Friday, June 25, 2010

Social Media Revolution, Some Flabbergasting Facts: Day Twenty-Six

When we started this blog, we aimed at achieving a semblance of competence with social networking and determining whether it had applications beyond keeping in touch with friends and family. If I am to be totally candid, we also viewed the concept with some skepticism: lonely housewives facebooking about their grocery lists and harmlessly or not so harmlessly flirting with old flames; stargazing wannabes monitoring how many crunches Ashton Kutcher does at the gym today; maybe a few uber techie businesses utilizing it for online sales.



Whether we achieved a level of competence depends on how you define competence, but we are certainly more comfortable and confident than we were on Day One. As far as the applications of social media beyond showcasing vacation photos, well, the sky's really the limit. Without overstating it, we are in the midst of a revolution.

Consider:

--1/8 of couples that married in the US in 2008 met via social networking.

--There are over currently 200,000,000 blogs on the web (with all those choices, thank you for reading ours!). 54% of bloggers post and/or tweet daily.

--YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and has surpassed online porn as the most popular web activity. (That's good news, right?)

--With an estimated 400,000,000 users, if Facebook were a country it would be the 4th largest in the world.

--96% of Generation Y is currently engaged in social networking activity.

--80% of companies now use LinkedIn as their primary source of prospective employees.

--35% of Amazon.com's sales are now for Kindle products.

--1/6 of higher education classes are currently taken online.

Thank you socialnomics.net for those staggering stats.

And here's another one:


--24 hours worth of video is uploaded every hour onto YouTube. But who is watching all of that stuff? Apparently we are. In 2009, online video viewing increased a shocking 53%! Don't throw your plasma screen out to salvage yet, but as Hulu and YouTube soar in popularity, there may come a day when television is obsolete.
Thank you mashable.com.




Posted by: Keri

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