A study from ad:tech Chicago and Q Interactive’s "Women Channel" found that women don’t seem to be incredibly influenced by social networks when it comes to purchasing decisions. In fact, 75% of the thousand women surveyed claimed that they were uninfluenced by these channels.

Retweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The concept began when somebody added the letters "RT" to somebody else’s tweet and posted it as their own. The idea caught on on a massive scale, and now there are services that utilize retweeting as the backdrop of their entire purposes. "Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate.

Press releases are a form of online marketing that we don’t discuss very often. They don’t have the new and exciting appeal of social media or even search engine marketing, but they’ve been around a lot longer and are still working. In fact, they can play right into those other forms.

A recent study from LinkedIn and Harris Interactive showed that only 8% of advertisers and consumers think Twitter is a "very effective" promotion tool. Still, it is the most linked to social network in email marketing campaigns.

Digg is putting a new spin on targeted advertising. It is always the goal of advertisers to target their ads as well as they can, but when you advertise with Digg, it will cost you if they’re not relevant enough.

InsideFacebook has an interesting page that showcases the popularity of Facebook pages with Vanity URLs. For those interested in celebrity social media statistics, it may be worth a look.

Companies have long had problems putting numbers on social media marketing results. Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group have now released a study looking at how engagement with consumers through social media correlates with financial performance.

Facebook and Twitter have both been proven to be valuable sources of traffic to many sites, but another potential source that you might be overlooking is StumbleUpon. It is true that in the past, StumbleUpon has been presented as a traffic tool, but the results weren’t always what webmasters and marketers had hoped for.

Facebook has begun offering keyword suggestions for it’s ads. This could go a long way to help advertisers better target Facebook users.

When a user goes to create an ad on Facebook, they begin the process by designing the ad. Here they select the landing page, the ad copy, and an optional image. Then they are presented with the targeting section, which now features the keyword suggestions.

Social media is huge.  That’s right; you heard it here first. Big news flash, huh? Everybody knows that anything ‘social’ is all the rage right now and it looks like it isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.  So, obviously, we all want to be ‘doing social’.. the problem is: what exactly does that entail? Beyond that, how do we answer the dreaded ‘what do we get out of it’ question to the accounting types?

Questions are frequently asked with regards to how social media and search engine rankings can be used together. In fact, I wrote an article on this subject a while back, in which I asked a few search engine marketing experts their thoughts about where social media fits into the SEO equation.

In some cases it may be wise to keep social network profiles separate from each other. What I mean by this is that business shouldn’t always be mixed with pleasure. I don’t mean this in the same way that the Wall Street Journal meant it however. Perhaps a better way to put it would be not all business should be mixed with all pleasure.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released some new guidelines for social advertising best practices. The organization aims to define key elements of social advertising and showcase best practices for consumer control and privacy.

The document, which can be found here, includes:

I have long considered online forums to be an early form of what we now consider to be social networks. They’ve been around much longer than Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and have allowed users to create profiles and communicate with each other on the web.

YouTube has just launched a new engagement product for YouTube Brand Channels called the YouTube Mosaic. What it does is present an image covering nearly the entire screen of a channel, and it is made up of colors and shapes from a bunch of individual videos.

"The idea is that users no longer just browse on a company’s channel, but they can also actively experience the brand in new and exciting ways, which could lead them to identify more strongly with it," Victoria Katsarou of YouTube Communications tells WebProNews.

appssavvy is a direct sales team for the social media space, and is able to get a first-hand look at the world of marketing through social media apps, a trend that is growing by the day. In fact, the company recently entered exclusive partnerships with six big-name social app companies – LivingSocial (makers of the ever-popular "pick your five" app on Facebook), Circle of Moms, Zynga, Serious Business, Where I’ve Been, and Poolhouse.

Author and WebProNews Blog Partner Michael Stelzner, has put together an interesting report based on a survey of 900 marketers. The report looks at the state of social media marketing. Interesting stats from the report include:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released a document of social media ad metric definitions. The document breaks social media down into three categories – social media sites, blogs, and widgets & social apps.

As a report from Michael Stelzner recently made abundantly clear, although the majority of marketers are using social media, most still have many questions about how to use it.

It’s finally coming – NFL Draft Weekend. For those of us who love the NFL, it has been a long time coming. The draft has some different elements this year though, and social media is a big part of it.

NFL.com is streaming live coverage of the draft throughout the weekend. And along with that, it is offering plenty of opportunities for fans to get engaged.

We hear a whole lot of talk about social media marketing these days. There is plenty of evidence that there are great benefits to this medium, but there are still many questions about it as well.