THE growing use of social networking, such as Twitter and Facebook, has coincided with 24 of the 25 largest newspapers in the world experiencing record declines in circulation – according to a ‘socialnomics’ video sweeping the internet.
Asks the video, rhetorically: Is Social Media a fad or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?
And there then follows a rapid-fire sequence of statistics to argue the latter.
Watch the video: here.
Reflect on the statistics, here:
By 2010, Gen Y (born between the mid 1970s and late 1990s) will outnumber Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and 96 per cent of them have joined a social network.
Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
One in eight married couples in the U.S. last year met via social media.
It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet four years and the iPod three years.
Facebook (www.facebook.com) added 100 million users in less than nine months. iPod Application downloads hit one billion in nine months. If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, behind China, India and the USA, but ahead of Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan. Yet, China’s QZone (www.qzone.qq.com) is larger, with over 300 million users.
The fastest-growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) are shared on Facebook, daily.
The US Department of Education has found that, on average, online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. And the same study had found that one in six higher education students had enrolled in online education.
80 per cent of companies are using LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) as their primary tool to find employees.
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter (www.twitter.com) followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. 80 per cent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices.
Generation Y and Z (born since the mid 1990s) consider email passé; in 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen.
YouTube (www.youtube.com) is the second-largest search engine in the world: 100 million videos.
Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has over 13 million articles; 78 per cent of these articles are non-English. 156 articles are posted every hour.
There are over 200 million blogs; 54 per cent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
25 per cent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are linked to user-generated content. 34 per cent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google (www.google.co.uk) ranks them.
78 per cent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14 per cent trust advertisements. Only 18 per cent of traditional TV campaigns receive a positive ROI (return on investment). 90 per cent who are able to skip TV ads, on their digital video recorders, do.
US-based TV catch-up website, hulu (www.hulu.com), has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
70 per cent 18-to-34 year-olds have watched TV on the web. Only 33 per cent have ever viewed a show on digital video recorders, such as TiVo. 25 per cent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
35 per cent of book sales on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) are for the wireless reading device, Kindle.
