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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.

Blogging outfit Tumblr has set up a news operation to cover breaking news on… Tumblr. Articles will be posted to an as-yet-unlaunched channel on Tumblr, as well as on the Tumblr.com staff blog. The platform currently hosts 42 million blogs.

ESPN has tasked media discovery company Shazam with supplying additional content to its coverage of the Winter X Games Aspen 2012. When winter sports fans use Shazam to tag the live telecast they will be able to access video highlights, photos, results and music, as well as connect to related social media.

Channel 4 Education is launching SuperMes, an online drama featuring virtual actors. The cast will improvise, taking direction from the production team, which will capture the action in the style of an observational documentary, where the action emerges from the ‘interplay of improvising artificial intelligences’.

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.

One thing social bookmarking site Pinterest has going for it right now is traction, with brands quickly getting in on the act. So, it was inevitable that the next stage for Pinterest was that it would earn itself an infographic.

The country with the most active social networking users? That would be Israel, where the average social Netizen spends over 11 hours a month with social media, ahead of Argentina (10.7 hours) and Russia (10.4 hours). And women, of course, spend more time on social networking sites than men.

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’.