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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In just a few years Twitter has established itself as an increasingly important medium for breaking news, but what happens when Twitter itself is the subject of that news, and the story is almost wholly negative?

Last week, users responded with anger on reports that female campaigners and MPs had been subject to abuse and rape threats on Twitter, particularly when Twitter, Inc, was initially slow to respond and then failed to provide any practical solution. YouGov tracked the UK public’s reaction to this news between July 28th and August 5th and discovered that attention given to Twitter, which is defined as those hearing anything good or bad about a brand, doubled in this period (from 12 percent to 24 percent of the UK public).

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What do you do when you have a problem with a brand’s product or service?

You go online, right?

You’re not alone. Close to six in ten (57 percent) of customers search for a solution online before taking any further action, and they’re increasingly reaching for a brand’s social media outposts. Almost half of social media users (47 percent) have received customer care on a channel such as Twitter or Facebook, and 37 percent now prefer customer service through social media rather than by telephone.

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Nielsen has released a study that, for the first time, provides statistical evidence of the two-way relationship between Twitter and television, inasmuch as how conversation on Twitter about a TV show can boost ratings for that program, and vice versa.

However, while the data has shown that there’s definitely some correlation between a spike in tweets and strong ratings, it’s typically more in Twitter’s favour than the other way around.

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When you Like or follow a brand on a social media channel such as Facebook and Twitter, what is the thing that they do that you hate the most?

Disruptive Communications asked more than 1,000 UK consumers what was most likely to damage their opinion of a brand that uses social media, and discovered that poor spelling and lousy grammar was the worse offence, with 42.5 percent citing this as their biggest turn-off.

“Salesy” updates (24.9 percent) and posting too frequently (12.8 percent) were also negatives for some customers.

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Pew Internet have updated their data that shows who is using Twitter and other social media sites. As we noted yesterday, 18 percent of online U.S. adults are now active on Twitter, up a full two percentage points from February of this year, and more than double Twitter’s total user base in November 2010.

But who are these people? According to Pew’s findings, the typical Twitter user is an 18-29 year-old educated minority with a well-paying job, and slightly more likely to be male than female.

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Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of online adults in the U.S. now use social media, suggests new data from Pew Internet.

This represents a significant rise from when Pew first carried out this research in February 2005, when just 8 percent of online adults were active in social channels.

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Social advertising has become a seriously big business. How big? Ad revenue on Twitter alone is forecast to reach $950 million next year, and more than half of all advertisers have said that they plan to increase their social advertising budget in 2013, with an increasingly significant portion going towards mobile ads.

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Do we share too much online?

Nine in ten adults think we do, and when you look at the statistics it’s hard not to agree. Millions write status updates each and every day about their health, love life and alcohol use, and a startlingly high number of folks tweet and Facebook whenever they leave their house.

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