I have been following Sarah Evans, PR guru, since I was in college. Recently, her team scoured the internet, news, books, and everything else they could to come up with the most convincing social media stats. This list is phenomenal and you should hang it up in your office and definitely use it on your next presentation slide.
1. “Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US.” (Journalism.co.uk)
2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.” (TVGuide.com study via TVNewsCheck.com)
3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.” (Pew Internet via Social Media Club)
4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.” (Mashable via Social Media Today)
5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.” (comscore.com via Mashable)
6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.’” (VentureBeat via Marketing Pilgrim)
7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.” (prsarahevans.com via TechCrunch)
8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.” (Ning via TheNextWeb)
9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.” (Pew Internet via prsarahevans.com)
10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.” (Advertising Age)
11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.” (eMarketer)
12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.” (Forbes)
13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.” (TravelClick via Econsultancy)
14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. [...] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.” (via Poynter)
15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.” (Business Insider)
16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.” (60 Second Marketer)
17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.” (via Social Media Today)
18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.” (AllThingsD)
19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.” (AllThingsD)
20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.” (NYTimes.com)
21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.” (The Next Web)
22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.” (Pew Internet)
23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.” (Hubspot via ClickZ)
24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.” (Problogger)
25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.” (Problogger)
26. “In early March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user’s private information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user data or even impersonate the device owner.” (Network World)
27. “Groupon is on track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone. Facebook’s 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth year of existence.” (Knowledge@Wharton via MSNBC)
28. “A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions.” (TheNextWeb)
29. “99 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to password theft.” (MobileCrunch)
30. “Recent estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than other social sites.” (Advertising Age)
31. “More than 3.34 million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social asks.” (PRsarahevans.com)
32. “David Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that, based on a new research study, ‘age and sex don’t matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.’” (Forbes)
33. “An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver.” (via AFP)
34. “Almost one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social networking sites.” (Kelly Group via BusinessReport)
35. “The percentage of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now.” (via NY Post)
36. “33% of Facebook posting is mobile.” (Dan Zarella)
37. “Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%).” (Journalism.org)
38. “85% of media websites now use online video to cover news.” (SocialTimes.com)
39. “”Social media advertising spending will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion by 2015.” (BIA/Kelsey via Direct Marketing News)
40. “Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month. World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003.” (via Lee Odden, TopRank)
41. “Twitter reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the beginning and end of Obama’s speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]” (AllTwitter)
42. “65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.” (USA Today)
43. Re: the Royal Wedding: “911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That’s about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media.” (USA Today)
44. “According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd.” (Nieman Journalism Lab)
45. “Twitter penetration rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, according to new data from online tracking firm comScore Inc., which suggests that nearly one in five Canadian Internet users over the age of 15 regularly visit Twitter.” (via Financial Post)
46. “Traffic from social media has highest bounce rate. [...] If you’re looking for ‘hyper-engaged’ readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average.” (Marketing Pilgrim)
47. “”Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies that Ad Age analyzed.” (Advertising Age)
48. “Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2010: $41,390. Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2011: $230,000″ (Huffington Post)
49. “Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet.” (eMarketer)
50. “According to a Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently.” (Search Engine Watch)
You can follow Sarah at PRSarahEvans.com
