If you feel like you’d pay closer attention to the ongoing evolution of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, if only you had the time, this post is for you. The triumvirate of key social networks in the U.S. has been hard at work rolling out new features over the past month. Here’s the executive summary, with links to insightful blog posts about each innovation.

1. Promoted Tweets. Twitter stirred up a lot of media coverage a few weeks ago when it introduced its first serious attempt at generating revenue in the form of “Promoted Tweets”, which allow companies to sponsor their tweets so that they rise to the top of users’ searches. The program is currently available only to a test group of companies that includes Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy. 

2. Facebook “Likes” on Web sites. At its F8 developer conference last week, Facebook announced a number of new features, most notably the ability for Web publishers to include a “Like” button with each post or article on their site (we’ve implemented it here at CisionBlog, see the bottom of this post). When you “Like” an article, it gets published to the news feeds of your friends on Facebook. This little feature has the potential to drive a lot of new traffic to your content. If you publish press releases or blog posts online, you should consider using it.

3. Facebook Insights enhancements. Facebook page administrators, app developers and Web site owners now have a new suite of reporting and visualization tools at their disposal for tracking the user engagement they generate through Facebook. The new Facebook Insights dashboard lets you track activity on pages, apps and external Web sites integrated with Facebook in one place for the first time, with a new API for mashing up this data with other analytics tools.

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