These days, it’s almost obligatory for every small business to maintain a social media network. For small businesses, social media opens the door to long-term relationships with customers. If you use social media for marketing campaigns and relationship building, you should measure your activities to determine what’s successful, and how you can improve.

Social media metrics shouldn’t be kept just for the sake of records. Metrics are great tools to track activity over time and are necessary to understand the general attitude towards a brand or company. Metrics can also be used for short-term measurements and for single campaigns. 

These are early days in digital marketing and analysis, so there is no set standard for measuring social media success. As you navigate the uncharted waters of social media marketing, follow the tips below to ensure you learn as much as possible from your business’s social activities. 

Set Goals

Analytics improperly measured can be messy and overwhelming. Before you start measuring each tweet, Instagram photo share, and Facebook comment, think about your goals for your business’s social media network. As you build communication channels with customers, consider the following questions: what are you trying to achieve, and which channels are most relevant to your goals? 

of a housing market on the road to recovery. Figures released by the Census Bureau show that homeownership fell during the first quarter as more Americans lost homes to foreclosure and chose to rent homes. During the first three months of this year, the homeownership rate was 65.4 percent, down from previous year’s first quarter rate of 66.4 percent. 

Released in March of this year, the homeownership rate is the lowest it’s been since the first quarter of 1997, down nearly 4 points from high-flying days of the housing boom in 2004. Sales of previously-owned homes in January and February marked the best winter in five years. Despite disappointing sales in March, a recently released report tracked the number of signed contracts to purchase homes, which is the highest it’s been in two years. If the past 100 years of real estate tell us anything, it's that the housing market is one that continually adapts to economic, political, and social changes. History shows us that opportunity awaits on the other side of this 15-year-low. Now that the market has found the "bottom," prices will soon bounce back, houses will be sold at market value, and the construction industry will experience renewed demand for new homes and commercial development.

Creating ASCII art manually is time-consuming, but the new Textaizer Pro make it fun and easy.  Textaizer Pro is a Windows-based program that creates beautiful pictures from text.  It is a text mosaic and ASCII art creator.

What is ASCII Art?

For those not familiar with this type of graphic design, it is pictures created out of text.  It can be created with any text editor, but automatic programs make the job much simpler.  With Textaizer Pro, you can take any photo and turn it into ASCII art.

How Does it Work?

Textaizer Pro allows you to take a picture and text and the program will recreate the bitmap of the photo with text.  You can hide a secret message in a picture or create a picture from words.  It allows you to change the font, brightness, and contrast.  You can even increase the size without changing the level of sharpness.

In the main interface of the program, you will see all of your options.  The original picture is in a small box in the right side of the screen, while the created image is in the left pane.  With the Text Mosaic choice, you can multiply the font size, change the font style, and color match to the picture.

How do you express your love to the woman who gave you life and sacrificed for years so that you could have everything you need? Simple presents fall short in repaying her for everything she’s done. There is, however, one way to show our gratitude and love to our mothers on the one day set aside just for her. Here are a few suggestions on how to make that gift more meaningful.

To Help Her Relax

Since mothers work so hard, one of the most appreciated gifts can be something that will help her relax. For the mom who loves to read, consider a Kindle or iPad. You can even load it with books that you know she will enjoy.

If she’s the traditional paper book reader, pick up some new reads from Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com. If she doesn’t have time for a full-length book, choose one or two magazine subscriptions that she will enjoy.

If music is more your mom’s way to relax, get her an mp3 player loaded with her favorite music. You can even download movies on to the player that she can watch anywhere.

The stars may have finally aligned for those looking to sell their home, as homebuyers become more interested and housing supply diminishes. According to market experts at Edina Realty, this spring marks the best time in eight years to sell a home. 

A couple of factors contributed to the strong seller’s market. First, there’s a shortage of new homes for sale due to a lagging construction industry. According to this report, housing inventory is at the lowest since 2004. Another report states that the supply of unsold homes is hovering around 144,000 – the lowest on record since 1963. A shortage of available homes combined with rising demand has made it more possible than ever to sell homes near their market value. Even though many media outlets report a slowly recovering housing market, new-home sales in March were 7.1 percent higher than last year. 

Edina Realty president Barb Jandric offers a hint to homeowners who’ve been waiting out the economic storm, “The market has turned…there’s a lot of pent-up demand for homes in good neighborhoods.” Jandric says people have been selling their homes more quickly and receiving multiple offers.