Social Media: Fad or the Real Thing?
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Since the turn of the year, most of my thoughts about taking my business to the next level have focused around social media. Thinking about this objectively, this got me thinking, is this just a fad or is it here to stay?
Some facts…
1. Average person spent five and a half hours on social media sites in December 2009, up 82 percent from December 2008. AC NIELSEN
2. Marketers will also be spending more time and money on social media sites in 2010 – Alterian
5. Facebook is still by far the most popular social networking site worldwide, with 206.9 million unique visitors in December
6. 67% of global social media users visited the site during that month, spending an average of about 5.5 hours there per month, up from just three hours in December 2008.
7. Twitter received 18.1 million unique visitors in December 2009, up from 2.7 million in December 2008 (a remarkable 579 percent rate of growth).
8. Time spent on blogs and other social media sites increased 210 percent year-over-year, and the average time spent per person increased 143 percent.
9. Australia led the world in time spent on social media sites with 6 hours and 52 minutes per person, United States was second (6 hours and 9 minutes) with the United Kingdom close behind (6 hours and 7 minutes)
10. 20 million people are online on SKYPE at peak time, 445 million subscribers in Q1 2009, 30% usage for business purpose, 3.1 billion call to mobiles and landlines in Q3 2009, More than 190 certified hardware products.
11. Facebook available in more than 70 languages with 900+ employees. Facebook banned in Syria and 70% users live outside US. Features more than 350,000 application. Over 2.5 Billion photos uploaded monthly and faster growing demographic is women over 55. More that 300,000,000 users.
12. Approximately 150,000,000 videos on YouTube. 70% of the registered users are the American. Every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded. Localized versions for over 22 countries in 19 languages, total times of videos watched in 9300+ years. Estimated revenue of between $120 – $500 Million.
13. 54% of respondents said social media was ‘increasingly important’ to the overall marketing mix, with only 14% believing it to be ‘critical for success (Alterian Research Study)
14. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
15. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour;
16. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
17. Hitwise UK reports indicate as top three sites for the week ending 16/01/2010: Facebook (51.60%), YouTube (16.10%) and Bebo (2.26%) (social networking category).
18. 51% of journalists read blogs for story ideas.
19. 28% of top search engine results are Social Media sites.
20. Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users often read blogs.
21. Delicious (bookmarking site), has more than five million users and over 160 million unique bookmarked URLs.
22. According to Compete, In Q4 2009 Digg saw a 91% increase in traffic, while Stumbleupon and FriendFeed recorded a huge increase of over 180% and 3100%, respectively, as compared to 2008.
23. Wikipedia currently has more than 13.5 million articles in more than 250 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique visitors a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
24. There are overall 234 million websites as of December 2009. 126 million blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse)..
Data compiled by Sorav Jain: Social Media & Digital Marketing Blog



d I must say, I learnt a lot. However I made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t go to another until I followed up on my commitments I made and take MASSIVE ACTION around my goals.





