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Social media usage within the Inc 500 ranking – the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in the US – has changed in the past 12 months. While these outfits are now incorporating the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, mobile apps and Foursquare, they are cutting their use of blogging, message boards, video blogging, podcasting and MySpace, according to a report by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts.

Africa’s biggest Twitter nation? That would be South Africa, according to How Africa Tweets research from Portland Communications and Tweetminster. In the last quarter of 2011, the country boasted over twice as many tweets (5 million) as next-most-active-market Kenya (2.5 million), ahead of Nigeria (1.6 million), Egypt (1.2 million) and Morocco (745,000).

A little over half of tweets from Africa are sent from mobile devices, while 60% of the continent’s most active Tweeters are aged between 20 and 29. Twitter in Africa is widely used for social conversation, with 81% mainly using it for communicating with friends.

Recommendations from friends and family are the most powerful influence on consumers, and that the best way to get consumers talking is for brands to provide direct, positive experience, according to New Realities 2012 research in the US, Brazil, China and India conducted by Jack Morton Worldwide.

Not all kinds of advocacy are equal, though – consumers’ views on social media impact are contradictory and only one in five use social networks to make brand recommendations the same way they do ‘in the real world’.

Bangkok street life is buzzing and appears somewhat chaotic with myriad food and market stalls open pretty much 24/7, while counterfeit – and well-made – branded goods abound, and smartphones and iPads are almost de rigueur among youth. Plus. everyone is on Whatsapp. And social gaming was a big trend here in back in early- 2010.

Thai youth is clearly as heavily into the latest tech as its counterparts in Asian and Western societies, says Sabine Stork*.

Social media savvy brands should be taking an interest in Pinterest. What is it? Well, it’s a personal-use digital pinboard where users can pin images they find online in themed collections for sharing, writes Steve Mullins.

Social media figured highly in 2011, and the brand-e Campaigns Panel has flagged up a number of initiatives in its look-back at last year.

“Two Thousand and eleven was the year more and more businesses started to realise the creative and cost-efficient opportunities offered by social media,” says Pat McCaren, senior planner at Dare in London.