Facts about Social Media

Back in the earlier days we used the term “e-Business”. Web sites were commonly prefaced with the letter ‘e’. Products and services were e-this and e-that. But what business is not ‘e’? It didn’t take long for the ‘e’ to drop. We quickly realized how redundant and useless that little prefix was. It provided no additional information to any word because the fact was – everything was ‘e’.

The ‘Social’ in ‘Social Media is a useful terminology because it helps organizations understand a fundamental shift in how consumers think, work, and live. ‘Social Media’ may be just another buzzword, but the fact that media is social is no fad. The ‘Social’ in Social Media, like the ‘e’ in ‘e-Business’, will soon be implied, redundant, and unnecessary. Media that is not inherently social will die and one-way communications will simply be ignored.

The cluetrain has left the station. Is your company on board? If not, here are 49 compelling facts you can use to help them get a clue.

Facts of Social Media

1. By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers.
2. 96% of them have joined a social network.
3. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web.
4. 1 out of 8 couples married last year met via social media.
5. Years to reach 50 million users:
   • Radio: 38 years
   • TV: 13 years
   • Internet: 4 years
   • iPod: 3 Years
6. Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months.
7. iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.
8. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest.
9. China’s QZone is larger, with over 300 million using their services.
10. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that, on average online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction…
11. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
12. 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
13. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females.
14. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Norway, Ireland, and Panama.
15. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices people update anywhere – anytime.
    • Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences.
16. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé.
17. In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
18. What happens in Vegas stays on
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Orkut
    • Bebo
    • Flickr
    • digg
    • myspace
    • YouTube
19. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
20. YouTube hosts more than 100,000,000 videos.
21. Wiki is a Hawaiian term for ‘Quick’.
22. WikipediA has over 13 million articles.
23. Studies show it’s more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
24. 78% of these articles are non-English.
25. If you were paid one dollar for every time an article was posted on WikipediA, you would earn $156.23 dollars per hour.
26. There are over $200,000,000 blogs.
27. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
28. Word of Mouth is now World of Mouth.
29. 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
30. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
31. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
32. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.
33. 78% of customers trust peer recommendations.
34. Only 14% trust advertisements.
35. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
36. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do.
37. hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
38. 17% of 18 to 34 year-olds have watched TV on the Web.
39. Only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR/TiVo.
40. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
41. 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle.
42. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
43. We no longer search for the news – the news finds us.
44. In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services – they will find us via social media.
45. Social media isn’t a fad, its a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
46. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
47. It’s a people driven economy.
48. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first / selling second.
49. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Source: Socialnomics^TM

1. 

   dr.pixel says:

   16/12/2009 at 00:29

   Thank you Arkovi for the mention on your blog.

   Nicolas