One question we hear all the time is: “How is my small business doing with social media?” There are a bunch of different ways to answer this question, but we like to break it down into quantitative and qualitative measurements. Quantitative tools can be automated, but focus exclusively on numbers. To get a complete picture of how well your business is doing with social media, we need to make Qualitative judgement on things like social media profile aesthetics and quality of interactions with fans.

Some websites keep their original design for the sake of familiarity, but YouTube isn’t one of them. Just over a month ago, the social media website popped up on browsers around the globe showing the results of its latest redesign effort: a new homepage, new channel design, and new aesthetics. If you use YouTube to promote your business, it’s worth considering how this year’s YouTube redesign will impact content sharing.

For years, most businesses have used Google AdSense to monetize their blog site, but a changing of the guard could be underway. In November, WordPress announced it would develop a program for monetizing websites that offers benefits that Google AdSense (of which Google AdWords is a part) does not. As it stands, WordPress’ new program will be called – brace yourself – WordAds.