Social Media Today reports on five tactics to shelve. Good advice.

Here’s an email I received this morning that I thought had some pretty interesting data:

Some big news today: By our projections, a Huffington Post reader will post the site’s 200,000,000th comment early tomorrow morning, Friday, October 26th. It took six years for the first hundred million, but only around 15 months for the second. That’s quite a leap forward.

The explosion in commenting represents a new dimension of growth for The Huffington Post, which is not only growing wide — expanding traffic, verticals, bloggers, international editions — but also growing deep:

• From 9/2011 to 9/2012, minutes per visitor have increased by 62%
• Total visits have increased by 138% in that time; and visits per visitor have increased by 116%Our community of commenters has also grown in quality
• 70% of comments are in response to another commenter
•  More than 1,000 people who signed up to comment in 2005 are still commenting once a week
• HuffPost Live is taking all of this to video, mixing world-renowned experts with community pundits in conversations like nobody’s ever seen

Top commented stories of all time are:

Mitt Romney Video: Barack Obama Voters ‘Dependent On Government’ – 171,160 comments

Iran Updates: Live-Blogging The Uprising – 96,281 comments

Supreme Court Health Care Decision: Individual Mandate Survives – 71,632 comments

Ann Romney: We’ve Given ‘All You People Need To Know’ About Family Finances – 68,281 comments

Mitt Romney: ‘I Never Paid Less Than 13 Percent’ In Taxes – 62,562 comments

… is the history of the Internet, as Copyblogger correctly notes:

“From the very first email sent by researchers in Switzerland in 1971, to modern sites like Google+ and Pinterest, the Internet, and the valuable content it distributes, have always been social.”

Yep. Copyblogger throws in a nifty infographic to emphasize the point.

Woke up this morning to see this tweet from @J_M_McDermott, author of the Inc. article I linked to on Saturday.

“@LOHADdotcom is a shameless self-promoter who did no original reporting and wrote an ‘article’ based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. FYI.”

Well, good morning to you, too, John.

I was tempted to tweet back an equally abrasive personal attack, but I’m really not into flame wars (unless it’s with political extremists, then they can be all kinds of fun, especially in a red-hot election season), though I can’t help but wonder why he had such a visceral reaction to a pretty conventional random observation.

Takeaway for marketers: It’s usually a good thing when you link to articles to let the authors know you’ve done so. Occasionally, though, you’ll be reminded of the the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished.” Don’t sweat it. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, so don’t bother trying.

According to statistics assembled by The Social Skinny, Facebook is the number-one social marketing tool for brands (83% of brands). So you would think that brands are really kicking it on Facebook, right?

Well, according to this Inc. article, only 6 percent of a brand’s Facebook fans engage with that brand’s Facebook content. That really sucks, right?

Maybe not.

What the article doesn’t say is whether 6 percent is a good or a bad number. It’s an issue that begs for more study and data.

I have 339 friends on Facebook, and if someone studied all the activity on my timeline for the past year and told me that only about 20 of those people really engage with the content I post there, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Nor would it surprise me to learn that the vast majority (I’m thinking about 80-90 percent) of what social media marketers would term “engagement” is coming from a half-dozen or so of those 20 people.

I bet if you look at your own Facebook pages, you’ll see similar patterns of interaction. In social media, as in so many other areas of life, the Pareto principle continues to hold strong.

(Hat tip to Hillary via Barbara for the heads up on the Inc. article.)