Last year, Erik Qualman impressed us with his research and video titled, "Social Media Revolution." While some social media critics disputed some of the stats Qualman used to quantify his research, if even only 50% of the statistics listed in this year’s follow-up video, "Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)" weren’t totally accurate, it’s staggering the inroads social media has made in just one year.
As referenced on his blog and in his book, titled ‘Socialnomics,’ Qualman updated many of the statistics from the original Social Media video to better reflect what the space looks like today. As an extension of business ethics, Qualman see social media as a vital business channel and while it can be quantified, it needs to be analyzed over time versus strictly as a cause-and-effect paradigm.
Preferring the phrase, "what will success look like" versus "what’s the ROI," Qualman believes that since social media is not your traditional media channel, it needs to be reviewed in its totality. In his ‘Social Media ROI’ video, he showcases several Social Media ROI examples along with dozens of effective social media strategies.
The (Refresh) video released on May 5, 2010 has already tallied over 133,000 views on YouTube. The new and updated social media and mobile statistics researched by Qualman are more astounding this year than last, based on networks like Facebook and Twitter becoming the predominant movers and shakers in the space.
And if you want to use some of these stats in your own research and couldn’t write them dow fast enough, here are 42 of the stats noted in the video:
1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: 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
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 can’t develop a correlating analyses.
Erik QualmanBottom 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 these numbers substantiate that fact!
Hats off to Qualman for continuing to do some of this heavy lifting for the rest of us. I do hope this an annual tradition going forward. Bravo!
