Did you see that?
Social media might be the biggest shift since the industrial revolution. Some companies dismiss social media as a fad, but take a look at these numbers:
Let’s talk about Gen Y (AKA Millennials)
50% of the world’s population under 30 years old. That means that there are a lot of people in the millennial generation.
96% of all millennials are on social media.
That creates some interesting shifts in the marketplace.
Facebook has more traffic than Google. In fact, social media is more popular than online pornography.
Seriously.
Our world is so connected through social media, that 1 in 8 currently married couples in the US actually met for the first time on a social media site.
Let’s talk usage
When we say that the world is speeding up, this is what we mean:
To reach 50 million users, radio took 38 years.
TV took 13.
The internet took 4.
The iPod took 3.
That’s a pretty drastic difference from radio to mp3, but check this out:
Facebook added 200 million users in less than 1 year.
What about apps?
When iPod introduced app downloads, they saw 1 million in a mere 9 months.
If Facebook were a country, its population would make it the 3rd largest in the world, and it’s still growing.
What about the online landscape?
In recent studies by the Department of Education, online college students outperformed students getting face-to-face education in traditional universities.
As far as the workplace goes, in 2010, 80% of companies use social media for recruiting, with 95% of those use LinkedIn.
Note: this post was updated in April 2017, and the latest numbers indicate that around 95% of companies use social media to find new employees.
Females between the ages of 55 and 65 are the fastest growing Facebook demographic as of 2010.
Note: in 2017, the fastest growing demographic is the baby boomer generation.
Email is becoming so obsolete that some universities have stopped assigning email accounts to students at all. Instead, they use tablets.
More than 100 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every 5 minutes.
Wikipedia, with over 15 million articles (78% in languages other than English) has been determined to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.
Blogs are a big deal, too.
There are more than 200,000,000 blogs on the internet, and they’re getting a big chunk of web traffic.
25% of search results for the top 20 largest brands in the world are links to user generated content, not content created by those brands themselves.
What’s in that user generated content?
Opinions.
34% of blogs post opinions about products and brands.
People value the opinions of their social circle and peers – that means that social proof is more valuable than a good search engine ranking. 78% of internet users trust peer recommendations, and only 14% trust ads.
In fact, traditional TV ads are becoming increasingly ineffective. Only 18% of those campaigns generate a positive ROI, which means that 82% lose money. 90% of people skip ads because they’re watching online or via a DVR.
24 out of 25 of the largest newspapers are experiencing drastic dips in circulation numbers, and news is moving online.
News searches have declined, because news comes to us. The same trend is showing true for products and services.
Social media is a big deal.
Updated:
Headline: Prepare to Scrape Your Jaw Off the Floor
Publisher: NeONBRAND https://neonbrand.com
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