Photo compliments of Matt Hamm
I originally began this article because I was asked to do a dinner presentation on Social Media. Someone was looking for a social media guru and thought of me. I have to admit I believe I don’t match the guru aspect of that compliment but I accept it!
My point is, social media is a beast that changes daily and can not be measured by one man, nor can it be completely contained in a single blog, or a website, or weeks of research! Social media has changed the face of the earth. It has evolved how human beings communicate, torn down cultural, racial and societal barriers. Social media has opened doors that no man can shut.
I’m taking some of the statistics I’m going to point out from many other sources. A noteworthy link is Jake Hird’s blog, which you can find at http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited.
The truth of it is, the numbers are mind-boggling and because it’s so rapidly changing, you can only review data from months prior to get an impression of today and tomorrow. Consider some of these following tid-bits of data and think of what it could do for your online campaign…
- Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
- Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
- LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
These numbers are astonishing but what strikes me the most is actually using these services! I’ve always been reluctant to use social media as a person. As a business I’m loving it. But I feel like social media is a smoking gun. We can claim all day long that guns are terrible and should be banned. I think that’s wrong. Guns are a tool and have served man well for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately some bad people have guns too and bad people have social media too. When I finally gave up and made a twitter account ( today! ) I received a follower before I even tweeted! Someone named Alyssa24 was looking for a strong man posted a link to some online pics, which I did not click.
Aside from the personal ‘trash’ that floats around every fad, think about the impacts of social media on business networking however! Take Apple and PC for instance. There aren’t viruses on Mac’s. That’s because it’s a very small percentage of the market. The fad is still cheap PC’s. Mac’s are the ‘upper class’…
The market is all over social media. That means there are lots of viruses. But it also means there are more clients, lots and lots of them!
Consider:
- There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
- More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
Did you catch that??? 70% of Facebook users are NOT U.S. citizens! For all of us here in the U.S. we can expand to a global market.
What if I don’t want a global market? Every aspect of social media provides a refinement process to market to your local market. But think about this… In my article about Searching the Search Engine I talked about getting in-bound links to your website. Imagine the power of having a tweet link to your website daily? How about having 500 friends on Facebook linking to your website?
Every blog article I put in a link to my website, www.topsoftdesignstudio.com which constitutes a friendly in-bound link! What if you could get 50 new people looking your website? It would take about 5 days to get a couple hundred friends on Facebook. If you post to their wall a link to your website with a valid reason to look, imagine the power of advertising??
Social media is amazing! It’s a tool. It can be bad, it can be good and many people can argue both directions. It’s a tool that has caused the world to step back and look at what’s happening. An explosion in communication and personal marketing is creating entirely new markets. Take advantage of this phenomenon and jump into the social media world with open eyes. Expect great things and expect lots of spam!
