It has been a great year for social media, it has really come of age with businesses all over the world embracing it to help both their bottom line and to engage with customers and celebrities flocking to services like Twitter and Facebook. The mainstream media and blogs have dedicated millions of column inches to the subject as the public appetite for social media shows no signs of decreasing. With so many blog posts and content relating to social media we thought it would be a good opportunity to bring together what we thought were the best posts of the year. You probably won’t agree with them all, you might even think some of yours should be in there but these posts were huge at the time and heavily discussed so they clearly stirred some passions. Either way reading through the posts will give you a good overview of how the whole year went and remind you of some of the great things that happened this year online…

Top 50

1.Techcrunch Gets Secret Twitter Documents

This post caused a stir at the time as Techcrunch got it’s hands on some secret documents from Twitter HQ and shared most of them with the world. They talked about Twitter’s internal strategy and how they would aim to become the pulse of the planet.

2.Facebook Continues Impressive Growth

This Post talks about how Facebook have just passed 350 Million users and this really has been a year of massive growth for the most popular social network on the planet.

3 Susan Boyle Takes Over The Web

This Post talks about how Susan Boyle rose to stardom from nowhere. One minute nobody had heard of her and the next her video had over 200 million views on YouTube. She was the talk of Twitter and nobody could get enough of Susan Boyle.

4.Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants

This post has a very unusual title but a very strong message. I am not going to try and explain in a couple of lines what a great writer can do in a blog post but if you read one of the posts in this list make this the one.

5 Plane Crashes In To The Hudson

This post was one of the first to pull together images and video from the plane that crashed in to the Hudson river in New York. This was one of the most prominent cases of citizen journalism that the world had seen as news broke through social media in front of our eyes.

6Top Twitter Trends 2009

This Post on the official twitter blog gives us some great insight in to the massive amount of data we have all created by spending hours of our life on Twitter this year. All the obvious ones that you would expect are on there as well as a few surprises.

7 Did Social Media Kill The Film Bruno?

This Post looks in to how the new film Bruno opened super strong only to be panned on social media and only see a small amount of takings after that. Was this social media taking hold and was this the first movie to have it’s takings slashed because of social media?

8 Facebook Announces That It Is To Buy Friendfeed

This post breaks the news of how Facebook has snapped up emerging social network Friendfeed for a little over $50 million. The move is seen as mostly an acquisition of talent and with few Friendfeed features having actually been rolled into Facebook yet.

9 $72,000 in E-Books in a Week – 8 Lessons I Learned

This Post shows how who Popular blogger Darren Rowse launched an E-Book and made a huge amount of money in less than a week. He shares tips on how you can do the same yourself and the best ways to launch products online.

10 Six Social media Trends for 2010

This post in the Harvard Business review is a bit above the normal cut and paste stuff we see about the future of social media and has some great insights as to where the industry as a whole is heading in 2010.

11 Ten New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

This Post went some way to explaining the new privacy settings that Facebook launched that were causing so many people lots of concerns. Facebook were essentially trying to open as much data as possible for search but users got very confused.

12.Social Media Revolution

This Post was one of the biggest videos of the year as it brought together some very snappy headline figures with some funky music and was used in countless presentations all over the world by people trying to show just how big the growth in social media was.

13.Ashton Kutcher and Evan Williams On Oprah

This post showed us a video of the guys behind Twitter on the Oprah Winfrey show showing the host how to get started with the popular service and she sent out her first tweet and gathered a million followers in no time at all due to her huge reach.

14 Bing Launches

This post was one of the first to look at how the new search engine from Microsoft, Bing, was doing in the market place. Truth was it was very well received and continued to grow during the year.

15 Seth Godin Launches Free Ebook

This Post from Seth Godin announces the launch of a free E book with contributions from some of the biggest names online. You can head over there and download the free E book now as it is well worth a read.

16 A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009

This Post has a serious amount of research attached to it and links to some of the best stats on the web showing the growth of social media with a huge range of statistics to back up the growth. Well worth bookmarking and using as a resource.

17 Michael Arrington Spit Attack.

This post but perhaps the biggest tech blogger in the world was an insight in to the mind of somebody who gets a lot of abuse and when he got spat at while attending a conference he decided to pack it all in for a couple of weeks and think about life in blogging. An excellent blog read.

18 Belle Du Jour Named

This Post explained how one of the biggest bloggers in the world how had been working as an anonymous sex blogger chartering her job as a call girl was finally unmasked.

19 Iran Elections: A Twitter Revolution?

This Post in the Washington post gives some good insights in to how Twitter was used during the Iranian elections and how Twitter was one of the only was of getting information to the outside world and also to organize protests effectively.

20 Michael Jackson’s Death And Twitter

This Post uses Michael Jackson’s death to show the huge increase in the power and widespread use of social media in general showing just how quick the story is to break through social media.

21 Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

This post is in fact a video and it has a great look at one of the biggest problem areas at the moment in social media which is ROI. It is only a few minutes long and is not going to get in to the deep and meaningful stuff but it is well worth a watch.

22 Social technology growth marches on in 2009

This Post is a heavy read but has some really good insights in to how the market has grown and how social technology has really taken a massive leap forward in 2009.

23 Tiger Woods Social Media Diagrams

This Post takes a different angle to the Tiger woods story and uses some interesting diagrams to show the effect the cheating and car crash had on his presence through social media. Interesting way of looking at it instead of the hundreds of other similar blog posts about this subject.

24 Zynga Worth $1billion

This post talks about the huge rise in value of the company behind popular games such as Farmille and Mafia Wars that have become hugely popular in the last year through social networks like Facebook.

25 Twitter Lists Launch

This post on the official twitter blog was the first word we all had that twitter was about to launch a new feature called Twitter lists. There was a huge amount of chatter and talk online about how the lists would be used and as people tried to get themselves on as many lists as possible.

26 Free Ebooks

This Post from Mashable is a great resource for finding 10 of the top free E books on the web. E books are a great way of getting information on social media and authors will often only ask for your email address in return. This list is really the only one you want to go with.

27.How Events Can Use Social Media

This Post by Chris Brogan gave great insight in to how events should be using social media to improve the overall offering that they providing and to increase the visibility and ultimately increase ticket sales for future events. Crucial reading if you are involved in events in any way.

28.Sixty Two Ways To Use Twitter For Business

This post came out during the summer when Twitter use was at it’s highest and people were trying to find out how they would use it for business and along came this super post at just the right time with a bunch of ways to use Twitter effectively for business.

29.Eleven Ways To Influence People Online

This Post was essential reading for anybody doing any sort of business online or people trying to build an audience on the blog or website. Some highly effective strategies.

30 Apple Rejects Google Voice App

This Post tells how Apple rejected the Google Voice iPhone app and that was seen as the breaking point between an otherwise good relationship between Apple and Google as their products just become too aligned.

31 Le Web Videos

This Post is not actually a post as such but instead a series of videos from some of the brightest lights in the world of tech and social media from the Le Web conference in Paris this month. A great free way to get lots of information about the business.

32 U2 Stream Concert Live On YouTube In HD

This Post talks about how the biggest band in the world, U2, were to stream their concert to the entire world via YouTube and in the process attract 10 million viewers. It was one of the biggest streams of it’s kind ever.

33 The Ryanair Blogger

This Post by Jason Roe kicked off quite a storm when he found that there was a small bug in the Ryanair website and pointed it out on his blog. What happened next was a mixture of Ryanair staff attacking him, news appearances and a lot of debate.

34 App Store Passes 100,000 Apps

This Post tells how the app store for the iPhone has now passed 100,000 apps and is still rising. The store features everything from games to apps on where to locate your car that you parked earlier. It has been a huge year of growth for the app store despite competition from all sides.

35 Spotify Hits 1 Million Users

This Post talks about the massive growth of Spotify and this really has been a great year for the music streaming service as it has continued to grow at a rapid pace over the course of the past 12 months.

36 The 100 Best Social Media Books Ever

This Post does exactly what it says on the tin and delivers a massive list of the best books relating to social media from the last year. You’ll be able to buy all the books by clicking through and well worth a

37 Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

This post is on the blog of the book socialnomics and has a huge amount of great evidence and stats to back up the size of the social media industry.

38 2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?

This Post by Robert Scoble is a brilliant snapshot of what is happening in the search space at the moment and how SEO is going to change in a bit way over the next year.

39 Ten Of The Best Social Media Tools For Entrepreneurs

This post is a great resource for entrepreneurs who wanted to use social media tools to help them with their business and to improve their efficiency.

40 Paranormal Activity

This Post shows just how powerful social media was in turning a low budget film into a massive worldwide success. They used tools like Facebook and Twitter and had fans “demand” to see the movie so as to create added interest.

41Gary Vaynerchuk Launches Crushit

This post from Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the launch of his much anticipated new book Crushit which was one of the big social media books of the year. Gary promoted it heavily online and it made the best seller charts as you would probably have expected.

42Foursquare Launches in 15 New Cities

This Post shows how the popular new loaction based social network Foursquare started to roll out worldwide as the early adaptors started to jump on board.

43 Google Wave Launches

This Post was one of the first to announce the launch of the exciting new product from Google called Google Wave. It was rolled out to a handful of users at first and feedback was mixed on the collaboration tool that was apparently going to change how we used services like email.

44 Geocities Closes It’s Doors

This post talks about the once popular Geocities finally closing it’s doors and closing down it’s service. It was one of the early attempts at a social site but the users left after Yahoo had paid big money for the site and it just had to be closed down in the end.

45 Twitter 100 Million Fund Raising

This Post talks about how Twitter just raised around 100 Million dollars and what they are going to do with it. The money was raised around the time when things were going really well for Twitter and the growth was still explosive.

46 Ashton Kutcher Takes On CNN For 1 Million Followers

This Post announced that Ashton Kutcher had won the race to be the first person to get to 1 million followers on Twitter. The race had captivated many and Kutcher appeared on the Oprah show the next day.

47Google Launches Real Time Search

This post was one of the first announcing that Google had just taken us all by surprise and launched real time search that included data from Facebook and Twitter. The search results were quickly rolled out and we could all see tweets appearing in our Google results as they happened.

48.Eurostar Social Media Break Down

This post from social media agency We Are Social came as people tried to blame them for not responding to the Euro Star breaking down and leaving customers stranded even though the company were not even engaged to deal with customer service full time.

49.Dell Generates $6.5 Million Through Twitter

This post gives us the low down on how Dell has used their main Twitter account to make over $6 million in sales by seding out discount codes on the microblogging service.

50 RATM Xmas Number 1

This post shows how there was a Facebook campaign to make Rage Against The Machine the Xmas number 1 in the UK ahead of the popular single released from the Xfactor. It was a good way to end the year showing the power of social media and what can be achieved online.

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