If you need to convince someone about the importance of social media from a communications point of view, show them this video. It starts by asking, “is social media a fad?” (one I get asked often) to, “or is it the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?” (a bit strong, but to me social media is analogous to the birth of the printed press).
It’s littered with stats - some I knew, many I didn’t - such as:
- - One in eight couples married in the US last year met on social networking sites
- - Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months
- - and if it were a country, it’d be the fourth largest in the world
- - 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
- - 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are links to user generated content
- - 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, compared to 14% trusting adverts
- - 35% of book sales on Amazon (presumably US) are for the Kindle
The video was produced by Erik Qualman @equalman, author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
Thanks to Stieve De Lance for pointing the vid out to me.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Some of these numbers are very striking, but I think there’s also a risk of going for hype over serious analysis. So yes – Facebook is big – but other than (ahem) in my own blog post http://www.markpack.org.uk/facebook-statistics/ I’ve never seen the “would be fourth largest country” figure accompanied with “would be four poorest country”.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, I kind of agree about the hype thing and I almost put in the post about not having all the sources of the stats (I guess this is in the book). I think it works as a good vid to show someone who’s completely new to social media or a sceptic – it’s a bit sledgehammer to crack a nut though (one of the bits that most interests me is actually around peer reviews, and forums in particular).
But you raise an interesting point about Facebook; as in it hasn’t worked out the financial bit yet. Which is funny, because, it’s ad model is quite cool and anecdotally , I’ve spoken to a few people who have had really good success running small campaigns on Facebook.