The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution

Last week I attended SMACC2011 (#smacc2011). It was a conference at the Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University on the blending of Social Media and A Cappella singing. There was a lot of singing, but I spent my time in Social Media Marketing seminars. One seminar started on the phenomenal growth of Social Media. Some of the statistics and thoughts they revealed were, I thought, astonishing. Here are some of those revelations (the source of most of them are a book titled, Socialnomics dated May 5, 2010 - also found at www.socialnomics.com).

First, Social Media is called "The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution".

More:

Over 50% of the world's population is under 30.  96% of them have joined some form of Social Media

Facebook now tops Google for weekly traffic in the US

Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web

Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users

Television took 13 years to reach 50 million users

The internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users

The iPod took 3 years to reach 50 million users

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

China would be first, India second, Facebook third and the USA fourth

Facebook has more users than there are people living in the United States

80% of companies in the US use Social Media for recruitment

95% of these use Linkedin

The fastest growing Facebook segment is 55 - 65 year old women

Generation Y and Z consider email to be passe

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

There are over 200,000,000 blogs

34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

(34% of 200,000,000 is a very large number)

Only 18% of traditional TV ad campaigns generate a positive ROI (return on investment)

90% of viewers skip TV ads completely by means of Tivo/DVR

where as, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

(such as they get on social media)

and only 14% trust advertisements

On Facebook, there are over 60 million updates a day.

And, a couple of quotes:

"Social Media is not a fad, it is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate".

and

"The ROI of Social Media is that your business will exist in 5 years".

(These are powerful words - and the emphasis is added).

These numbers are compelling evidence that if your business is not involved in Social Media, at the very least, it is missing a huge opportunity to be more profitable.  Further, this opportunity exists for every type of business, be it professional or store front or creative.