Did you know that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey came up with the idea for the micro-blogging social platform by looking to combine the broad reach of dispatch software with the ease (and immediacy) of instant messaging? Dorsey pitched the idea to fellow co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and Twitter was born.

Fast-forward a whisker over six years later, and that moment of inspiration has evolved into a social powerhouse that now boasts more than 200 million active users built on the back of $60 million in venture capital, leading to a company valuation of $11 billion.

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Did you know that almost one in five (17 percent) of Twitter users earn more than $100,000 per annum?

That’s the findings from a new survey from Compete, who used their internal demographic data to track the income breakdown of the top six social media sites.

Perhaps not all that surprisingly, LinkedIn users rated amongst the most affluent, with 27 percent commanding an annual income of more than 100K, which was beaten only by… Google+.

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2012 will be remembered as a mixed year for Facebook, with superior marketing functionality, an increased mobile presence and the social network’s triumphant march to one billion active users contrasting somewhat with a widely-criticised (and underperforming) IPO, big brand abandonment and continuing privacy issues.

But one area where Facebook still dominates all the other social networks combined is its placement as the de facto sharing tool for users who want to talk about products, which is very good news for Mark Zuckerberg et al going into 2013.

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While the true origins of social media can be traced back to the late 1970s and the first bulletin board system (BBS), the medium didn’t really begin to develop until the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, which gave birth to the world wide web.

From here, we never looked back. AOL and blogging led to Friendster and MySpace, which gave us Facebook and then Twitter. But even as far as 2006 social media was predominately a text-based pursuit. So what’s changed?

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Did you know that 98 percent of retail brands have a presence on Twitter, and 61 percent use the Tweet button on their product pages?

These are just some of the findings from a new social commerce report from 8th Bridge, which takes a closer look at how today’s retailers are using channels such as Twitter, Facebook and rising star Pinterest to raise brand awareness, boost website footfall and drive sales.

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ComScore has released its list of the top fifty most-visited websites in the U.S. for September, and, for the first time, Pinterest has made an appearance, albeit barely.

Pinterest’s 25.3 million visitors in September was good enough for 50th place on the list, behind its more senior social media brethren MySpace (47th), Instagram (44th), Twitter (27th), LinkedIn (26th) and Facebook (4th).

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Recently we looked at a study from Amazon-owned Zappos that revealed that Twitter generated ten times more revenue for their platform than Facebook and Pinterest combined.

This study contrasted somewhat with previous data, which suggested that Pinterest users were a better source of referral traffic to websites than either Twitter or Facebook.

Well, now we have another study. And guess what? Yep. It says that Facebook generates the lion’s share of shoppers to retail websites. Can’t we all just get along?

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Much has been made of Pinterest’s rapid rise to social media darling and, more importantly, website referral traffic monster.

Indeed, Pinterest’s female-friendly demographic has quickly established the pinboarding platform as a better source of referral traffic than Twitter, Bing and Stumbleupon, and a Shopify study back in May suggested that Pinterest users were more likely to buy and spend twice as much as referrals from Facebook or Twitter.

Not so, says Amazon.

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The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is an indicator that tracks a variety of economic sectors, industries, companies and government services, reporting scores on a scale of 0 to 100 in customer evaluation of the quality of goods and services provided.

Facebook has been a mainstay in the ACSI since 2010, but this year four new social networks were added to the mix – Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.

Twitter scored a lowly 64 in its debut, beating Facebook, which fell five points from last year to 61, and LinkedIn, which scored a 63. Pinterest rated an impressive 69 in its first showing.

And your winner? That would be Google+, whose 78 left every other social channel in the dust and beat social networking overall by some nine points.

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