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McDonald’s has pulled a US promoted tweets campaign on Twitter after consumers used the brand’s #McDStories and #MeetTheFarmers hashatgs to slate the company over food quality, employee working conditions and animal rights – a subject McDonald’s managed to get into a debate with on Twitter with pressure group PETA.

Marketers view calculating return on investment as the biggest challenge to using social media, and a majority of them believe they cannot measure social media campaigns effectively, says eMarketer.

Social media measurement has evolved significantly in its short history, but the need to prove effectiveness is more important than ever, the research firm says. As marketing execs plan how much to invest in social media and whether to shift funds from other channels, they need metrics that show not only that their brands have a lot of friends, but that those friends actually affect the bottom line.

Brands which are early adopters of Google+ will overtake competitors in search results and therefore in online share of voice, says Habib Amir, head of digital at Clarion.While Facebook is still one of the biggest social networks, it’s important to remember that Google is where people begin their Internet journey, he explains. Google accounts for almost two thirds of total online searches and serves 98% of mobile search queries globally.

Fastest-growing Premier League football club on Facebook? Wigan Athletic with a 17% spike in ‘likes’ over the past month, according to UK digital agency Freestyle Interactive, writes Mark Terry.

Manchester United lead the rankings by a huge margin though, with total likes for the Old Trafford club topping 21 million, ahead of second-placed Arsenal (8.4 million) and Chelsea (8.1 million). Big spenders Manchester City prove you can’t simply buy a social media following, though, and the club is placed fifth with 1.5 million likes.

Leading Premier League team on Twitter? That would be Arsenal with more than 1.1 million followers on the 140-character channel, ahead of Liverpool with a mere 640,000 and Chelsea with 560,000, writes Steve Mullins. That’s according to the latest Premier League social media stats from Freestyle Interactive.

Look out, here comes seamless sharing, says Millward Brown in its Top 12 Predictions For 2012 report. You see, tomorrow’s successful social networks will be those which allow users to overcome barriers separating them from others – online traffic will be content-driven, not platform-defined.