ReadWriteWeb

When it comes to crafting social status updates to ensure maximum exposure and click-throughs, many of the tried-and-true methods seem somewhat obvious. Posting at certain times of day, for example, can have a dramatic impact on performance. Makes perfect sense.

Sometimes, effective optimization can come from places you didn't expect, and the only way to find out is by analyzing a large set of cold, hard data.

One way to target your audience and expand your reach is the daily exercise your social media accounts should be getting by doing text chats with others in your network. Twitter makes this easy, and there are now more than 500 weekly chats to choose from. Here is how to get started, no matter what your professional or personal interests might be. The beauty of a good social media chats is that they often allow the participant access to movers and shakers in a given industry. So here are some tips if you haven't tried this yet, or want to learn more. Remember, all chats are open forums.

Analytics firm comScore released new data today showing that U.S. mobile social media audiences increased 37%, and more than half of social mobile audiences read a post from an organization, brand or event on their mobile device.

While the mobile browser accounted for more visits, research shows that the social networking app audience has grown five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience has grown 24% to 42.3 million users, the mobile social networking app audience shot up 126% to 42.3 million users in the past year.

If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

For Twitter, it appears that the microblogging service's new relationship with Apple is paying off.

The company saw a huge boost in user sign-ups on the first day of iOS 5 being live, thanks to an especially tight integration between the service and Apple's ever-popular mobile operating system. Last Wednesday, when iOS 5 was officially released, Twitter had three times the new user sign-ups it normally sees in a typical day, CEO Dick Costolo told the crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Two recent studies about how companies use social media for customer support have concluded that for the most part they don't do a very effective job at responding to complaints. And while some companies are better at listening and responding to their customers, many do a miserable job, still. It is a sad and somewhat depressing state of affairs, to be sure.

You wouldn't think that your local megaplex shopping mall is leading the way in terms of social media engagement, but you'd be wrong. Simon Property Group, owners of hundreds of malls across America, is doing it right when it comes to how they engage their store owners and consumers. Let's take a closer look and see some of the lessons learned for your own humble business, even if you aren't a retail establishment that can be seen from the food court.

The effect Twitter and the social Web have begun to have on entertainment, journalism and other media-related industries is by now well known and much-discussed. Its impact on other areas of human culture and knowledge, however, is still emerging. For example, how does the microblogging service impact academics and scholarly communication?

That's exactly what researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are hoping to figure out. The team has selected a sample of faculty and non-faculty scholars at five US and UK-based universities and used Twitter's search API to find their Twitter usernames, filtering out those whose profiles did not clearly identify them and using scripts to positively identify 230 scholars.

For East Coast fans of Radiohead, the news could hardly have been more exciting. The band, multiple news outlets confirmed, would be playing a surprise show in downtown Manhattan on Friday afternoon. The show would coincide with the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests that had been organized online and with which the band would likely be sympathetic.

Once a few prominent blogs began reporting on it, the news spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook, where eager fans posted updates about the show and began making plans to attend.