Here are 20 data-backed ways to make your inbound marketing efforts in social media more successful.

“Politics is a direct-response business,” declares the digital director of President Obama’s re-election campaign. “People do things if you ask them to do it, and ... don’t … if you don’t ask.”

Google Analytics is a powerful resource for doing business online. Tracking how people get to your website and what they do when they get there is key to understanding your customers and figuring out how to adjust the way you market your business in order to get more sales or clicks. You might find different keywords are working for you and discover a niche you didn’t know about.

Never one to sit on the sidelines or allow user experience to become stale, Facebook has unveiled a new user interface (UI) for its popular News Feed feature that it claims will reduce clutter and focus more attention on updates, images and information from the people and brands you care about most.

For business owners who use LinkedIn as a tool for recruiting employees, some good news: the professional networking site has improved its LinkedIn Jobs service, making it easier for job searchers to find specific positions in specific areas -- ideally yours. In addition to a redesign, it has added new features, including a greater number of search options when looking for open positions. Job seekers can now search for jobs by country, zip code, industry and function.

If you’re tweeting out a URL, your tweets just got a bit shorter. Starting Wednesday, any tweet sent with a URL will be reduced to 118 characters, or 117 for https links.

In December 2010, a little-known app for sharing photos with funky, retro filters announced it had signed up its millionth user. Fast-forward two years, and Instagram is a social media titan, with more than 100 million users and some 58 photos uploaded every second.