Top 10 Social Media Blog Finalists 2013: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.

Finalists: Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2012

We received over 750 nominations for our fourth-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs).

The list of 24 finalists is pretty impressive! Take a look for yourself below.

The judges: Our judges include Gini Dietrich (co-author, Marketing in the Round, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich), Marcus Sheridan (co-owner of River Pools, founder of The Sales Lion) and Michael Stelzner (author, Launch, CEO of Social Media Examiner and host of the Social Media Marketing podcast). They are currently finishing up their reviews of these sites.

Here are the finalists (in alphabetical order):

• 60 Second Marketer
• Bloggers Make Money
• Boom Social
• Content Marketing Cardiology
• Danny Brown
• Heidi Cohen
• Jeff Bullas
• Jon Loomer
• Jason Cruz
• Lighthouse Insights
• LKR Social Media
• Pushing Social
• Razor Social
• Social Barrel
• Social Fresh
• Social Media Revolver
• Social Mediopolis
• Social Samosa
• Social Solutions Collective
• Social Strand Media
• Socially Sorted
• Spider Working
• Top Dog Social Media
• Viral Blog

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.
• 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 numbers 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's New This Week?

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

SlideShare Enhances Sharing With LinkedIn: You can now log into SlideShare with your LinkedIn credentials, use your LinkedIn profile to enrich your SlideShare profile, follow your LinkedIn network on SlideShare and easily share content you discover with your LinkedIn network.

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YouTube Turns Your Phone And Tablet Into A Remote Control For Your Television: YouTube has launched a feature that enables you to “send videos from your mobile to your TV with just one button.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zaNHntOe4

Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:

• Who’s coming to Social Media Marketing World?
• Who is your all time favorite social media expert?
• What content marketing questions do you have for Stan Smith?

LinkedIn Reaches 200 Million Users: LinkedIn now counts over 200 million members in more than 200 countries and territories and serves members in 19 languages around the world.

Bitly Announces Social Data APIs: Bitly's new social data API “gives you direct access to the best available content shared by people across all social networks.” If you use this popular link shortening tool, check out the new realtime search functionality.

Google+ Introduces Pan And Zoom Photos On The Desktop: You can now pan and zoom when viewing photos on Google+ from your desktop.

Foursquare Friends See The Adventures You Share: “Now when your friends tap on check-ins that you’ve shared on Facebook or Twitter from their phones, they’ll see a pretty new page with all the details of your check-in – the address, photos, badges, points, comments, and likes.”

And don't miss this:

Social Media Marketing World is Social Media Examiner's latest mega-conference—taking place at the waterfront San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina in San Diego, California on April 7-9, 2013.

As you'd expect, Social Media Examiner recruited the biggest and best names in the world of social media marketing for this conference. Only the best for you! Be sure to check it out.

Watch this video to get a quick overview of Social Media Marketing World.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.

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