Using Social Media for your business- Interesting Social Media facts

Posted on October 22, 2010

Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Web.

That’s one hell of an achievement & just one of the many interesting facts that I’m about to break to you all! Hopefully, these facts will make you realise just how important social media has become in the last few years for all business owners, no matter how big or small you are.

Social media marketing for business owners

All successful businesses are using Social Media one way or another these days; whether it be YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Digg, Linked In, Twitter, Stumbled Upon, or many others- they all play a huge part in online marketing.

If you own or run a business, you should without doubt be using Social Media for marketing purposes! There’s so much to be gained from Social Media- and the best bit about it, it’s mostly FREE! This article looks at just some interesting facts from various forms of Social Media. These facts of all come from various reliable sources & I’m sure that after reading them, you’ll realise just how important Social Media has become over the last few years & start using it to take your business forward.

The interesting Social Media facts

Watch the video, then read below to run through some of them again to make them sink in properly. If you really are interested in taking your business forward with an online presence- I guarantee you the 10 minutes you spend reading & watching this article will not be wasted time.

Is social media a fad? Or the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?

Welcome to the revolution!

  • Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old.
  • 96% millennials have joined a social network.
  • Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the USA!
  • Social Media has overtaken pornography as the number 1 activity on the web!
  • 1 out of 78 couples married in the USA, met via social media.
  • Facebook: +200 million users in less than 1 year!
  • iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months

Years to reach 50 million users:

  • Radio: 38 years
  • TV: 13 years
  • Internet: 4 years
  • iPod: 3 years

“We don’t have a choice on wether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.” -Erik Qualman

If Facebook were a country, it would the world’s 3rd largest!

  1. China
  2. India
  3. Facebook
  4. USA
  • Us department of Education study revealed that online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction…
  • 80% of companies use social media for recruitment….

Percentage of these using linkedIn: 95%

  • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females!
  • Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, Panama…
  • 50% of the mobile traffic in the UK is for facebook.

Some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts- Instead they are distributing:

  • eReaders
  • iPads
  • Tablets

What happens in Vegas stays … on facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube…

  • Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.
  • Wiki is an Hawaiian term = Quick. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles. Studies show it’s as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. 78% of these articles are non-English. If you were paid $1 for every article posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $1,712.32… per hour!
  • There are over 200 million blogs on the internet
  • Word of mouth > World of mouth!
  • 25% of search results for the top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content!
  • 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands… Do you like what they are saying about your brand?
  • You better…
  • People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them! 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations… Only 14% trust advertisements…. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI… 90% of people skip ads via TiVo/DVR!
  • Kindle eBooka Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
  • 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
  • 60 million status updates happen on Facebook every single day!
  • We no longer search for news, news finds us…
  • We will no longer search for services and products, they will find us via social media

To summarize- Social media is not a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate!

Social Media- are you part of the revolution? You should be!

Interested in using Social Media to bring your business bang upto date with the 21st century?

I’ve started writing some very easy-to-follow guides on using Social Media for online marketing. Whether you’re experienced in Social Media, or barely know how to turn on a PC- my guides really are that straight forward- even grandma could make sense of them! You can via the first one which is all about Facebook, by clicking the link below:

Using Facebook as an online marketing tool. Part 1 of 3- simple introduction to Facebook