The Stats On Social Media Today Will Astound You!

Since Web 2.0 is now passing its 5th year anniversary, there is enough data to assess just how much of an impact social media has had on our lives. While there are still those who believe it's nothing more than a passing fancy, a fad, the Studio 54 of our day...one cannot deny the numbers. Statistics don't lie and Kagan, Fisch, McLeod & Qualman are here to prove it so!

For those naysayers and non-believers, several social media gurus have been hard at work data-mining the facts to prove their case. The Social Media Revolution is alive and well and demonstrating everyday just how many rank-and-file netizens are goose-stepping to its drumbeat.

Marta KaganLast year, Marta Kagan, managing director for Espresso (an integrated What the F**k is Social Media?marketing agency) helped solve this problem with her presentation, boldly titled "What the F**k is Social Media?" It was critiqued a social media success for its humor and the convincing case it made regarding the power of social media.

With the tremendous growth of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging in the last year, Ms. Kagan felt with the evolution of social media moving so fast, a sequel was in order. And of course she was right on target. The stats she cites and the insights she surfaces are simply amazing. Check out her presentation here: "What the "F**k is Social Media: One Year Later!"

"Did You Know - 2008 Latest Edition" by educators Karl Fisch, and Scott McLeod is an updated Karl Fisch & Scott McLeodversion of a 2007 presentation titled "Shift Happens."  While somewhat US-centric, it does provide global stats on the Information Age and became an authoritative data source for Sony BMG at their executive meeting held in Rome in 2008.




Erik QualmanOn July 30, 2009, Erik Qualman, the global VP of online marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland updated some of the research completed by Kagan, Fisch and McLeod. Posting to his Socialnomics blog designed to cover the latest news and trends in social media, his presentation called the "Social Media Revolution" provides startling statistics from a vast amount of collated research.

 And if you want to use some of these stats for your own research and couldn't write fast enough, here is a complete list of the statistics noted in the video:

•    1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
•    2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
•    3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
•    4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
•    5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
•    6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
•    7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
•    8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
•    9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
•   10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
•   11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
•   12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
•   13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
•   14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
•   15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
•   16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
•   17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
•   18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
•   19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
•   20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
•   21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
•   22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
•   23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
•   24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
•   25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
•   26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
•   27. Only 14% trust advertisements
•   28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
•   29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
•   30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
•   31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
•   32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
•   33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
•   34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
•   35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
•   36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
•   37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser
  
  (note: the sources to back up these statistics can be found on Socialnomics Blog)

While its important to debate the pros and cons of social media, as I have myself in previous blogs, its also important to pay heed to the statistics. While pure data of this sort always needs to be analyzed and assessed, until you have the actual numbers, you are unable to make any assumptions.

Bottom line, I have to agree with Qualman and his belief that the above statistics “ tell the story that social media isn’t a fad... it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate." And that paradigm shift is underscored by the fact that we no longer need to search for the news... the news finds us! We are all part of a user-generated society, now in control of our own destinies. And the numbers substantiate that fact!