Nearly two-thirds of small business owners (64%) use social media for business-related purposes. Among small business owners who use social media, Facebook is the most popular platform, followed by Twitter and Google.

Rising costs and ambitious long-term investment strategies are undermining investor confidence in Facebook and Twitter, judging by the downward movement in both companies' stock following their earnings announcements earlier this week. Twitter is also suffering from its difficulty monetizing users and a slowdown in new user growth.

As most of you will recall from your own long-lost youths, teenagers hate fake people. While some might question their commitment to authenticity in our postmodern age, where meaning is constantly appropriated and reappropriated, they seem pretty sure about this hating fakers thing, so let's just go with it. More interesting is the fact that they feel social media compels them to be fake too, according to a survey of U.S. teens and young adults conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Naver, a Korean Internet company.

Confronted with a scandal about potential privacy breaches, anonymous social messaging platform Whisper is doing what any good organization would for damage control: throwing someone under the bus! Preferably one of those disposable editorial staffers. In this case the sacrificial offering to the bus gods is editor-in-chief Neetzan Zimmerman, who came under fire after disclosing that the app tracks users' locations, including users who specifically asked not to be tracked, in an interview with The Guardian.

More women than ever are reporting negative body image issues, and one of the main culprits is social media, according to a new survey of 1,000 women ages 18-40 conducted by Glamour. The survey, carried out for the magazine by Ohio State University assistant professor Jesse Fox, is a follow-up to the original Glamour survey from 1984 -- and the comparison is pretty depressing.

While I'm sure that none of you, dear readers, would ever absent yourself from work for a less than perfectly valid, indeed urgent reason, here's a piece of advice should you ever consider doing so: don't post photos of yourself sipping mimosas cross town when you're supposed to be sick in bed with the flu, because your boss may very well see them and realize that you're actually a lying, untrustworthy slacker.

While everyone is wringing their hands about the effect of advertising clutter and marketing-related privacy concerns on social networks like Facebook, one new contender is trying to cut the Gordian knot with a novel approach. Meet Tsu, the social network that pays you to share.

Moms love social media, but they also kind of hate it, according to a recent poll Current Lifestyle Marketing and Impulse Research, which surveyed 1,004 mothers and found that many feel social media creates unrealistic expectations and puts pressure on them to craft an idealized image of their lives. They also objected to excessive marketing, a proliferation of annoying invitations, and over-sharing by online contacts. Unsurprisingly younger mothers were both more likely to engage with social media, and to feel stress because of it.

Conventional wisdom has it that the American political scene is becoming more polarized, with liberals and conservatives increasingly entrenched in their own views and unwilling to consider those of the opposing side. This is attributed in large part to a tendency to "choose your news," as partisans on both sides retreat into media echo chambers where they only hear reporting that agrees with their opinions.

There's some good news for all those people who complain that social media encourages people to traffic in superficial, trivial nonsense, as a new generation of social networks are focusing on encouraging intellectual and creative endeavors.