As we’re regularly curating content for our Twitter feed anyway (yes, we do it manually, and we read every single article we link to to make sure it’s valuable and not just site padding!) we thoughts we’d start a regular roundup of the very best social media content we’ve come across.

Hopefully, this’ll help our readers get to the most important news for them as SME marketers.

This week’s biggest Social Media news

Arguably, the release of Google + pages for businesses. Which, so far, haven’t changed our views on G+ one bit.

Other than the customer service potential of the “hangouts” feature (live video chat, basically), there’s very little here you can’t already do on Facebook; and Facebook has a much broader church of active users.  Our money is on Google’s dominance strategy being mainly based on favouring G+ related activity in search results. Which is a shame really, as they’re basically holding us all to ransom rather than luring us in with great functionality.

And also…Twitter changes

Twitter has been gradually rolling out a new “Activity” tab to users’ Home view.  The new tab contains all sorts of great information – for example, you can see at a glance which accounts your Twitter friends have just started following, a great source of implicit recommendations. BUT, it’s all jumbled in together with tweets your friends have favourited or retweeted, and retweets of your own stuff. If there was a filter to allow you to choose what kind of activity you want to view at any time, it would be fantastic. As it is, there’s just way too much going on.

And, much worse, the old “your tweets, retweeted” drop down has been removed – so if you want to find out who’s retweeted you, you have to dig through ALL the activity of EVERYONE else you follow. Or to put it another way, you effectively can’t.  The best way around this is to retweet manually and stop using the ReTweet button – which is a good idea anyway, see this post from Marian Schembari if you want to know why. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

So, on to our pick of this week’s articles. Happy reading!

Some people have been finding that Twitter is apparently unfollowing accounts at random. Here’s how to check and why it’s happening

LinkedIn has just released Facebook Insights style statistics for groups – great if you’re growing a community there and need to understand their activity. LinkedIn unveils Dashboard for Groups

In a further change to the Newsfeed format, Facebook has reinstated the old “new stuff first” option. This has implications if you were benefitting from higher visibility due to a lot of interaction on your Business page posts, or have users who generally have large numbers of friends.

It’s always a good idea to know where your weaknesses lie before starting on a project. This excellent article from Smedio highlights the most common areas where you might need help with your social media campaign.

Looking to improve your website? (You should be, constantly!). Here are five great example of product copywriting – and the principles apply even to services businesses.

And finally…Google has announced yet another algorithm change for search rankings, “freshness”. Makes having a blog even more valuable, as you stand much more chance of being the most up to the minute publisher of content on a particular topic!