Social Media Fun Facts

Consider the following:

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers -- 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
• Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
• One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
• 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 nine months; iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's fourth largest, between the United States and Indonesia.
• Yet, some sources say China's QZone is larger, with more than 300 million using their services (Facebook's ban in China plays into this).
• ComScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience, with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month -- Vkontakte.ru is the number one social network.
• A 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that, on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
• One in six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
• Eighty percent of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55- to 65-year-old females.
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway, and Panama.
• Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences!
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé. Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen in 2009.
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook...
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
• Wikipedia has more than 13 million articles. Some studies show it's more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica. Seventy-eight percent of these articles are non-English.
• There are more than 200,000,000 blogs.
• Fifty-four percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth.
• If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• Facebook users translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than two weeks and cost Facebook $0.
• Twenty-five percent of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.
• Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.
• Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
• Ninety percent of TiVo users skip ads.
• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
• Twenty-five percent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
• According to Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.
• Twenty-four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news -- the news finds us.
• In the near future, we won't search for products and services; they will find us via social media.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy -- listening first, selling second.
• Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

All courtesy of Eric Qualman and Search Engine Watch

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