Top 10 Social Media Blog Finalists 2014: This Week in Social Media

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

Finalists: Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2014

We received over 600 nominations for our fifth-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs).

The list of 22 finalists is pretty impressive! See for yourself below.

The judges: Our judges include Lee Odden (author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing), Denise Wakeman (founder of the Blog Squad™) and Neal Schaffer (author of three books, including Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing). They are currently finishing up their reviews of these sites.

Here are the finalists (in alphabetical order):

• Amy Porterfield
• Bloggers Make Money
• Boom Social
• Brands With Fans
• Christian Karasiewicz
• Danny Brown
• Dustn.tv
• Jenn’s Trends
• Jon Loomer
• Likeable Daily
• Muddywall
• Pagemodo
• Post Planner
• Pushing Social
• RazorSocial
• Simply Measured
• Social Media Frontiers
• Socially Sorted
• Socially Stacked
• SocialMouths
• Spiderworking
• Top Dog Social Media

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: Regular comments from readers are another sign of a healthy blog. In addition, the number of nominations for a specific blog plays 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.

Facebook Launches Trending: “A new product that’s designed to surface interesting and relevant conversations to help you discover the best content from all across Facebook.”

“To the right of your news feed, you’ll see a list of topics that have recently spiked in popularity. The list is personalized, including topics based on things you’re interested in and what is trending across Facebook overall.”

Twitter Rolls Out New Web Design: Twitter is “now rolling out a refreshed https://twitter.com” to reflect the look and feel of their iOS and Android apps.

Twitter’s new design on the web.

YouTube Launches New Comment Management Tool: YouTube has “fast-tracked the development of a new comment management page that lets you see, respond to and moderate your comments all in one place.”

“From this central page you can easily remove comments, flag comments for spam or abuse, give a thumbs-up or click over to the video watch page and reply.”

Twitter Releases New Ways to Create Tailored Audiences: “Advertisers can define groups of existing and potential customers more flexibly and connect with them on Twitter.”

“You can now create tailored audiences from lists of email addresses from your own customer relationship management (CRM) database or you can use your CRM database records that you have previously stored with an ad partner.”

Tumblr Adds Support for @Mentions: In Tumblr, “just type @ and a username when you’re writing a post and let that person know that you mentioned him/her.”

Tumblr adds Mentions feature.

LinkedIn Launches LinkedIn Volunteer Marketplace: “Nonprofits can discover the relevant members who’ve expressed interest in volunteering.”

“These members will now be able to browse hundreds—and eventually thousands—of specific, high-quality volunteer opportunities that nonprofits are seeking to fill.”

Here are a few social media tools worth checking out:

LoginBox: A mobile app that “will change the way you log into websites on your iPad and iPhone, forever!”

With a fresh and different approach, LoginBox not only remembers and fills in your username and password, but also automatically completes any other login workflow actions that may be required.

Kuhcoon Ads: An app you can use for Facebook ads management and optimization.

“Create, manage and monitor on the go!”

Other Mentions

Introducing Social Media Marketing World: 60+ pros help you master social media marketing! Join Chris Brogan (co-author of The Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Michael Hyatt (author of Platform), Jay Baer (author of Youtility), John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies), Mark Schaefer (author of Tao of Twitter), Michael Stelzner (author of Launch) and experts from more than a dozen brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2014—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.

Check out this overview of the conference or click here for more details.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.