Today’s world is growing at an increasingly fast pace with new technologies, opportunities and the way we communicate with one another. One way people and businesses are changing to stay up-to-date with this extremely fast growing competitive world is through social media. Social Media are works of user-created video, audio, text or multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment (capilanou.ca). These are any website or web service that utilizes a ‘social’ or ‘Web 2.0′ philosophy. This includes blogs, social networks and social news (about.com). Types of social media would be blogs, podcasts, pictures, videos, forums, rating and wikis to name a few. Some social media applications are blog sites: WordPress; LiveJournal; Blogger; Xanga. Social networking sites: Facebook; MySpace; Twitter; Bebo; LinkedIn; Hi5. Video sharing sites: YouTube; Vimeo; Viddler. Photography sharing sites: Photobucket, Flickr, SmugMug; Zooomr. Livecasting sites: Skype; Stickam; Ustream.tv. The list for social media types and sites is endless. Some of the most popular social media sites are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

According to Socialnomics.net if Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia. Facebook has more than 400 million active users with 50% of those active users logging on to Facebook in any given day (facebook.com). Facebook added more than 100 million users in less than 9 months (socialnomics.net) There are more than 3 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and more than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week (facebook.com). More than 35 million users update their status each day and more than 60 million status updates posted each day (facebook.com). There are more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook and more than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook (facebook.com). Each day more than 20 million people become fans of Pages and Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans (facebook.com). The average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site and an average user sends 8 friend requests per month (facebook.com). The average Facebook user spends more than 55 minutes per day on the site (facebook.com). There are more than 70 translations available on the site and about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States (facebook.com). Over 300,000 Facebook users helped translate the site through the translations application (facebook.com). Facebook Plateform has more than 500,000 active applications currently and more than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users (facebook.com). Currently more than 100 million active users accessing Facebook through their mobile devices (facebook.com). Facebook users that use their mobile devices to access Facebook are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users (facebook.com). Throughout 60 countries there are more than 200 mobile operators working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products (facebook.com).

Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now (twitter.com). Twitter has 75 million members with about 6.2 million new users each month (computerworld.com). Twitter ranks as the 3rd top social networking site and has between 10-15 million active users (computerworld.com). According to Twitterholic.com the top 5 twitter users are: Ashton Kutcher; Britney Spears; Ellen DeGeneres; Barack Obama; Oprah Winfrey. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama (socialnomics.net).

The 4th largest site on the internet today is YouTube (cleancutmedia.com). YouTube ranks as the number 1 video site on the Internet today (cleancutmedia.com). YouTube is designed so that users can not only watch video(s), but they can also share video(s). There are 300 million worldwide people that visit YouTube each month and 3.5 million users that visit the site each day (cleancutmedia.com). YouTube has 5 billion video stream each month and 15 hours of video uploaded every minute (cleancutmedia.com). In August 2008 YouTube became the number 2 search engine on the web (cleancutmedia.com).

There are even business related social networking sites like LinkedIn. LinkedIn is designed to help you connect with professionals across the world to become more productive and successful. As of February 11, 2010 LinkedIn has over 60 million member (LinkedIn.com). The site currently has members in 200 countries and territories in all 7 continents (LinkedIn.com). A new member joins LinkedIn about every second and half of its members are outside of the United States (LinkedIn.com). Some of the LinkedIn members include all of the executives from all Fortune 500 companies (LinkedIn.com). About 38% of LinkedIn members are between the ages of 35-49 and 31% are 50 or older (quantcast.com).

Social media is continuing to grow every minute of every day and if you’re still in disbelief here are a few more statistics for you. According to Socialnomics.net social media has overtaken porn as the number 1 activity on the internet. In 2010 Generation Y out numbered the Baby Boomers and 96% of Generation Y has joined some type of social media (socialnomics.net). Last year 1 out of 8 couples married in the United States meet through social media (socialnomics.net). And were as it took the radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, television 13 years, the Internet 4 years and Ipod 3 years, it only took 9 months for iPhone applications to hit 1 billion users (socialnomics.net).

Social media is the new thing and it is only going to keep growing. As you saw with Facebook adding over 100 million users in the past 9 month social media is growing rapidly. Social media has already out numbered television, which has been around for over 80 years. So if you’re currently not a member of a social media site you had better join one. In fact, you had probably join 2 or 3, if not more.

References

“About.” About Twitter. Twitter. 2010.

Gaudin, Sharon. “Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse.” Though Twitter is still getting newbie users, many are inactive. ComputerWorld Networking & Internet. 26 Jan. 2010.

“Linkedin.com” Daily Traffic. Quantcast. 2010.

Nations, Daniel. “Web Trends.” The Web 2.0 Glossary (R-Z). About.com. 2010.

Oualman, Erik. “Socialnomics – Social Media Blog.” Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think. Socialnomics. 11 Aug. 2009.

“Press.” Frequently Asked Questions. LinkedIn. 2010.

“Press Room.” Statistics. Facebook. 2010.

“Social Media Optimization.” Top Twenty Five Social Networking Sites – Feb 2009. 17 Feb. 2009.

“YouTube Statistics.” The Ultimate Time Suck. Clean Cut Media. 18 Feb. 2009.

Young, Linda. “Marketing & Communications.” A social media glossary. Capilano University. July 2008.