Social Media: Fad or Revolution?

Erik Qualman | Aug 10, 2009 | 0 Comments

Is social media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the Social Media Revolution.

Consider the following:

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers -- 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
  
  
• Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
  
  
• One out of eight 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 nine months; iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months.
  
  
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's fourth largest, between the United States and Indonesia.
  
  
• Yet, some sources say China's QZone is larger, with more than 300 million using their services (Facebook's ban in China plays into this).
  
  
• ComScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience, with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month -- Vkontakte.ru is the number one social network.
  
  
• A 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that, on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
  
  
• One in six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
  
  
• Eighty percent of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
  
  
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55- to 65-year-old females.
  
  
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway, and Panama.
  
  
• Eighty percent 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. Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen in 2009.
  
  
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook...
  
  
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
  
  
• Wikipedia has more than 13 million articles. Some studies show it's more accurate than Encyclopædia Britannica. Seventy-eight percent of these articles are non-English.
  
  
• There are more than 200,000,000 blogs.
  
  
• Fifty-four percent 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.
  
  
• If you were paid $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 two weeks and cost Facebook $0.
  
  
• Twenty-five percent of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
  
  
• Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
  
  
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.
  
  
• Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.
  
  
• Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
  
  
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
  
  
• Ninety percent of TiVo users skip ads.
  
  
• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
  
  
• Twenty-five percent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
  
  
• According to Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.
  
  
• Twenty-four 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 won't 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 advertisers.

The above statistics and "Social Media Revolution" video tell the story. Social media isn't a fad. It's a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers!

Erik Qualman's new book "Socialnomics" from Wiley Publishing will be in stores and available online August 26.