CEOs and social media haven’t always made the greatest of bedfellows – while some chief execs seem to spend almost all of their spare time online, many others don’t bother at all – new research from Domo and CEO.com has revealed that the heads of America’s largest companies are gradually coming around to the idea of social networking, certainly when it comes to Twitter and linkedIn.

Facebook and Google+? Not so much.

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Cursing. Swearing. Dropping the f-bomb. Everybody does it. Right?

Back in 1972, legendary standup comedian George Carlin did an iconic gig where he talked about the seven dirty words you can never say on television in the United States. That’s more than forty years ago, but even today many of these words are still not used on the public airways in the U.S., certainly on the major networks (although they get a regular airing on HBO and Showtime). But what about the internet? How often do folks use these expressions online?

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Last week Pew Internet released new data that showed who is using Twitter and other social media sites, with Twitter now enjoying an 18 percent penetration rate amongst internet users in the U.S., up from just 8 percent in 2010.

Perhaps most pleasing for Twitter was that the numbers also revealed that usage amongst all age demographics is also growing, with the 18-29, 30-49 and 50-64 age zones more than doubling in this same period.

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Need a little weekend reading?

We’ve compiled our top ten Twitter stories of the week, which includes a study which reveals what customers dislike the most from brands they follow on social media, the latest Twitter user demographic statistics, a social media image size guide, a look at how social media is changing customer service and a brief history of social advertising.

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Did you know that 80 percent of business to business (B2B) marketers use Twitter, and 56 percent planned to expand their social media budgets in 2013?

But it’s not all social. Indeed, far from it: B2B marketers use, on average, twelve different content marketing tactics, including blogs, video, search marketing and mobile.

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When you’re considering a college placement, what’s the most important “must have” on your list?

A recent study of 7,000 high school students revealed that students are increasingly choosing colleges with social media clout, which means that the institutions that are managing their social presence on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook better than their rivals have an exponentially greater chance of attracting the highest quality of applicants.

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How do you measure social media ROI?

While social media marketing, as a concept, is less than a decade old, best practices for generating and measuring return on investment have proven particularly difficult nuts to crack.

So how are brands defining goals?

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Have you heard? Social media is changing the world.

In business, brands are using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to raise awareness of product and services, drive engagement and boost website footfall and sales. Increasingly, they’re also using these channels for customer service, with firms that excel in this area often enjoying a trickle-down effect on their bottom line.

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When you’re new to social media, setting up your Twitter or Facebook profile can be a little overwhelming.

The basics of your account can be quickly mastered, but figuring out the heights and widths of all the images you will need to make your social outposts look awesome is a time-consuming and, unfortunately, often instantly forgettable business.

This is true for veterans, too. And it gets a heck of a lot more complicated when you start rolling out your Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube channels, and those images. Where on earth do you begin?

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What was the moment when Twitter was first brought to your attention? When did you realise that Twitter was something important?

For many people, the Hudson River plane crash was Twitter’s tipping point, when the of-the-moment and on-the-spot reporting medium that Twitter provided to anybody – critically, not just the mass media – allowed iPhone owner Janis Krums to take a photograph that was rapidly shared around the Twitterverse. And the rest, as they say, is history.

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