The social media statistics I posted a few weeks ago seemed to strike a chord amongst the digital community, especially in highlighting just how big an issue this particular area of online currently is. So I’m happy to say that I’ve trawled around the internet to bring you some more snippets of useful data and awesome figures.
As before, all this information is likely to be out of date in six months or so – but until then, they’re reasonably recent facts and once again I feel they demonstrate the meteoric rise and importance of this rapidly evolving area of online.
In no particular order:
- Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
- If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
- 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
- Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
- It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
- Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
- The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
- It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
- The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
- According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
- The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
- Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
- Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
- Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
Although these statistics look impressive, it needs to be remembered that no single piece of data can be used to base strategy or objectives upon, let alone be used as a forecast for future growth of a specific area of social media. To really drill down into a sector of interest, you need to fully aggregate and analyse all available data before making an informed decision or conclusion.
If you have any interesting or useful information that you think might be applicable, please add it into the comments below!
*Thanks to SEW for the b/g inspiration
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Posted 17 August 2009 10:50am by Jake Hird with 14 comments
Tags: statistics, data, Facebook, YouTube, twitter, MySpace, Flickr, Delicious
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Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
12:40PM on 17th August 2009
Social media has been played a great role epecially those who have an online business. But this people show bear in mind that a strategy in his/her online business is unique, one may not be applicable to the other.
3:12PM on 17th August 2009
Great stats but don't forget all the dead wood on Facebook, Twitter etc behind the stats. eg 20% of Twitter accounts are unused. another 50% of twitter users haven't 'tweeted' in the past week. 75% of tweets come from 5% of twitter users. puts a fresh perspective on it all.
http://twitpic.com/e8ej6
Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy
3:28PM on 17th August 2009
@David Fair point - and one that I think is reasonably acknowledged in the responses I left in the comments of the stats list that predeeded this one:
Worth pointing out that this is just my opinion, however. I'd be interested to see what others think.
- J
5:12PM on 17th August 2009
My view on this issue is that organizations need to take into consideration both the social and technical aspects of the adoption and use of these types of services. Power and reach of these products and various services are what enables organizations to consider innovative approaches to establishing and maintaining relationships with those who are known and also unknown to various personnel internal to a particular organization or across a group of organizations, such as in the case of an industry. A good way to approach this issue would be to first assess the information culture that exists in a particular organization. What are the current practices, including technologies, that are being used to interact with others, including distribution of both "need to know" as well as "might want to know" information? What are the features of a various social media product or service that might extend the current practices to promote as well as expand the reach outside a particular organization? What training might be needed among members of organizations to make the change in practices happen? There are many other questions that should be asked to make a broad assessment of what is as well as what can be in the context of the adoption and use of the various products and services that are currently on the market as well as in other stages of development and anticipated to hit the market in the near future as well as on into the distant future.
CEO at NewLeaseG2M
9:08AM on 18th August 2009
Even if the figures themselves are not entirely accurate the trends are mind boggling, and over time the absolute values will improve.
As to whether the "dead wood" and babble counts against the importance of social media - I don't think so. It simply makes it all the more important to have a sound business process in assessing what you need to do, and how to form and execute a strategy.
@jake I agree with you except with your narrowing of social media to part of the "marketing mix". That is a fundamentally wrong approach as I am sure you would agree. The task is to assess its relevance and then to develop a strategy as part of the total customer experience and engagement. Which social media places and spaces that may involve, and which functions and departments within a particular business, are not pre-determined and the answers come from the analysis.
Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy, Australia
http://www.socialmedia-academy.com.au
5:19PM on 18th August 2009
People are spending more time online than ever before and specifically in social media. This is where people are spending their time engaging with content and each other. How marketers engage with where people are spending their time is an exciting but still unformed process ripe for the innovators in the field. I believe most would agree that the standard banner ad has marginal effectiveness. Perhaps there is no good way to engage with this particular audience when they are on social media sites any more than how advertisers can't reach people when they are talking on the phone. As a medium to engage with brands directly, I've seen some great stories.
2:57PM on 19th August 2009
So what. Twitter is BORING!
4:35PM on 19th August 2009
Very impressive! But I think you must visit and know other online video-services like Vimeo and Videolog. In each case you can see a lot of good productions, not only TV features. Obviously, YT is the hit, but isn't the only one. Best Regards from Brazil!
1:34PM on 21st August 2009
more and more social media stats, can't seem to get enough of them, thanks for the list.
3:32PM on 21st August 2009
Great list thanks. Would be really useful to have the specific sources next to each one, so we can dig deeper and contrast sources. Cheers.
6:20PM on 24th August 2009
Jake Hird thank you very much for the statistical report that you present to us.
I translated into Spanish, big part of this article.
----------------------
Jake Hird muchas gracias por el informe estadístico que nos presentas.
Traduje al español, gran parte de este articulo pueden verlo en:
http://www.gustavocoronel.com.ar/datos-estadisticos-de-la-redes-sociales/
9:57PM on 31st August 2009
While I'm not necessarily in agreement with the tone of this blog, I thought it important to share the Ad Contrarian's post today - which calls into question many of the statistics spreading like wildfire from that Socialnomics video, in particular. As advocates for social media marketing, I think its incumbant on us to be sure the information we're using is accurate.
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-social-media-baloney.html
2:20PM on 7th September 2009
My view on this issue is that organizations need to take into consideration both the social and technical aspects of the adoption and use of these types of services. Power and reach of these products and various services are what enables organizations to consider innovative approaches to establishing and maintaining relationships with those who are known and also unknown to various personnel internal to a particular organization or across a group of organizations, such as in the case of an industry. A good way to approach this issue would be to first assess the information culture that exists in a particular organization.thank you
11:47AM on 13th January 2010
nice one