You might need to watch this several times –It was created by Erik Qualman.

Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

  1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
  2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
  3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
  4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
  5. Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  6. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
  7. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
  8. 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
  9. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
  10. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
  11. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
  12. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  13. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
  14. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  15. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
  16. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
  17. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  18. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
  19. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  20. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
  21. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  22. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
  23. Facebook users translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
  24. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  25. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  26. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
  27. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  28. Only 14% trust advertisements
  29. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  30. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  31. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
  32. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
  33. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
  34. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
  36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
  37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

Still think social media is a fad? Are you ready?

These are SOME of the points made in the video. Go here  for a complete list and slide by slide  data sources.