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Published: August 18, 2009 Last Updated: February 09, 2022

Is Social Media A Fad, Or Should You Get On Board?

Is Social Media a Fad, or should you get on board?

I came across this amazing video on Youtube with interesting Stats on Social Media. It reinforces my opinion that any Business that is serious about growing into the future should focus on their online presence. The Internet (and Social Media) is here to stay, so don't get left behind.

If you don't have time to watch the video, some of the key points to come out of it are:

  • By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
  • 96% of Gen Y have joined a social network
  • Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
  • The years taken to Reach 50 millions Users:
    • Radio - 38 Years
    • TV - 13 Years
    • Internet - 4 Years
    • iPod - 3 Years
    • Facebook - 100 million users in less than 9 months
    • iPhone applications - 1 billion in 9 months.
  • If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
  • China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services
  • 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
  • 80% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees
  • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  • Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
  • 80% 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
  • What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook
  • The 2nd largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles. Some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica and 78% of these articles are non-English
  • There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  • 54% 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
  • 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  • 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  • 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 that can TiVo ads do
  • Hulu (a TV Show Download site in the US) has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
  • 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
  • According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are in Downloadable format
  • 24 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 will no longer 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 advertiser