Social Media and Small Business: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Nearly Half of Small Businesses Use Social Media Marketing: Check out the results of this Zoomerang survey.

"Nearly half of the surveyed SMBs utilize social media to market to customers; of those, an overwhelming majority (86%) have Facebook accounts."
Connect With Your Customers: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Foursquare Makes Business Page Set Up Easy: Foursquare Business Pages are now self-service. “Any brand, organization, or publication can now create their own page, gain followers, share tips, check in, and reach their fans.” 
4 Ways to Use Twitter Data to Optimize Your Social Activities
Twitter is just over 5 years old and its users are sending more than 200 million tweets per day. This means your own tweets are just droplets in an ocean of content.
The good news is all of that content can become actionable insight.
Here are four ways to use Twitter data to optimize your social media activities for maximum exposure and effectiveness.
#1: Analyze your best topics and tweets with Crowdbooster
All tweets are not equally as effective. Crowdbooster aims to help you optimize the things you tweet by tracking what resonates and what flops among your followers. 
5 Tools That Help Measure Your Social Media Influence
Do you know if you’re having an impact on Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks? Do you want some tips on how to measure your social media influence?
As Twitter continues to grow, tools to enhance your Twitter experience and measure your influence are popping up all over the web. In this article, I’ll highlight five free tools that offer easy ways to keep track of your influence on Twitter and beyond.
#1: Klout
Perhaps one of the more well-known resources for measuring your Twitter influence is Klout, which is available as an extension for Chrome and Firefox, as well as the stand-alone site. Late last year, Twitter client Seesmic also integrated Klout scores into its desktop and web versions. 
Social Influence: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Klout Comes to Facebook Pages: The social marketing platform Involver joins forces with the online influence measurement tool Klout to bring Klout to Facebook pages. This gives brands a new way to engage with their most influential fans, and to reward consumers based on their influence as measured by Klout. 
12 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros
Are you struggling to make social media work for your business? Sometimes a few well-chosen tools are all you need to get your social media marketing working for you.
In our recent Social Media Success Summit, there were presentations that covered all the key topics you need to make your social media marketing easy. In this article, I’ll share 12 of those tools that were recommended by the pros.
Tools to Refine Your Visibility and Engagement
Here are three tools recommended by Mari Smith during her first presentation on increasing your visibility and engagement on Facebook. 
Is Klout a Good Judge of Your Social Media Influence?
Have you used Klout? Can it really tell you how influential people are online? Can it be gamed? Read my review and decide for yourself.
What Is Klout?
Klout calls itself the “measurement for your overall online influence,” but what are they really trying to do? To understand Klout’s goal, you have to understand influence itself and the difficulty in measuring social media ROI. In the beginning, social media was measured in followers and fans, and for a time, life was good.
But with companies joining social media sites by the tens of thousands, everyone got followed and eventually tricks, software and spam accounts ran wild. Newcomers were able to create large ‘followings’ and social media service clients couldn’t tell who was legitimate, and who had purchased a great ‘friend adder’ software program.
If we can’t count on raw numbers to tell us who’s popular online, then what can we do? Enter Klout. 
6 Social Media Success Metrics You Need to Track
People who say social media isn’t measurable aren’t looking very hard.
The truth is there are dozens of viable metrics you can use to gauge the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability; it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.
Here are the 6 undervalued social media success metrics you should be tracking:
#1: Daily Story Feedback
Instead of just counting the number of Facebook “likes” you accrue, which signifies nothing more than digital bumper-stickering, track how often your fans click “like” and comment on the status updates you post. 
10 Cures for Your Social Media Pains
For marketers, social media is becoming increasingly complicated. The number of channels continues to grow and the pressure to show how all this effort will impact the bottom line only grows stronger.
The pains of managing social media are obvious – now let’s look at 10 different cures to make those pains disappear.
#1: I can’t keep track of what’s going on!
Between answering questions on LinkedIn Answers and updating your Ning profile, you missed the fact that one of your customers just wrote a scathing comment on your Facebook page. 
How to Succeed With Social Media: A Brian Solis Interview
I recently interviewed Brian Solis, author of the new book, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. He is also coauthor of the book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.
During this interview, you’ll gain some great social media insight, discover some key mistakes businesses make, and learn which corporations are excelling with social media.
Mike: In your book, you made the following statement: “We are forever students of new media. We should never strive to master something that evolves much faster than our ability to grasp its lessons.”









