Social Media Revolution
Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the industrial revolution? Welcome to the revolution.
This article is a textual representation of “Social Media Revolution” by Socialnomics.
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 US last year met via social media.
Years to reach 50 million users:
- Radio: 38 years
- TV: 13 years
- Internet: 4 years
- iPod: 3 years
- Facebook: Added 100 million users in less than 9 months
- iPod applications: Downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest.
- China
- India
- United States
- Indonesia
- Brazil
- Pakistan
- Bangladesh
Yet, China’s QZone is larger than Facebook with more than 300 million people using their services.
A 2009 study by the US Department of Education revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in an online curriculum.
80% of companies are using LinkedIN as their primary tool to find employees. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old females.
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population 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 email passé. In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen.
What happens in Vegas, stays on social media. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world. The service has more than 100,000,000 videos.
Wiki is a Hawaiian term that means “quick.” Wikipedia has more than 13 million articles. Studies show that its contents are more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. 78% of its articles are non-English. If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
There are more than 200,000,000 blogs in existence. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
Much of social media is word-of-mouth.
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 and 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.
Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009. 70% of 18-to-34 year olds have watched TV on the Web. Only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR/TiVo. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experience record declines in circulation.
We no longer search for the news; the news finds us. In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services. They will find us via social media.
Social media is not a fad. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” – James Carville, 1992.
“It’s a people driven economy, supid.” – Erik Qualman, 2009.
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.
Do you still think social media is a fad?
Leave your response!