As part of a comprehensive global survey of forward-looking business leadership, IBM spoke to 1,700 CEOs from 60 countries, in 18 industry sectors, and found two somewhat surprisingly impactful conclusions about the future of social. The first is that social media engagement with customers will soon be more important than face-to-face interaction. The second, as a result, CEOs aim to significantly escalate their level of social media engagement with customers over the next five years.

The traffic-driving impact of The Big 3 social networks – today, let’s rank them as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – is being constantly measured, calibrated, then re-measured and re-calibrated, it seems. This is important as marketers want to know on which networks it would be wisest to maintain a vibrant presence. The answer: all three. But it’s clear that one of these Big 3 is not just driving traffic, but big-ticket sales. Hint: it ends with “interest.”

As we write, the world is playing countdown to the biggest tech IPO in a decade. In a matter of hours, we’ll know how many billions (north of $100 billion) will add up to the value of Facebook. As we ponder all those zeros, here’s an interesting infographic on the 901 million-pound gorilla’s globe-spanning growth.

For some time now we’ve been delivering to SMI readers a “Social Media by the Numbers” roundup, a summary of the big numbers and the big picture that are driving social. Our newsletter subscribers know this well as they get it in their in-box at the start of every week. Here, we’ve put together a longer version that look back over the past few weeks so those of you are not familiar with it can get a glimpse. Enjoy!

Over the past 12 months, social media has gone from an “add-on” to “business critical” for marketers in the UK. Social has opened up a huge opportunity for brands to engage directly with customers, and every marketer understands now that there are clear benefits to using social media for marketing. But, as online engagement platform provider EPiServer noted in a recent study, the vast majority of UK businesses still struggle to effectively measure their return on social media investment. Here then are five keys to increasing your social media ROI.

We’re on the tools beat again this morning. Last week we looked at a McKinsey survey of business executives who showed their growing fondness for social networking and, in particular, video sharing. Today, we look a bit deeper into the latter phenomenon to show just how companies are deploying video to position themselves.

The social engagement chops of luxury brands has become nothing to sniff at lately. We saw a few weeks ago where Burberry Group swept top honors in the FTSE 100 Social Media Index, landing the No. 1 brand on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The high-end fashion label may have set the bar high, but that’s only because there’s a lot at stake in this corner of online retail.

There have been a number of studies that look at the social smarts of today’s most tech-savvy companies. For example, last month we took a look at the phenomenon of the great stall happening on the corporate side with blogging and the subsequent surge in Tweeting. This is only one side of the story, of course. A far more telling picture is to look at uptake of social tools. And we have that for you here.

As customer-reviews specialist Yelp proved yesterday in its first quarterly earnings report, all big acquisitions in our lives will start with asking the crowd first what they think or know of a particular merchant. Here in lies the promise – and challenge – for a social commerce sector that’s expected to top $30 billion in the next few years.

There are now more than 46 million avid “gadget” gamers in Western Europe, and Britain leads the league table by a surprising margin. Looked at another way, over 40% of Europe’s smartphone users are using their sleek new handsets for gaming, a phenomenon triggered by the success of Angry Birds, Farmerama and Draw Something. Gaming has now leap-frogged music as one of the most popular uses for smartphones.