Social media networks are no longer a novelty as they were several years ago. They are mainstream and highly accepted ways of sending and receiving “STUFF” … good stuff, bad stuff, dumb stuff, silly stuff, worthwhile stuff and pretty useless stuff … all delivered in a blink of an eye.
Email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and Apple Apps are all part of the communication technology that is overwhelming us at every turn. And don’t think Social Media networks are being used by just the hip, techno savvy 18 – 34 years old … Twitter’s fastest growing age demographic is 55 to 64 year olds … and the fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively. I’d like to share with you some interesting statistics from a recent study by GlobalWebIndex.
TWITTER is the fastest growing social network in the world growing 44% (active users) from June 2012 to March 2013. That equates to 288 million active users and over 500 million registered accounts.
FACEBOOK continues to grow with over 1.1 billion monthly active users and 751 million mobile users accessing Facebook every month.
YOUTUBE has over 1 billion monthly visitors and reaches more U.S. adults ages 18-34 than any cable network. People are watching 6 billion hours of video a month, which is up 50% from a year ago.
GOOGLE+ is making an impact on social media and is now the second largest social network with 359 million monthly active users … up over 30% from last year.
LINKEDIN is the largest professional business network on the planet. It continues to grow but not at the pace of Twitter or Google+: Over 200 million users … 2 new users join it every second … and 64% of users are outside the USA.
APPLE, on May 16, 2013, announced that customers have downloaded over 50 billion apps from the revolutionary App Store. Customers are downloading more than 800 apps per second at a rate of over two billion apps per month on the App Store.
Companies are no longer being judged by their brick and mortar structures … they are being judged by their websites and Facebook pages. Every day there are 822,000 more websites and NOW … websites are being reconfigured to (better) fit mobile tablets and phones rather than desktop computers. Why? Because THE KEY FACTOR to what is driving the social web is mobile devices. The number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone increased by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years.
EVERY 60 SECONDS … 41,000 people make a post on Facebook … there are 2 million searches on Google … 204 million emails are sent … 11,000 professional searches are made on LinkedIn … 216,000 photos sent out over Instagram … and 278,000 tweets on Twitter. (source: Qmee)
You may not like it nor fully understand it … but you better GET CONNECTED OR PULL THE PLUG on your business because you won’t survive. This year for the first time in my life I did ALL my Christmas shopping ONLINE with almost all shipping charges waived. NO crowds, NO hassles, NO parking problems and NO tired/irritated/uninformed sales clerks.
Words like quick, fast, simple, easy, painless, and efficient are driving successful companies today. Several years ago, one of my clients, who has since been bought by FedEx, had a great motto … E Z T D B W. It stands for Easy To Do Business With. May I suggest you take a page from their playbook and do the same.
Social Media is here to stay and a perfect way to make your company E Z T D B W.
For more information on Robert Stevenson, visit http://www.speakernow.com/espeakers/6560/Robert-Stevenson.html?topic=-1