Who can question the power of social media in today’s world?
Facebook is the most visited website on the internet, exceeding one trillion page views as of last year. There are more Facebook users than there are cars (850 million vs 750 million). Every minute on Facebook, 510,000 comments are posted, 293 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. As huge as these numbers seem, Facebook is still blocked in China.
Twitter has over 225 million users generating close to 200 million tweets every single day. Twitter is far more than a “what I had for lunch” app. 40% of Twitter users don’t tweet, but use Twitter to keep up to date with news and trends. Over half of Twitter users access the site via their smartphones or tablets.
Linkedin has over 150 million users with two more people signing up every second. Almost half of Linkedin users have a household income of over $100,000 per year.
YouTube sees 490 million unique visitors every month generating 92 billion page views. Over 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every…….minute! That is more video in 60 days that the networks were able to generate in 60 years.
In a year, Google+ has grown from nothing to over 100 million registered users. Granted, the average user spent only 3.3 minutes on Google+ in January, but then again, Rome wasn’t built in a day either. Almost 90% of engagement with Google+ occurs during working hours on weekdays.
Flickr hosts over 5 billion images and another 3,500 are added every second. Like Google+, Pinterest has seen explosive growth over the last year, rapidly approaching 20 million members, without the muscle Google was able to throw behind promoting its own social product. Groupon has over 115 million subscribers looking for deals every day. 15 million people use Foursquare to check-in at stores and restaurants.
Social media today is responsible for 1/3 of all internet traffic. (Another 1/3 is porn) That leaves the last 33% to all other internet activities. So, the next time you want to dismiss the power of Social media for your business, remember a handful of these numbers and keep in mind, they are still increasing.
Daniel Feldman, is a co-founder to the Visionaries Group visionariesgroup.com (on Facebook) and CEO of dba Communications dbadesigns.com, (on Facebook) a web design and social media firm specializing in helping eye care practices achieve success.
