"Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words," says Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University. "When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest."

This trend toward the visual is also influenced by the shifting habits of technology users. As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they're discovering that taking a picture "on the go" using a high-resolution phone is much less tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.

A 2012 study by ROI Research found that when users engage with friends on social media sites, it's the pictures they took that are enjoyed the most. Forty-four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media

Facebook has done some initial experiments and found that the Recommendations Bar was getting three times more clicks than the posts in the Recommendations Box, according to a blog post from Facebook developer Jeffrey Spehar.

using both the Recommendations Box and the Recommendations Bar may be overkill.

If you are using the Recommendation Bar, you may not want to rely on that alone to allow people to like your post, since it doesn’t show up when someone is logged in as their page.

As much as 40% of clicks on mobile ads are so-called worthless clicks, offering no return on investment for the advertiser, according to a new study.

The study, which was released on Wednesday, was commissioned by Trademob, a Berlin-based mobile app marketing platform. The company analyzed six million mobile advertising clicks on 10 of the biggest mobile advertising networks. Conclusion: Advertisers are wasting a lot of money on mobile ads.

The study, which was released on Wednesday, was commissioned by Trademob, a Berlin-based mobile app marketing platform. The company analyzed six million mobile advertising clicks on 10 of the biggest mobile advertising networks. Conclusion: Advertisers are wasting a lot of money on mobile ads.

brands are increasing their use of the social network for marketing and consumer engagement. As reported by CMSWire, a recent Simply Measured report shows that 64 percent of the Interbrand Top 100 now have an active Google+ Brand page (up 3 percent from December 2011), 22 percent of the brands now have circler counts more than 100,000, up from 13 percent, and more brands are posting more frequently: 43 percent are posting more than three times a week (up from 15 percent in February).

Among the top brands, the study showed that engagement on outbound posts is growing. Circle engagement is up 112 percent since February and content engagement is also on the rise as it increased 65 percent since February. 

During this preview period, organizations that use Google Apps will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013