Erik Qualman is the man behind a great series of videos in which the the development, in facts and figures, of social media is beautifully portrait. It had been a while since he published his last video, Social Media ROI in November 2009, but now there is an updated version of the original video ‘Social Media Revolution’ available:
Some statistics in this video:
- Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
- 96% of them have joined a social network
- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
- 1 out of 8 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 over 200 million users in less than a year
- iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
- Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; 95% of these using LinkedIn
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- 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.
- 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
- Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
- What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
- Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
- If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
- 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
- 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 that can TiVo ads do
- Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
- 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
- We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
- We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
- Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
- The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
- 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
Staggering statistics, and mind boggling as an employer. What do you do first? What is most important?
At Project Resource we have been looking at this closely for the past two years. We evaluated our target audience and the messages we wanted to convey, then we took steps to target that audience using the mediums we felt most appropriate.
Good article.