Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business

By Erik Qualman

It’s amazing how fast the world of social media moves!  As many of the statistics from the original Social Media video have changed, I took a moment to refresh the video with a few new statistics and graphics.  Thanks to all of you for your support in making the first Social Media Revolution and Social Media ROI videos such a huge success and I hope that you enjoy this refresh!

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Social Media Statistics:

Below are the sources I used to compile this video.  Keep your feedback/questions/challenges coming as it will collectively make the next video better – be social.

A huge thanks to all below:

1. Source: http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/broker http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.php  [roughly 52% based on table data] | 2010 U.S. 310,232,863 | 2010 World 6,814,609,654 | 30 and under: 3,548,760,268 / 6,814,609,654 = 52% http://sasweb.ssd.census.gov/idb/worldpopinfo.html
2. Source: Grunwald Associates National Study – Trendsspotting Blog | Millenials Conference
3. Source: Hitwise Intelligence Heather Dougherty http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2010/03/facebook_reaches_top_ranking_i.html
4. Source: Huffington Post
5. Source: McKinsey Study also posted by David Dalka
6. Source: First Stats: United Nations Cyberschoolbus Document
7. Source for Facebook Stat: Facebook Timeline http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline Feb 2009 175 million users – Feb 2010 400 users:
8. iPhone Stat: Apple
9. Personal Quote
10. Source: Facebook and world population data
11. Source: TechCrunch
12. Source: U.S. Department of Education Study
13. Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey
14. Source: Inside Facebook Blog
15. Source: Twitter & World Population Data [Pulled 4/11: Kutcher & Spears 4,743,902 and 4,689,808 = 9,433,710] – note it’s not the combined populations of the countries listed
16. Source: The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/feb/08/facebook-rise-mobile-web-use
17. Source: Metro Commuter Newspaper
18. Source: USA Today: Should Colleges Start Giving iPads to Students? http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-04-05-IHE-colleges-give-iPads-to-students05_N.htm
19. Opinion, not a statistic
20. Source: TGDaily
21. Source:  Mashable by Ben Parr
22. Source: www.wikipedia.org - calculated based on # articles per language category; Colorado State University Wikipedia Accuracy Study; open debate and of course very biased information is also found on this Wikipedia Accuracy page.
23. Source: China Internet Information Center, Technorati, Wikipedia
24. Opinion, not a statistic
25. Source: ClickZ Stats SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
26. Calculated based of Wikipedia article data found at www.wikipedia.org
27. Source:  TechCrunchThis says 4 weeks so I may have been a little off here as my source at Facebook had said 2 weeks adjusted above
28. Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine June 8 page 24-25 Chris Aarons, Andru Edwards, Xavier Lanier Turning Blogs and user-Generated Content Into Search Engine Results
29. Opinion, not a statistic
30. Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (actually 90% now – updated above but video still shows 78%)
31. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007
32. Source: “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing  2007
33. Source: Starcom USA-TiVo
34. Source: Mashable
35. Source: Solutions Research Group
36. Source: Facebook Stats
37. Opinion, not a statistic
38. Opinion, not a statistic
39. Opinion, not a statistic
40. Opinion, not a statistic
41. Opinion, not a statistic
42. comScore
43. Music in video provided by Fatboy Slim “Right Here, Right Now” (1999) – if you like it buy the single

To watch videos with millions of YouTube views and deservedly so, please check out Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod’s Did You Know? And Shift Happens videos on YouTube.  If you are like me you will love them!

Also, if you haven’t seen Marta Kagan’s “What The F**K is Social Media” presentation,  it’s amazing! Many of the same eye-popping facts are contained in it – as well as many more.  Plus, it does a much better job of providing insight than my video which is designed to grab attention.  Kagan’s presentation informs, check it out!