Social media - bigger than you think

Now, some critics have questioned his statistics but I believe that, if only a small fraction of these are right, they represent an awesome eye-opener for any marketer or businessman who still refuses to believe that social media is anything but a passing fad.

Just look at a few of the points Qualman makes:

1. More than 50% of the world's population is under 30 years of age
   
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
   
3. FaceBook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US
   
4. Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
   
5. One out of eight couples married in the US last year met via social media
   
6. Number of years to reach 50 million users: radio (38 years), TV (13 years), Internet (four years), iPod (three years)...
   
7. FaceBook added over 200 million users in less than a year
   
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months
   
9. We don't have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it."
   
10. If FaceBook were a country, it would be the world's third largest ahead of the US and only behind China and India
    
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
    
12. A 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
    
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment, 95% of these using LinkedIn.
    
14. The fastest growing segment on FaceBook is 55-65 year-old females
    
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.
    
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for FaceBook... people update anywhere, anytime... imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
    
17. Generation Y and Z consider email passé - some universities have stopped distributing email accounts
    
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
    
19. What happens in Las Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook...
    
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
    
21. . While you read this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
    
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles... studies show it's more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica... 78% of these articles are non-English
    
23. There are over 200 000 000 blogs
    
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
    
25. If you were paid US$1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn US$156.23 per hour
    
26. 25% of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
    
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands
    
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You'd better.
    
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
    
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
    
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
    
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
    
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
    
34. Kindle eBooks outsold paper books on Christmas
    
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
    
36. 60 millions status updates happen on FaceBook daily
    
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us
    
38. We will no longer search for products and services; they will find us via social media
    
39. Social media isn't a fad; it's a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
    
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men: listening first, selling second
    
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in five years
    

Socialnomics is available from Amazon.com for about R90.