Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.
Social media take on many different forms, including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking.
Social Media statistics:
- Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the US
- A total of 234 million people age 13 and older in the U.S. used mobile devices in December 2009
- Twitter processed more than one billion tweets in December 2009 and averages almost 40 million tweets per day
- Over 25% of U.S. internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up from 13.8% a year before
- Australia has some of the highest social media usage in the world. In usage of Facebook Australia ranks highest, with over 9 million users spending almost 9 hours per month on the site
- The number of social media users age 65 and older grew 100 percent throughout 2010, so that one in four people in that age group are now part of a social networking site
- As of June 2011 Facebook has 750 Million users
- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
- Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web
- iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest
- U.S. Department of Education study revealed that online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
- In four minutes and 26 seconds 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
Contact us for more information on implementing social media strategies in your business.