2M Facebook fans better than Super Bowl ad, celeb endorsement … or Twitter followers

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study by Staples.

Sprout Social launches #BePresent to give brands free social media checkups

How is your company doing in social? Are you engaging customers, fans, and potential customers? And are you doing it better than your competitors?

Ouch: Samsung beats out Apple in customer loyalty for the first time … and so does Amazon

"It's not terrible to be number two," Passikof said. "But in both cases I think consumers are looking for higher degrees of innovation. It was only after Samsung and other companies came out with smaller tablets that Apple brought out the iPad mini. It was only in reaction."

Enterprise marketing tech firm Unified acquires Y Combinator alumus PageLever

"The core reason for the deal is that we have a killer Facebook advertising solution, and they have a killer Facebook analytics solution," Unified VP of corporate communications Dave Donohue said.

Advertisers salivating in anticipation of new iPad Mini

It seems almost certain that Apple will announce an iPad Mini tomorrow in San Jose. And for several reasons, advertisers can't wait.

Study: brands don’t listen, answering fewer than half of customer questions on Facebook (infographic)

Customer service is going social. Unfortunately, it's traveling on the slow boat to customer satisfaction.

SproutSocial grows revenue 750% as social media bursts out of the marketing department

Most two-year-olds are growing fast. But few are growing as quickly as social media management service SproutSocial, which is riding the wave of social media escaping the marketing department and penetrating the entire enterprise.

Exclusive: Buffer partners with “#1 Twitter client” TweetCaster to make you more popular

Social engagement tool Buffer will be announcing an integration with top Twitter web and mobile client TweetCaster tonight.

Twitter mulls a replacement for follower counts

Twitter might be considering a replacement metric for follower count that more accurately measures how influential users are.

Stubhub founder Jeff Fluhr wants you to know that Spreecast is way, way better than Google Hangouts

Jeff Fluhr, the serial entrepreneur who sold StubHub to eBay for $310 million, thinks there are far better options than Google Hangouts when you want to connect, engage, and communicate with groups of people.

Not surprisingly, high up on the list is his new startup, Spreecast.

Chartbeat moves past the pageview with redesign focused on engagement

As a struggling Chartbeat addict, I can tell you that watching the number of people flooding onto your site or story can be a rush. But like any great high, it fades too fast, especially when you can’t figure out …

Apsalar’s analytics tools delve deeper into mobile app engagement and monetization

Analytics is becoming the big science behind mobile games. And the folks at Apsalar are aiming at becoming the biggest propeller heads in the business.

The San Francisco company, a veteran of DEMO,  is announcing today two new analytics tools …

Now anyone can make a Wall-E style narrated encyclopedia with Qwiki

Qwiki, an online Wikipedia-esque service that displays information and computer-generated voices, images and video, launched an online presentation creation tool for publishers today, at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The Qwiki editor takes content such as text, …