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How Can a Social Marketer Take Advantage of the New Twitter Web Analytics Tool?

Posted April 26, 2012 By Francis Santos
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When it comes to social marketing tools, Twitter is one of the best any business can adopt. The popular microblogging site has well over 200 million users and trendiness that has made it a favorite among users that range from everyday people to the high profile athletes and celebrities.

Not only that, it has long proved itself as a powerful platform capable of building communities, engaging target audiences, and driving qualified traffic. From a marketing perspective, the one knock on Twitter has always lied in the difficulty of tracking its activity, but even this appears to be changing for the better.

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Twitter recently announced the debut of  Twitter Web Analytics. As the name implies, it is a new tool designed to help users gain a much better understanding of how their social marketing efforts are performing through connection with the platform. Up until recently, marketers have been forced to rely on third-party tools that while useful, were not very efficient in terms of accurately measuring traffic. With an analytics system launched by Twitter itself, it is safe to assume that this tool will be far more precise and reliable than many of the third-party options out there.

Analyzing Your Twitter Impact

According to Twitter itself, social marketers can take advantage of the new web analytics tool by analyzing three main performance area:

Inbound Traffic – See exactly how much traffic Twitter is generating to your website.

Social Sharing – See how much of your content others are sharing throughout the Twitter network.

Integration Effectiveness – Analyze the impact integrating the famous tweet button on your website has really made.

As you can see, the new Twitter Web Analytics can be helpful in measuring some very important areas, but the one that really sticks out is inbound traffic. Whether you are indulging in social marketing to boost sales or create awareness for a non profit cause, driving traffic is vital. With that said, being able to understand what is and what isn’t working is just as important. When your efforts are not resulting in direct sales or donations, it can be hard to justify carrying on with your social initiatives. Analytics allows you to do away with all the guessing and base your marketing on actual and factual data. With the tool being powered by social analytics platform BackType’s technology, which Twitter recently acquired, the company’s new and improved tracking capabilities may be the solution marketers have been eagerly awaiting for some time.

Be on the Lookout

Twitter Web Analytics has been rolled out to a small group of Twitter’s pilot partners. The company says that it will be available to all site owners in the coming weeks. Aside from being pretty useful, this tracking tool is completely free to use, and that makes it even more attractive for the social marketer operating on a restricted budget. If you have been looking for a better way to track your efforts on this immensely popular social network, the new analytics tool will definitely be one you want to pick up.

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Coding the Future: Computing Power to the People

Posted April 26, 2012 By JesseMLangley
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OpenStack was developed as a way to provide cloud companies of all breeds a path to deploy services and applications on standard computing hardware. The budding Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution was developed over a two-year period in partnership with Rackspace Hosting and NASA. To date, several big-name tech companies have jumped on the OpenStack bandwagon, including Dell, HP, Cisco, Intel and AMD.

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More About OpenStack

The solution implements a combination of two open-source code platforms – NASA’s Nebula platform, and Rackspace’s Cloud Files platform – and is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 platform, and is licensed through Apache 2.0. This means that all the code is available for free, and can be used by anyone for development within the cloud. There are three main components of the OpenStack platform: Compute (Nova), Object Storage (Swift) and Image Service (Glance). Nova focuses on infrastructural resources, Swift is more about cloud storage and Glance enables speedy application deployment by providing registration, discovery and delivery services for virtual disk images.

Open Source Code Matters & Cloud Standardization

It’s no secret that the cloud is in desperate need of standards. Cloud technology is growing and evolving at a rapid rate, yet there are no UI or UX standards for the cloud to date. Each cloud app is approached from a seemingly isolated design and functionality point of view. A lack of standards can have devastating effects on the wide adoption of cloud technology. It’s from this vantage point that OpenStack was created.

Ending the Public vs. Private Cloud Debate

The latest release of OpenStack, née Essex, was developed with an increased focus on security. This is a direct result of the widespread critique of the open cloud’s lack of security. The effort to increase security in the open cloud is a sign that the OpenStack community is maturing and becoming more sophisticated in their efforts to make the cloud more stable. Ending the public vs. private cloud debate rests on the ability for the open source community to prove the public cloud is stable. While this may not sway IT professionals from their closed-only approach, it may influence decisions to implement a more hybrid approach to cloud service deployment and management.

Conclusion: Large-Scale Cloud Standards Just Around the Corner

While the OpenStack platform isn’t perfect by any means, it is telling that more and more large-scale enterprise tech companies are adopting it. Most recently, Sony transferred a portion of their cloud service from the Amazon cloud in favor of the OpenStack platform. This says that on some level Rackspace offers a cloud platform with better security. Sony isn’t the only company testing the open source waters at OpenStack. Companies as diverse as Disney, AT&T and CERN, an Eastern European nuclear science group, joined Sony, as well as 140 others. With big names like these joining the open source ranks at Rackspace, it’s clear that cloud standardization is not only important, but it is a reality that is not far off.

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How To: Customize Your Desktop With Rainmeter

Posted April 24, 2012 By Ganesh Babu
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Most of us use Windows and a small minority of us use OSX and Linux. As time goes by, we tend to get used to the GUI so much that we hate it. We try various other ways to experience a refreshing GUI, We can try themes, use transformation packs, change the OS. But the most visited desktop remains little changed, what can we do about that ? Well to spice up your Desktop and reignite your computing experience, we’ll customize your desktop using an amazing software known as Rainmeter.

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Rainmeter is an Open Source, windows only desktop customization software that’ll let you add layers of wonders to your desktop. The first part is to download Rainmeter. You can download Rainmeter from the official site. Rainmeter is a small and nifty tool. It comes with a single default theme, once displayed you can see it for yourselves.

Like gadgets in the windows sidebar, each element in Rainmeter is called a skin. You can have multiple skins which can be arranged anywhere on the desktop (read: draggable). The best way to quickly edit a skin is to use the context menu, which can be obtained by right clicking on a particular skin. You get options to edit the skin’s settings, It’s variants and also unloading the skin. Clicking on Manage will open a new dialogue box, which is the centre place to edit your theme’s, skin’s and Rainmeter’s settings. You can check this detailed introduction to know more about how Rainmeter works.

You can download various themes for Rainmeter from the web, we’ve listed a few good places to check at the end of this, if you are looking for a good theme that suits your needs. Once you’ve downloaded your favourite theme, all you have to do is edit it to make it look like you wanted. This is a bit of a lengthy process as it requires you to edit a text file in most cases while a few themes come with a config editor. First get yourself acquainted with the flow of the skin. You can check this Rainmeter guide to get a quick knowledge on how skins work.

Suites like Enigma, Gnometer and other bigger themes are easy to edit as mentioned above. However if you’ve downloaded a less popular theme, you can search the theme files for any instructions. If not found, right click the particular skin that you want to edit and click Edit Skin. Your default text editor will open, showing the skin’s codes. You have to search for a prompt, that asks you to enter a value, like a app name, path etc. Generally these prompts can be identified easily as they have a # (Hash) symbol before and after. Edit it to suit your needs.

Once it is done, Rainmeter is ready to use. If you have an adventurous heart, experiment with a different skin everyday and make your computing experience a new one, every day.

Downloading Rainmeter Themes

Finding the theme that suits you best is a difficult task because there are a huge number of themes each begging for your attention. However you can use Google to find a theme if you have something in mind, else you can try at the resources we’ve mentioned here.

  • Rainmeter, by default comes with a simple theme known as “illustro”. Rainmeter also recommends the following skins – Gnometer, Enigma and ABP.
  • deviantArt has the largest online repositories of  custom Rainmeter resources. Rainmeter Group (curated gallery) is the home of the Rainmeter community on dA. Browse the galleries for skins vetted to be sure they work and are safe. If you are ready to take the risk, you can check the Rainmeter Category it has all the Rainmeter skins dA has to offer, but are not checked for safety, so don’t be surprised if your Anti-Virus app warns you.
  • Customize.org is also one of the largest and oldest sources for Rainmeter skins. Many Rainmeter skins available in customize.org are a part of larger suite of a collection of apps, that aim at changing your user interface radically. You can give it a shot.
  • Lifehacker Desktop Show & Tell Lifehacker maintains an entire album in flickr, which lets their readers share their desktop with fellow lifehacker readers. You can get an idea on the possibilities of Rainmeter here and of course, a few are kind enough to share how to achieve what they had done.
  • Rainmeter Forums Many fresh and new themes show their faces first at the forums in Rainmeter.net

This video will give you a short walk-through on using Rainmeter.

Hope we’ve helped you gain a idea on Rainmeter and propelled you into a whole new world of desktop fun. Try it and share your thoughts with us. If you know any awesome skin, don’t forget to mention it, so that our fellow readers will be benefited.

[stextbox id="info"]Links[/stextbox]

Download Rainmeter

The picture shown uses the Ironman Jarvis skin by ~scrollsofaryavart and Enigma.

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4 Things to Keep in Mind Before You Start a Technology Blog

Posted April 24, 2012 By Arun Sathiya
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These days, blogging is not a thing that one seems to be new to. There are lots of blog niches that one can choose to blog about but it’s those technology blogs that steal the title. Technology blogs have been awesome for ages and continue to be. If you ever wanted to start a blog and consider to proceed with an ultra cool technology blog, here are few things that you must keep in mind before starting that blog.

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#1 Select a Suitable Sub-Niche

As we mentioned, technology is a really big term. The word is applicable to every thing that changes from one stage to it’s cool next stage. Gadgets, Social Media, Space technologies and lot more are out there that come under the banner technology. And hence, it is really better if you wish to blog about a particular sub niche rather than choosing the entire technology space. On the other hand, you can, provided you have all the hope that you will be able to work well with it. But beware, the readers won’t find it pretty good to see all the things dumped together in a single place.

If you happen to be a mobile freak, it would be really great if you choose to blog about the latest gadgets out there in the markets, their prices and their specifications. Blogging is all about sharing things. If you are not quite sure whether the specifications of a mobile that you came across, you can blog about it, no matter what the readers might think. But make sure to add a relevant title to the post. Alternatively if you are an expert with televisions and such stuff, blog about them.

To put thing simpler, it’s all the sub-niche that matters. Make sure to blog on a particular sub-niche rather than dumping the full contents in a single blog.

#2 A Relevant Domain Name, Please.

Domain names form an integral part of blogging. If you are about to start a blog, any niche blog, with your name, I would probably ask you to avoid that! When you choose to blog with your name, that will be a total waste. The domain name must be catchy and easy to remember. Also, make sure to choose a domain name with a keyword that suits your blog’s niche. That will optimize your blog for search engines and make it easier to drive good traffic to your site.

#3 Review Gadgets and Discover New Stuff in Social Media

Let us consider that you are blogging at a internet and gadgets blog. Whenever a new gadget hits the market, it must be that you happen to be one of those first guys to review the device and blog about it. People love smartphones like craze these days and there are lots and lots of searches on the web these days for ultra cool mobile devices. If you happen to review a great gadget and blog about it, wonder how much traffic will surge to your website. Cool, right?

And also, if you are running a blog focusing on social media like Mashable, you must be one who loves to use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as much as I do. The more you play with them, the more you discover and the more you get to blog about them. :-)

#4 Market Well and Create a Presence on Social Media Sites

When it comes to blogging, most of the bloggers are generally obsessed with the idea of getting massive traffic to their blogs in a small time. And to achieve that search engines have proved to be really great and so do the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The thing is that you ought to create Pages on Facebook for your blogs and a separate account for your blog on Twitter.  That will prove to be helpful to your readers to stay tuned to your daily updates.

Few Extra Things :

I assure you that if you happen to remember those above things and work on them, your blog will be getting a really great place on the blogosphere and that will help you to rock your life. Also, you would like to follow these additional tips that my friends suggested.

  1. Update Daily : The flow of tech news and news related to technology is really fast and hence you ought to prepare to work hard to get a better ranking.
  2. Writing Skills : Applicable to all types of blogs, it is really great to use simple and easy words that will help your readers to understand the underlying concept of a particular post with ease.
  3. Infographics : Heard of them? Infographics are graphical representations of information that certain people love to make. There are lots of infographics out there and if you come across any infographic related to technology, make sure to add that to your blog and also give credits to the original maker.
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Tips to Give Better Look To Your Blog

Posted April 23, 2012 By Amarendra
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Blogging is changing its pace with speed, new bloggers are growing daily with something interesting. But the idea for better blog look is different among bloggers. Some may define having attractive frame work adds better look. Others Add: Providing simple, navigational structure is better look for blog. But according to me, it’s the amalgamation of various vital factors which finally leads to give your blog perfect look.

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With WordPress as blogging platform, one can have better customization, design, ability, etc. And this is recommended one even if you want to come up with better blog as we have access to tons of themes but it exactly doesn’t suit your needs, if it so? Then read out below mentioned tips to give better look for your blog. . I also tried these tips which I applied on my blog when I started my site, where I talk about Nuance and Eltima coupon and these tips would help you give a better look at your blog too.

1. Niche Oriented Theme:

Now-a-days many readymade templates are available to use and you don’t really need to learn web designing. But you need to understand the effect of your niche and have to choose the theme accordingly. Imagine you are running tech blog, and then have applied the template of vegetables; it’s not at all appetizing.

So, always try to implement relevant theme having better color combination but adds readability for readers. You must analyze your blog’s look from reader’s point of view.

2. Function-ability:

One must keep functions of blog in mind. Blog is meant to provide knowledge and not attractive user interference. Imagine you stuffed theme’s structure with lots of scripts to give eye-catchy look, but forget the basic fact that all these is increasing the blog’s loading speed impacting bad results in front of readers.

It’s not always necessary that blog must be eye-catchy. Blog gets better look when its simple, clean, navigational. So keep these factors in mind and give your blog according design.

3. Logo & Tagline:

Logo works as title-bar your blog. It is something that defines your blog. You might have seen that branded companies spends amount of money behind their logo as they care for brand. If you treat blog as Brand, then logo must be attractive and eye-catchy stating the short-form details of your whole blog. To get better logo for blog, you need to opt for professional logo designer who will charge bit amount. And if you self are logo designer then you knows the lead.

Tagline is something like slogan for your brand; it’s really needed and shows your brand power in front of readers. Make sure you keep nice, attractive tagline for blog

4. Images & Icons:

Images are one of the factors, which keep and grab maximum attention from blog’s reader. You can always put relevant images indicating your blog to increase readability and author-ability and to get a better blog look.

Icons too plays important role, in term with blog’s look. Using social media icons indicates that blog is active enough on other social networking and media websites. Icons can even replace texts when blog’s appearance is concerned.

5. Small Details:

It includes much things when we talk about blog’s look. One needs to take care about navigation factor; it should be easy and quick. You must fit a perfect sidebar matching with blog’s theme. Along balance is too required, give it effective and natural look.

For last words, I need to conclude that apart from appearance and look, more important thing is blog’s authorship which provides with loyal readers, though you can always use above mentioned tips to give better look to your blog.

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10 Beneficial Tips For Small Business Social Media Marketing

Posted April 22, 2012 By Guest
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Having an online small-sized business has become a reality for many business owners today. These entrepreneurs have built an online presence that has helped them get through to their targeted audience. Sitting at the comfort of your home, earning a lot, and on top of it all setting your own working hours is one of the ways to describe small businesses operating through the Internet.

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However, there is another side of the coin, and the fact is that not a lot of people pay attention to it. They all love to believe that Internet businesses are bound to be successful and earn the owner a lot of money, but the truth is somewhat different from their beliefs. Developing a successful business is a time-consuming task that requires a lot of knowledge and a variety of skills needed to constantly improve it.

Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Rare are the people who don’t have a profile on social media sites, and this includes businesses as well. Everyone is on Facebook, Tumblr, and this is not debatable! Taking this into account here will be listed ten most beneficial tips intended for a business to grow:

  1. Determine whether you should advertise on social media websites – Before proceeding any further, you need to decide whether marketing on sites such as Facebook is something your business will benefit from.
  2. Plan ahead – This step is to take in case you decide social media marketing is the right choice for your business. You need to make a plan and stick to it in order for your business to thrive.
  3. Invest time – You need to know that your fans will require your time, and in case you don’t have enough time on your hands to post updates and talk to your fans, you might want to consider hiring a social media manager.
  4. Find the platform – There are many social networking sites, and you ought to find the one that suits your needs best. Also, when choosing try to pick a site that is among the popular ones in this category.
  5. Be confident and sure you love your job – There is nothing more that people like to see, than a passionate business owner who loves his job, knows what he’s doing, and knows why people should love his brand too.
  6. Don’t give up – Many people make a mistake and give up as soon as they see no results. In case you don’t attract people after you create a fan page, don’t just give up. Instead, be patient, and fans will eventually start noticing your brand if it’s worth their attention.
  7. Listen to your fans – Don’t think you know everything, but try to receive constructive criticism from your fans and followers.
  8. Don’t bother your fans – You need to remember that social media websites are not there for you to bother your fans with your company. You should try to make them want to find something about your business.
  9. Welcome negative comments – Not everyone will like your products or services, and you should be prepared for this. So, if someone says they don’t like what you do, don’t delete this. They have the right not to like it.
  10. Watch your progress – It is a good idea to keep track of your progress, as this will help you know your current status.

These tips are very useful, and they can really help your business expand, as well as help your brand become more famous.

About the Author:I am Nadine Myrick from Pass Certification looking for pass certification exam assistance? Let’s take benefit of pass certification self-paced Microsoft Certifications training material and clear your IT certification on first try.

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A Quick Guide to 4G Android Phones

Posted April 21, 2012 By mohdakthar
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Smartphone has grown to be remarkably a famous category in mobile phone world. With the release of 4G-capable smartphones, it is more popular in a short time. Pick out the best future smartphones that suits your needs and tastes among the list mentioned in the article presented below.

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4G signifies fourth generation of wireless service that typically comes after 3G, and that is currently made available by most services. This is actually a faster and even more useful service that is becoming a lot more widespread. Annually, once better and latest mobiles are unveiled along with Android apps, users except the choices to be more highly innovative, faster and fascinating than the preceding one.

The listed below mobiles are powered by Google’s Android OS.

Sprint

    • Samsung Epic 4G

      • - The touchscreen display holds up a sequence of sophisticated touchscreen gestures. Moreover, it enables for an HD-quality viewing experience, providing the most effective illustration of color on a mobile handset. It includes Dual Cameras having five megapixles and Swype text-entry technique.

 

  • HTC EVO 4G – EVO 4G looks more or just like the HTC HD2, which has a simple attractive layout. The phone features Android 2.1 and Qik video chat application. Featured with dual camera, one with 8 mega pixels as well as the other is really a 1.3 mega pixels camera phone existing aids in video calling.
  • HTC EVO Shift 4G – Sensible speeds for EVO Shift’s 800 MHz processor approximately 5 to actually 6 megabits per second and 1 megabit per second for downloads and uploads respectively. The EVO Shift comes preloaded, which has a range of wonderful apps.

 

T-Mobile

  • HTC G2 – There’s an excellent in-built 3.2 Mega pixel color camera, supports video file formats, resolution of 320X480 pixels, and multimedia features.
  • myTouch 4G – It features 3.8 inch display, 1 GHz processor chip, 5.0-MP camera, larger sized screen, HTC Sense user interface, and Mobile hot-spot.

Verizon 4G Phones

  • Motorola Droid Bionic – The 4G network offers download and upload speeds of around five times those particular possible on 3G. It includes 1 GHz OMAP4 Dual Core Processor, resolution of 4.3 Inch Screen having 960 x 540, Android Gingerbread 2.3.4 Operating systems, and Wi-Fi Enabled.
  • HTC Thunderbolt – The Thunderbolt is Verizon’s leading phone. The HTC Thunderbolt features a 3. 5mm audio jack and a wireless bluetooth connectivity of 2.1 having EDR.
  • LG Revolution – It features a 1GHZ processor and 4.3″ screen. It is one of the most budget friendly 4G phone, however, original pricing and existence as well.

 

AT&T 4G Phones

  • Motorola Atrix – It is a tremendous phone. It is available with the new Tegra 2 dual-core processor inside. The Atrix also has a dock that’s supposed to make it a full-featured laptop.

Thats’s it ! We’ve listed some of the most powerful 4G Android phones out there. If we’ve missed out anything, let us know and do share your favourite one’s with us.

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How To: Backup Your Facebook, Twitter and Other Social Data

Posted April 19, 2012 By Ganesh Babu
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Like taking backups of your personal data in your local hard drives, it is highly important that you take a backup of your online presence too. In this social media age, where we share every teeny tiny information about ourselves with the web, like our photos,  events, statuses and a lot more online, we tend to depend totally on the web and forget to have an offline backup.

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Anything might happen online and if you lose access to your social networking accounts, (read: got hacked) then you’ll be losing your data forever. It is better to be safe than sorry. So, let us see how you can take a backup of your social data.

How To Backup Facebook

With 800 Million and counting, Facebook is the de facto place for social networking. Facebook provides inbuilt options to take an offline backup of your data. We’ve already covered that in detail. This in-built tool offered by Facebook is straight forward. But it’ll require you to wait for some time before they process your archive. The backup is basically an HTML version of your account with your photos, statuses, wall posts, chats etc…

How To Backup Twitter

I am not sure how many of you know this, twitter doesn’t store all your tweets. Twitter stores only 3,200 of your most latest tweets. It automatically deletes the older ones and there is nothing you can do to stop this from inside twitter. But there are web apps that let you have a backup of your twitter tweets before they get deleted by twitter. If you are an avid tweeter and worried that your witty-cracks and your daily brawls would be deleted by twitter, then act fast.

  1. There are two services that let you backup your tweets. One is TweetBackup and the other is BackUpMyTweets.
  2. Let us see about TweetBackup, however, you are free to use any.
  3. Go to TweetBackup and click Sign up now using twitter.
  4. You need to click “Authorize app” before you can use TweetBackup.
  5. You’ll be redirected to the app, where you need to provide your email.
  6. It is obligatory that you follow TweetBackup in return for their free service and you can post an optional tweet in favour of them too.
  7. Click Sign up and then you’ll be asked to login using twitter.
  8. Once it is done, you’ll be taken to the TweetBackup control panel where you can backup and export your tweets.
  9. This nifty tool will surely help save those precious tweets.

For the Rest

Backupify lets you take a backup of your data in a host of social networks, from Facebook, Twitter to even Linkedin. It provides a free plan, in which you can backup upto 3 accounts with email as the only mode of backup. If you want to more, you have paid versions based on your requirements.

It is simple, go to Backupify, choose your plan, sign up and point the services you need to backup and voila ! You are done.

Hope these tools helped you save your precious online data. If you have any personal favourites and use further better tools for backing up your social data, do share with us through the comments. Backup and be safe.

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