You know the old saying, what goes up, must come down? Will that be the case with social media? Nothing stays around forever especially in the rapidly changing world of technology. People are fickle when it comes to tech. We love something today but then something cooler and more useful comes out and the former gets dropped like a hot potato. Is social media that hot potato?
According to the infographic from the Search Engine Journal that my colleague Mark Story shared, social media has been riding the tidal wave since 2005. While I don't think social media is going to suddenly disappear, I do think that it will evolve and quite possibly into something completely different then how it looks today. Until then, let's dive into some of these statistics.
- In 2005, 16% of 18-29 year old US internet users, used social. By 2010 that statistic to climbed to 86%. In 2010 61% of 30-49 year old US internet users social media compared to 12% in 2005.
- One in four Americans watches a video on YouTube everyday.
- Facebook has about 63% of the social network membership share. YouTube has 20%. Will Google+ shake things up?
- If Facebook were a country, it would rank at third most populated country after China and India. Yes, FB would beat the US.
- The fastest growing segment of social networking users is college age students.
- People using mobile devices to access Facebook rose about 200% between 2010 and 2011 from 63M users to 200M users. This is an important number for nonprofit campaigners to look at. If people are using mobile devices to access social media, they are using it for everything else including reading your action alerts, fundraising appeals, and accessing your site. Have you optimized your website and emails for mobile yet?
- Twitter is growing at a much slower rate than Facebook in terms of registered users. Between 2010 and 2011, Twitter grew by 26% and Facebook grew 82%.
- Registered users on LinkedIn grew 138% between 2010 and 2011 and 56% of the new users were from outside the US.
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