So maybe us East-coasters are a little pampered when it comes to natural phenomenon (thunderstorms freak many of us out), but the vast majority of us felt that 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook Virginia and fanned out along the coast this afternoon.

Instead of turning to our local news or even the U.S. Geological Survey website, however, we did what we do best – we tweeted about it.
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The oil industry is losing friends fast, and this latest Twitter stunt won’t win them back: The American Petroleum Institute (API) has been accused of creating more than a dozen fake Twitter accounts to promote a new pipeline.
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Silicon Valley is going through yet another boom, with the tech job market seeing growth that exceeds even the dot com expansion in the 90s.

At the time of writing there are some 48,000 jobs at internet companies in the Valley. In the past year alone, unemployment has fallen from 11% to 8.5%, and there are no signs that things are slowing down.

This infographic from Q&A and research hub Focus analyses how much you can make if you’re fortunate enough to work in Silicon Valley, and asks: with the area’s incredibly high cost of living, is it actually worth it?

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The following is an excerpt. The complete article, available in our Facebook Marketing Bible, includes more key differences between Twitter and Facebook, Twitter mistakes to avoid, and how to optimize your marketing strategy for the two platforms.

Facebook is not Twitter, and Twitter is not Facebook.

For veteran users of both platforms, this statement is well understood. But for marketers and brands new to either network, or for those with an extensive level of experience in one but not the other, the differences are not immediately apparent.

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Earlier this week we looked at the ways in which Twitter and Facebook, and new kid on the block Google+, are different. And the same.

This infographic from Stefano Epifani takes a slightly more visual look at this matchup, helping you decide which of these social networks is right for you.

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This year we’ve followed closely how airlines have been using Twitter to provide customer service and make announcements, but what about the other social platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn? What about other areas of the travel industry, like hotels and cruise ships?

What about Las Vegas?

This brilliant infographic from Tripl takes a detailed look at the social travel revolution.

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It seems like each and every week we read reports of the staggering valuations of the major tech companies, many of which are in the social space.

Twitter, which has yet to turn a profit and hasn’t demonstrated a viable long-term business plan, was recently priced at $8 billion. Groupon’s $20 billion-plus valuation has been described as fiction. LinkedIn has already gone public and are trading around $110/share – over twice their $45 pricing. And Facebook is rapidly heading towards a $100 billion IPO. Maybe more.

So here’s the big question: are we in the middle of a tech boom… or facing the mire of another tech bubble?

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Wow. Not only is Rupert Murdoch having some serious offline troubles with his embroiled tabloid News of the World, but he’s being kicked around Twitter, too. Topics about the phone hacking scandal and subsequent closure of the tabloid were represented in 53 percent of all news links in tweets sent last week, July 4th to 8th, according to numbers from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
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Last month MG Siegler wrote a post on TechCrunch that claimed that LinkedIn was now sending ‘far more’ traffic to TechCrunch than Twitter.

A lot of things in the article didn’t sit well with me. I’ve had access to the Google Analytics statistics on a number of high-trafficked websites and I’ve never seen any significant referrals from LinkedIn. I also knew that Google’s take on what constituted traffic from Twitter was unreliable. But I figured that maybe it was different at TechCrunch, a technology blog that covered LinkedIn quite heavily and was therefore likely to see a lot of referrers from shares on that site. Maybe, as Siegler suggested, the recently-launched LinkedIn Today social news mailshot was a total game-changer.

Siegler’s intentions were sound but he made a number of fundamental errors in his piece, notably that he was actually talking about referrer data from Twitter.com, and not Twitter per se (he later realised his mistake and amended his post, although not conclusively). That is, we know that Twitter.com only accounts for a certain percentage of all Twitter usage, so by definition it must then also account for an equal (or, more likely, lower) percentage of Twitter referrer traffic. A large chunk of those referrals come from Twitter clients such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, as well as the myriad of smartphone apps and m.twitter.com.

There’s no doubt that referrals from LinkedIn have increased in the past few months, but LinkedIn isn’t anywhere close to Twitter’s level as a source of traffic for the majority of websites across the internet. In fact, LinkedIn’s numbers could be somewhat deceptive and probably shouldn’t be claiming any lion’s share of credit at all. And now we have the stats to prove it.

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By most counts the first-ever White House Twitter Town Hall event on July 6 was a major success, both for Twitter and Barack Obama himself, with tens of thousands of questions sent to the President via the #AskObama hashtag.

To keep it relevant, Twitter created an algorithm that determined which questions were receiving the most retweets, favourites and replies, and so, while the President spoke for about an hour, he actually only answered 18 questions during the live broadcast. From a pool of 65,217.

So, here’s the question that really matters: which topics were left out?

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