Facebook will begin testing a new service that uses mobile beacons to push information about businesses and attractions to Facebook users in the area, according to "The Wall Street Journal," which first reported the news. The Bluetooth beacons are just one way the company will reach mobile users with content drawn from the Facebook profiles of local businesses and landmarks; the service will also determine users' locations through GPS signals, cell phone towers, and WiFi connections.

British police have identified a chilling new trend, in which rapists use social media to construct "false narratives" to cover their tracks after they have committed the assault. In one favored tactic, assailants have sent their victims social media messages or texts thanking them for their evening together in order to make it appear that the rape was in fact consensual intercourse.

Social media marketing will be the number one area of new investment for marketing executives over the next three to five years, according to a survey of 478 chief marketing officers and senior marketing executives around the world, conducted by the Economist Intelligent Unit on behalf of Marketo.

This week brought some additional confirmation of social media's rapidly growing role in our lives, with figures from Shareaholic showing that social's share of referral traffic to Web sites is exploding, apparently at the expense of organic search. According to the Shareaholic study, the eight biggest social networks (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube) contributed 31.24% of total traffic to Web sites in December 2014, up from 22.71% in December 2013.

Emojis may just be content-free signs that allow users to inhabit discourse without actually saying anything, but they can still totally get you arrested. That's what happened to Osiris Aristy, a 17-year-old from Bushwick, Brooklyn, who was arrested after posting emojis on his Facebook page that were interpreted by the New York Police Department as threatening violence against cops.

It's common knowledge that Pinterest users are mostly women, and it's conventional wisdom that the social network "needs" to get more male users. "The Wall Street Journal" just published an article about Pinterest's efforts to change the site's gender profile -- a bit of a Catch-22 proposition, as they must first overcome men's perceptions that it is just for women. Once again I find myself questioning the notion, always presented as self-evident, that Pinterest needs to recruit more male users and even up its gender balance.

Just in case Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vine, Google+, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Secret, Whisper, and Yik Yak weren't enough for you, now there is a new social network just for marketing professionals called Shocase. The new social net encourages marketers to, yes, "showcase" their professional skills by combining elements of LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube.

More Americans are getting their news from social media channels, and sports news is no exception. Indeed the only problem is that there may simply be too many social platforms delivering sports content for even ardent fans to keep up with it all. On that note, Sprylogics has launched a new app, Breaking Sports, that allows sports fans and fantasy players to see sports news aggregated from all their favorite social media channels, conveniently collected in one virtual spot.

Not so long ago, you would routinely hear predictions that social media was the customer service channel of the future -- but if that prediction is true, then I guess we haven't arrived at the future yet, because most people still don't view social media as a suitable channel for customer service.

People around the world believe that new technology including the Internet, social media, and mobile devices has a positive overall impact on their lives, but this belief coexists with widespread anxiety about diminishing privacy. That's according to a new global survey of 12,002 Internet users in 12 developed and developing countries -- Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the U.S. -- conducted by Microsoft, and published in advance of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.