Here’s a little charticle that might surprise you. We took the latest comScore web usage numbers, sifting through it to focus solely on Europe’s most popular social sites. The big winner hails from Mother Russia, not Palo Alto.

Despite the recent sale of Myspace for a relatively meager $35 million and LinkedIn’s rocky ride so far on the stock market, search engine giant Google has decided it wants a piece of the lucrative social networking pie, and last week launched Google+. Oh, it’s also made a big green announcement that’s gotten lost in all the geeky plus-buzz.

Last week we looked at the novel way in which PayPal UK has recruited over 100,000 160,000 Facebook fans and another 11,000 Twitter followers in a matter of a few weeks simply by dangling the chance to win a free iPad 2 to anyone who clicks the “Like” button. We calculated the cost-per-acquisition for PayPal UK is pennies on the pound, a huge bargain when you consider what it costs to lure in new Twitter followers by paying for a targeted “Promoted Account” buy.

npower Football League launched the ‘Every Shirt Has A Story’ campaign earlier this month to get fans passionate online for a chance to win a range of league prizes just as the season draws to a close. Technically the campaign accomplished its goal, with a respectable number of fans participating in the contest. But in terms of social media engagement, if this campaign came down to a penalty kick, you could say, it was a sour miss. Here’s what went amiss.

PayPal UK launched an effort last week to boost its social media presence through a giveaway contest dangling free iPad 2′s. Its message: love us and we might award you with this must-have baby. Can boosting social followers through bribes be a genuine lure? More importantly, does it work?

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?

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?

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.

Nobody saw this one coming. Flip video, the darling gadget of mobile journos and digi-documentarians, is dead, shut down by its under-pressure owner Cisco. We are morbidly fascinated here with the death of brands in this era of social networking. The death of Flip is the spookiest we’ve yet seen.