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Below is the list of 20 finalists, including some well-known favorites and new blogs for our judges to consider.
The Judges
Our judges include Heidi Cohen (chief content officer of Actionable Marketing Guide), Marcus Sheridan (founder of The Sales Lion), and Sonia Simone (founding partner and chief content officer of Copyblogger).
Read on to find out if your favorite social media blog is a finalist.
- AgoraPulse
- Authentic Storytelling
- Buffer Social
- CinchShare Blog
- Dustn.tv
- Firebelly
- Jenn’s Trends
- Katie Lance
- Katie Wagner Social Media
- LinkedIn for Business
- Mike Gingerich
- Molly Marshall Marketing
- Peg Fitzpatrick
- Social Media Blog by Carmen Lascu
- Social Media Revolver
- Socially Sorted
- Spider Working
- Sue B. Zimmerman
- The Social Media Hat
- Top Dog Social Media
How We’ll Pick the Winners
1. Initial qualification: A blog must have a strong social media focus, must have been nominated multiple times by multiple individuals and must be regularly updated. 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. This is the most important criterion.
- Frequency of posts: Blogs that feature multiple posts per week will score higher. This is a sign of the blogger’s commitment to blogging.
- Reader involvement: Blogs that have regular comments from readers are another sign of a healthy blog. In addition, the number of nominations for a specific blog play a part in this.
- Blog ranking: The number of other blogs that link to the nominated blog shows the value of the content. 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 comments below.
