By Cindy King
Published January 12, 2013
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 (co-author, Marketing in the Round, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich), (co-owner of River Pools, founder of The Sales Lion) and (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):
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.
: 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.
: YouTube has launched a feature that enables you to “send videos from your mobile to your TV with just one button.”
: 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:
: LinkedIn now counts over 200 million members in more than 200 countries and territories and serves members in 19 languages around the world.
LinkedIn now has over 200 million members.
: 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.
Bitly bursts API returns the current phrases that are receiving a burst in attention beyond what we would expect.
: You can now pan and zoom when viewing photos on Google+ from your desktop.
To pan and zoom, "open a large photo on Google+, use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out, and click and drag to pan right, left, up or down."
: “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.”
When you share your check-ins your Foursquare friends now see more information.
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.
Read more from the original source:
Top 10 Social Media Blog Finalists 2013: This Week in Social Media …