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."

Klout Releases New Scoring Model: These changes are to “help you understand changes in your influence. This project represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history.” And most cases, people’s Klout scores have gone done. What do you think about this change?

"These changes are a significant milestone in the Klout Score’s evolution."

Google+ Integrates With Blogger: You now have the option to “replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile.”

Bloggers who switch will automatically get access to the Google+ integrations rolling out in the future.

StumbleUpon Shares Life Cycle of a Web Page on StumbleUpon: Discover how StumbleUpon can impact traffic to your website.

The average Stumble session lasts 69 minutes.

Here are a couple of social media tools worth noting:

Zooshia: The first social widget which enables websites and blog owners to mix feeds from across the social web from multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube).

With Zooshia, you can group your social feeds together and embed them onto your blog or website.

Vidcaster: This tool allows you to create your own branded video-based websites—so instead of publishing your video on YouTube, for example, you can publish it on your very own branded video site.

With Vidcaster, you are in full control of the viewing experience.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.