Social Media: Tracking Its Exponential Growth [Stats, Video]

Many of you are probably familiar with Social Media Revolution, a fantastic video created last year by Erik Qualman that examined the explosion of social media onto the modern scene. It did an excellent job of explaining the importance of the social Web and its impact on society. Erik is also the author of the fine book Socialnomics, which details how social media has forever changed the way we live and do business.

Since everything in the world of social media has been evolving so quickly, Erik has just updated that wonderful video to include many new statistics and graphics. If you loved the first one, you’ll enjoy version two just as much:

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Stats from Video:

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 about 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 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that, on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; 95% of these use LinkedIn
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
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the U.K. 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 with 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 $156.23 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 and brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You’d 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 skip TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks outsold paper books for 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 no 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 engaged 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