Wow, so I have been incredibly remiss in writing a blog. I was talking today to Diana, here at Pinc, and was asking when our next newsletter went out…thinking it was NEXT week, and I’d have time to put my ‘office’ work on hold and write a blog. Yea, well, not so much. Our newsletter goes out this week. As a working mom of three, back to school shopping on the agenda…turfing out clothes tucked way in the back of drawers that no longer fit my always growing childen, and of course, living my life on purpose…how on earth am I to write a blog?
Ok, the above really isn’t my ONLY excuse for not having a topic…social media is. Every day I receive dozens of newsletters in my inbox on philanthropy, change, giving, social enterprise. My iphone buzzes with every breathe from direct mentions on Twitter . I am receiving Facebook updates through my app and nosy me wants to go check out my best friend’s pictures of her camping trip! Toss in CNN, BBC, and CTV news feeds…and well, I am doomed.
Jake Hird from eConsultancy in the UK just sent out this blog with the most recent statistics on Social Media use.
In no particular order:
- Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
- 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
- Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
- It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
- Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
- The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
- It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
- The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
- According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
- The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
- Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
- Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
- Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
At the end of his blog, Jake says ‘…it needs to be remembered that no single piece of data can be used to base strategy or objectives upon, let alone be used as a forecast for future growth of a specific area of social media. To really drill down into a sector of interest, you need to fully aggregate and analyse all available data before making an informed decision or conclusion.’
Are you kidding me? Now I have to aggregate and analyse ALL available data…before making an informed decision or conclusion?? …might get a proper blog out to you next week.
