Social Media Revolution: Is it a Fad?

Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. They support the democratization of knowledge and information and transform people from content consumers to content producers. Popular networking sites including Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are social media most commonly used for socialization and connecting friends, relatives, and employees.

Is social media a fad?

• Studies show that Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met via social media.
• Number of years to reach 50 million users: radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPOD, 3 years. iPOD application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months; Facebook – added 100 million users in less than 9 months. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc) are shared on Facebook, daily. If facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4^th largest.
• 2009 US department of education study revealed that on average, online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum. 80% of companies find their employees online.
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices, people update anytime, anywhere
• YouTube is the 2^nd largest search engine in the world with more than 100 million videos
• Wikipedia, hawaiian term for Quick, has over 13 million articles. Studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Briatannica. 78% of these articles are non-English. If you were paid $1 for every timem an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• There are over 200 milliom blogs 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily
• 70% of 18 to 34 year-olds have watched TV on the Web
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…in the near future we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.

Still think social media is a fad? Social media isn’t a fad, it’s simply a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.