Is Social Media A Fad Or A Revolution?

by Chris Kamalski

I SAY REVOLUTION.  WE DON’T HAVE A CLUE WHERE THIS TRAIN IS HEADED…

  • By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network 
  • 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 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  • If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
  • 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
  • % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
  • 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…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
  • The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
  • There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  • 54% = Number of bloggers who 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 a $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 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
  • 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
  • More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

    • Thanks Aly.