As you may already be aware, Facebook is rolling out the first major update to its News Feed since the feature launched nearly seven years ago. As with every other change the site has made, the new design has been met with mixed reactions and hasn’t gone unnoticed by the media.

Facebook’s revamped News Feed gives the homepage a starkly mobile look, reducing clutter and lending more space to prominent photographs. It takes significant cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets, adding a new side navigation bar and more white space.

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If you’re looking to connect with people in a particular niche on Twitter, Followerwonk could be just the tool for you. It’s currently free to search Twitter biographies, compare users and analyse followers of multiple accounts, so try it out before subscriptions kick in.

What can I find out about my followers?

By linking a Twitter account to Followerwonk, users can run a number of different analytic reports for free. Below is a list of the most useful for strategically growing a following and connecting with ‘influencers’ in a specific area:

• Influence scores – how influential are your followers?
• Follower counts – how many followers do your followers have?
• Mapped locations – where are your followers located? (see below) more…

Not only is Facebook the online destination where users spend the most time, it also represents a massive global repository of marketing data. Companies have spent the past few years trying to understand how to leverage Facebook Pages, Likes, and other aspects of the social network in order to connect with customers and gain tactical advantage over competitors. Facebook’s Graph Search, announced this week, seems to offer brands a new tool for mining the market research data stored on its servers.

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Article-level metrics (or ALMs) were a hot topic at this week’s HighWire publisher meeting in Washington. (Highwire hosts both the BMJ and its stable of 42 specialist journals). From SAGE to eLife, publishers seem sold on the benefits of displaying additional context to articles, thereby enabling readers to assess their impact. These statistics range from traditional indicators, such as usage statistics and citations, to alternative values (or altmetrics) like mentions on Twitter and in the mainstream media.

So, what services are available to bring this information together in one simple interface? There are quite a few contenders in this area, including Plum Analytics, PLoS Article-Level Metrics application, Science Card, CitedIn and ReaderMeter. One system in particular has received a good deal of attention in the past few weeks; ImpactStory, a relaunched version of total-impact. It’s a free, open-source webapp that’s been built with financial help from the Sloan Foundation (and others) “to help researchers uncover data-driven stories about their broader impacts”.

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With more and more social networks appearing on a daily basis, many find themselves with multiple sites to manage and not enough time to do so. Enter RebelMouse, a self-proclaimed “social front page”, that pulls in user content from social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

At first glance, RebelMouse looks like a digital newspaper, hosted on Pinterest. After you spend some time on the site, however, it becomes clear that there is more to it than that. Founded by Paul Berry, the former CTO of The Huffington Post, RebelMouse has already signed up 32,000 users since it’s launch in June.

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ResearchGate, a Q&A site that soon became known as ‘Facebook for scientists‘, has announced its intention to function as a publishing platform for scientific researchers and offer an alternative measure of reputation in that community.

Started in 2008 with few features, ResearchGate was reshaped with feedback from scientists and has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook. According to the website, more than 1.9 million scientists currently share papers, publish data and engage in discussions on its platform. Now an ‘RG Score’ has been designed to make those interactions visible and quantifiable.

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In response to static, neglected lab websites that have become the norm, a Princeton scientist (Ethan O. Perlstein) has personally invested in the design of a site that will inspire fellow academics to openly share their research. In addition, with his academic appointment coming to an end, http://perlsteinlab.com/ is a great way to establish a personal brand.

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For those looking improve engagement with their Facebook posts, it seems that adding more pictures and speaking in the first person is a good place to start. Social media ‘scientist’ Dan Zarrella has tracked and analysed more than 1.3 million posts from the 10,000 most-liked Facebook pages. He has created an infographic (see below) showing what kind of posts perform best on Facebook in terms of likes, shares and comments.

Photos perform best across the board, followed by text and video, according to the data. News links bring in the lowest number of likes, shares and comments. In opposition to Twitter, posts with a high number of self-referential words such as “I” and “me” get more likes .  “It’s also important to be passionate, not neutral,” which means that both positive and negative posts tend to do well. more…

As part of the longstanding strategy to position LinkedIn as a marketing platform for brands, a new program has been released that lets brands embed a “follow company” button from the social network on their homepages. The option is similar to Liking a brand on Facebook or following them on Twitter. Followers will receive automatic updates from the brand through their LinkedIn feeds.

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A host of journal editors and industry experts descended upon BMA House yesterday to discuss the latest techniques and developments in reader engagement. Highlights included a lively debate on post-publication peer review, an inspiring presentation by Twitter Journal Club founder Natalie Silvey (@silv24), encouraging advice on developing a comprehensive journal web presence by Karim Khan, and predictions for the future of social networking by Tad Campion, senior deputy editor and online editor of NEJM.

Given the central theme of social media throughout the day, perhaps the most fitting way to capture the event is by following the surrounding conversation on Twitter. According to TweetReach, the stream below reached in excess of 27,000 users – quite an achievement!
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