all payments utilize crypto-currencies, and all deliveries of physical goods use inexpensive, multi-hop services that conceal the ultimate end delivery address behind anonymous dropboxes.

Fluid layouts are often compared to water, but water isn’t always fluid. H2O has three different states, and depending on the temperature can be a solid, liquid, or gas, transitioning seamlessly from one to another at specific points (0ºC, 100ºC). An infinite grid also has multiple states (single column, multi-column, etc.), and should transition as seamlessly as possible between them at specific breakpoints as well. For example, just as ice is an appropriate state for water when the temperature is low, a single-column layout may be the appropriate state for an infinite grid on smaller devices. Water’s state change is caused by the rearrangement of its molecules. When an infinite grid changes state, we rearrange its components.

Each state in a responsive layout tends to be made up of the same components, such as an image gallery or navigation menu. However, as Ethan Marcotte recently outlined, the form these components take can vary dramatically between one state and another, usually involving a change in one or more of the following attributes: Hierarchy: What’s its order and prominence in the layout? Density: How much detail do you show? Interaction: Should it be a list of links or a dropdown? A carousel or a group of images? Width: Is it fixed (a specific width), flexible (set with max-width), or fractional (set with percentages)?

Absolute units like pixels effectively give a layout a sell-by date, locking it to a finite resolution range in which it will “work.” Proportional units (ems, rems, and percentages) enable you to define the important relationships between elements, and are a crucial first step on the road to resolution independence.

Pixels size an element relative to a particular resolution Ems size an element relative to its font size; large rems size it relative to the document’s base font size Percentages size an element relative to its container VH and VW units size an element relative to the viewport

lets say my largest state is 75em wide (any larger and the white space starts to dwarf the content), and my smallest is 34em (any smaller and the measure is less than optimal). In the largest state it makes sense for my navigation to be a horizontal list (interaction) at the top (hierarchy), but in the smallest state it might make more sense to move it to the bottom of the layout (hierarchy), or collapse it into a show/hide list (interaction). Designing these independently of one another helps you be more objective about what is best for each state, rather than stretching a one-size-fits-all solution across every state.

Just like water changes to steam when its molecules get too far apart, one state should change to another when the relationships between its components begin to break down, such as when the measure is getting too wide, or the left-aligned logo is getting so far from the right-aligned menu that the visual connection between them is broken.

The number of states you require will depend on how much your layout changes from one extreme to the other. For example, my smallest state has a single column with a collapsed menu, and my largest state has three columns and an expanded menu. However neither state looks quite right between 34em and 53em, so I’ve added an “in-between” state which maintains the smallest state’s single column article, but expands the menu and divides the footer into three columns to make the most of the space available. This smooths out the transition from one extreme to another quite nicely.

With each state change, remember to reconsider the hierarchy, density, interaction, and width of each component

the goal is to make the most of the space available, relative to your content, to maximize readability and presentation.

focus around content and avoid the pitfalls that certain aspects of websites can create.

there are now more monthly users of mobile apps than there are for desktop computers and laptops. Yet the the desktop ad market is still 10 times the size of the mobile ad market in revenues

To execute a mobile ad buy, you have to choose between various networks and exchanges and real-time bidding platforms. The ads themselves are also different since they're often designed to prompt users to take action relatively quickly, which mean fewer branding ads and more direct-response executions. To ensure that the ads are effective, it helps to tailor to them to individual users' demographics and geographic location. To make things even more complicated, while on desktop, there are basically two operating systems, in mobile there are at least 10, Becker says and "hundreds of browsers and screen sizes."

eMarketer predicts that TV will continue to grow — and outpace digital advertising — through 2017.

TV ratings are down — Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne recently found that they fell 50% over the past decade — TV is still the last place where you can find 5 million or more people tuned in at the same time to an ad. You may be able to get in front of 5 million people on Facebook, but if you use a display ad, only about one in 1,000 people will click on it.

bigger advertisers are jumping into mobile — Mondelez (nee Kraft) pledged last year to put 10% of its ad budget into the segment