Finalists: Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2012

By Cindy King
Published January 9, 2012

We received over 570 nominations for our third-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs).

The list of 20 finalists is pretty impressive! Take a look for yourself below.

The Judges: Our judges include Andy Sernovitz (author, Word of Mouth Marketing & CEO, SocialMedia.org), Rick Calvert (CEO, BlogWorld) and Michael Stelzner (CEO, Social Media Examiner & author, Launch). They are currently finishing up their reviews of these sites.

Here are the finalists (in alphabetical order):

• Bundle Post
• Digital Brand Marketing Education
• Heidi Cohen
• Hubze
• inBlurbs
• Inbound Marketing Spot
• Jeff Korhan
• Jeff Bullas
• Likeable Media
• Marketing Tech Blog
• Media First
• Media Tapper
• My Social Agency
• Pushing Social
• Sales Lion
• Social Mouths
• Social Strand Media
• Spiderworking
• Splash Media
• ViralBlog

How We’ll Pick the Winners

#1: Initial Qualification: A blog must have a strong social media focus and must have been nominated multiple times by multiple individuals. If someone nominated more than one blog, only the first nomination was counted.

#2: Final Winner Selection

• Quality of posts: Our judges will examine and score the quality of posts on each blog. Educational and discussion-spurring posts are more valuable than self-promoting posts (55% of decision).
• Frequency of posts: Blogs that feature multiple posts per week will score higher. This is a sign of the blogger’s commitment to blogging (15%).
• Reader involvement: Blogs that have regular comments from readers are another sign of a healthy blog. In addition, the numbers of nominations for a specific blog play a part in this (15%).
• Blog ranking: The number of other blogs that link to the nominated blog shows the value of the content (15%). We’ll use accepted third-party blog ranking systems for this portion of the score.

Congratulations to the finalists! We’ll announce the winners here soon!

What do you think about these blogs? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Tags: blog contest, bundle post, digital brand marketing education, heidi cohen, hubze, inburbs, jeff bullas, jeff korhan, marketing tech blog, media first, mt media tapper, my social agency, phil mershon, pushing social, social media blog, social mouths, social strand media, spiderworking, splashmedia, the inbound marketing spot, the sales lion, top 10 blog, top blog, top social media blog, viralblog

About the Author, Cindy King

Cindy King is the director of editorial for Social Media Examiner. She spent 25 years abroad in international business development and then built her own international business from scratch by using social business networking. Other posts by Cindy King »