The sheer weight of fake and inactive followers is not great for the company’s image. Even the @Twitter account itself has 33% fake followers, according to one count.

The latest active user count, back in March: 140 million. An unofficial count of total Twitter users, including the fakes: half a billion.

Lady Gaga and Barack Obama, two of Twitter’s most-followed users, would both see their counts drop by 70%. Mitt Romney wouldn’t fare much better, with a 50% drop. If Twitter did this before the election, it would be headline news across the planet, and the company would be accused of stepping into the race.

About 50% percent of consumers think a brand’s Facebook page is more useful than a brand’s website, a new study suggests.

one of the top reasons to follow a brand on Facebook is to print coupons and discounts. The study revealed that 77% of those who “Like” a brand on Facebook have saved money as a result.

Consumers (73%) also noted that they have no issue with un-Liking a brand on the site if they post too often.

Williams was asked whether he thinks Twitter should highlight the number of active followers users have rather than just the total follower count.  “I would endorse that,” said Williams, who remains on the network’s board of directors. “I think that’s a great idea.” But he went on to note that even active followers wouldn’t be the ideal metric to represent one’s distribution power on the social network. Instead, he suggested that tallying the number of times a tweet has been viewed and reweeted would be the ultimate measurement — not unlike what services like Klout and Crowdbooster offer.

“The dream metric is really how many people see your tweet, which is not even active followers,” he said. “It’s some different metric.”

"The dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling 'targeted killings' of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false," the report, entitled Living Under Drones, states.

The "best available information", they say, is that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September this year – of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children. The figures have been assembled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which estimated that a further 1,300 individuals were injured in drone strikes over that period.

US drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in north-west Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning," the American law schools report says

PageLever also says LinkedIn drives more referral traffic to Facebook Pages than Google and Bing combined

According to HubSpot, 93 percent of adults on the Internet are on Facebook, yet only one percent of a brand’s Facebook fans will ever make their way to the company’s main website.

If there’s no stylistic connection between a company’s Facebook page and its main Web site, visitors may not trust that the page is legit. Brands often spend a disproportionate amount of time, money and effort on Web site branding efforts, in comparison to the relative pittance reserved for complementary Facebook efforts. Keep branding consistent across all channels, so that visitors know exactly where they’re going and whom they’re dealing with.

The beauty of such Big Data applications is that they can process Web-based text, digital images, and online video. They can also glean intelligence from the exploding social media sphere, whether it consists of blogs, chat forums, Twitter trends, or Facebook commentary. Traditional market research generally involves unnatural acts, such as surveys, mall-intercept interviews, and focus groups. Big Data examines what people say about what they have done or will do. That's in addition to tracking what people are actually doing about everything from crime to weather to shopping to brands. It is only Big Data's capacity for dealing with vast quantities of real-time unstructured data that makes this possible.

Much of the data organizations are crunching is human-generated. But machine sensors — what GE people like CMO Beth Comstock called "machine whispering" when I talked with her this past summer — are creating a second tsunami of data. Digital sensors on industrial hardware like aircraft engines, electric turbines, automobiles, consumer packaged goods, and shipping crates can communicate "location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, and even chemical changes in the air."

the number of Google queries about housing and real estate from one quarter to the next turns out to predict more accurately what's going to happen in the housing market than any team of expert real estate forecasters. Similarly, Google search queries on flu symptoms and treatments reveal weeks in advance what flu-related volumes hospital emergency departments can expect.

The major takeaways from Google Panda and update (in no particular order) are as follows: Focus on original content – you will get hammered for “stealing” or repurposing on too high a scale (for example, lifting content from Wikipedia) Over-optimization kills – Google can sniff out sites that are designed solely to exploit certain key words (for example, repeating the same keyword, or variations thereof to drive traffic) Link to high quality/authoritative sites – while Panda focused more on a more systematic sweep of SEO, Penguin is focused on the processes around linking. Don’t over-link, and when you do create links, link to high quality sources Excessive Ads are Bad – If it looks like you are running too many ads against your content, you will face the consequences SEO is a “Bad Word” – The rise of the term “content marketing” effectively means that high quality content trumps low quality link bait.

Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative SitesContent marketing does not just refer to content you write for your own site, but content you write for other sites.

content marketing also improves SEO rankings and traffic.  Link building is a common SEO strategy that is always difficult to grow through a paid channel.  The best way to get organic and quality links is by creating interesting content that drives people to link and share your content.  Whether or not it’s directly related to your line of business, driving free traffic is always a victory.

Pinterest has beaten out Yahoo organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide

Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63% on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.

it could also be because Shareaholic’s data, which comes from a network of 200,000 publishers using its social sharing and content analysis tools, is more likely to reflect an engaged community where people are comfortable with using social networking sites to perform searches. In other words, it’s not a big picture study here – just a slice.

Contests and sweepstakes on Twitter may offer prizes for tweeting a particular update, for following a particular user, or for posting updates with a specific hashtag.

Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.

Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”).  Your contest or sweepstakes could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest or sweepstakes, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.

If you use Facebook to communicate about or administer a promotion (such as a contest or sweepstakes)

Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App. ii.    Promotions on Facebook must include the following: a.    A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant. b.    Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. c.    Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [disclose recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook. iii.    You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.