THE GUARDIAN — Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study. Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks. Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter's user base, the numbers didn't necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site's traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective...

EMARKETER — US marketing executives were much more optimistic about the economic outlook in February 2010 than they were the year before, when the recession was in full swing, and many were planning to increase budgets, according to the “Marketing Trends Report 2010” from Anderson Analytics and the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). But they have become even more focused on getting a good return on their marketing investments. Anderson and MENG found that “marketing ROI” had jumped to become the most important trend to marketing executives. Social media cracked the top 10 this year, when 72% of respondents were planning a social strategy...

MEDIAPOST — Mobile social networking is gaining ground. As of January, 17.1% of U.S. mobile subscribers went to a social networking site or blog compared to 13.8% in October, according to new data from comScore MobiLens. The Web measurement firm last week reported Facebook and Twitter have both seen triple-digit traffic growth on the mobile Web in the last year, reaching U.S. audiences of 25.1 million and 4.7 million, respectively. (MySpace's mobile site dropped 7% to 11.4 million.) Highlighting broader growth, Facebook recently announced cracking 100 million active mobile users worldwide...

MARKETINGPROFS — Unprecedented change brought on by a volatile economy and the rise of new marketing channels is creating opportunities for marketers—and leading the way for widespread adoption of emerging tactics such as social media, rich media, and mobile marketing, according to a survey of online and direct marketers by Unica and Salloway & Associates. Over eight in ten marketers (84%) use or plan to use at least one emerging marketing tactic (social media, rich media, or mobile marketing) in the next year. Among marketers, 47% now use social media for marketing, and 23% plan to use it in the next 12 months...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — Today, Offerpal released the results of a survey that targeted social gamers’ monetization activities.  Specifically, the report found that 29.7% of social gamers do not have the ability or means to pay for virtual currencies with cash, and 53.3% of consumers are willing to engage in alternative payments, like offers, to earn virtual currency. The report also found some other interesting statistics related to monetization behavior...