That’s how you could pretty much sum up the conversation I had this morning with Jon Bishop, head of social media for PayPal UK. For the second time in a year, the popular online payment service has amassed 6-digit gains in its Facebook following in a matter of days with a pretty cost-effective pitch: friend us and you’ll get a chance to win a new iPad 2.

Promoted tweets aren’t just for big brands anymore, it’s now becoming clear. StylePage.com, a month-old Silicon Valley based start-up for all things fashion, tapped Twitter to build some launch buzz and pad its community membership as it aims to take on the top names in online fashion. A big challenge for vertical social networks like Stylepage is building a critical mass of users at the outset. Could Twitter get it off the ground?

We share 27 million pieces of content every day, a new study says, and that number is increasing everyday. But what types of content are consumers more likely to share? It’s a question top-of-mind for big brands and organizations investing in social media outreach. Here’s a hint.

We’re actually being slightly conservative here, given the new data from comScore. Incredibly, Facebook served up about one in every three online display ads served in the U.S. And that was just for Q1, a seasonally slow quarter.

Slim-Fast, of all brands, launched a promoted tweet campaign last week in time to capitalize on all the excitement surrounding the Royal Wedding. Its promoted tweet can hardly be called a precision-based advertising scheme; the tweet was directed at anyone interested in William and Kate, which, as we know from the TV networks, is anybody from urbane Brooklynites to Sydney royalists, plus a lot of people in a certain island in the North Atlantic. Did it work?

Volkswagen gave the driving public the first glimpse at the 2012 VW Beetle last week in a launch spearheaded through social media, most notably, through a prominently placed promoted tweet campaign. But despite the hype around the new design and the well-intended social strategy for the launch, the initial results have sputtered out of the gate.

Late last month we cited the latest IAB UK statistics to point out that the social media ad spend — the fastest growing in all of digital — last year grew a staggering 200% to top £132 million in Britain. We have some new projections for the U.S. market and the growth in social spending is even greater.

No more standing in line for the bathroom at the annual sprawling music festival. Wrigley 5 Gum launched a Twitter promoted tweet this past weekend to direct fans to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s live broadcast on YouTube. The “ChoachellaLive” YouTube stream might be the most advanced integration of social media into live music and sponsorship to date.

Last week we reported on the two-headed force of social media and online video propelling advertisers in the UK to a record spend for 2010. While we wait for the audited US online ad spend numbers to come out in the coming weeks, here’s further evidence of the importance of online video to the marketing world.

SocialVibe creates and brokers ad deals between marketers and social sites to incorporate better-aimed social ads. For example, SocialVibe works closely with Zynga’s social games such as “Mafia Wars” by prompting users with an ad for more in-game cash when they interact with the sponsors ad.