There are many statistics floating around that give testament to the importance of social media. Digital consultant Arik Hanson made a short list of some of the more interesting facts that have surfaced recently. Here are five of those stats that deserve comment:
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More than 250 million people use Facebook Connect every month
There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about the portability of the social graph, your own network of contacts and personal information. Google, Facebook, Twitter … every new system that arrived on the scene had it’s own picture of your social connections. Initiatives like OpenID came into being to try to bridge those gaps across systems, but today many sites offer access to multiple authentication schemes and let their members decide which login to use. This can present some issues for both developers and users, of course, but it is usually a win for everyone to lower the barrier to entry for more people by refusing to commit to one silo. The fact that a quarter billion people leverage the Facebook authentication each month speaks volumes about the rest of the social graph ecosystem, too.
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A lot happens on Facebook
That’s an understatement. During the average 20-minute period in 2010, there were (among other things) 1.5 million wall posts. To put that in perspective: The great novel War and Peace is 560,000 words long. Assuming the average wall post is 15 words, that’s 127.5 Tolstoy novels worth of content every hour. The largest museum in the world—the State Hermitage Museum in Russia—has 639,000 paintings and graphic art works, just 24 percent of the number of photos uploaded to Facebook every twenty minutes. There are 14 million messages and comments exchanged on Facebook each hour, the equivalent of almost two-thirds of the volume of USPS mail. A lot happens on Facebook.
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Twitter biographies increased to 69 percent
From December 2009 to December 2010, users with a biography listed on Twitter increased from 31 percent to 69 percent. This is a significant change for two key reasons. First, it is a clear sign of growth in fluency using the microblogging platform. Informal studies have shown that people are more likely to trust you (and therefore follow you) if you have a full profile, especially a descriptive personal bio. Second, even if only to self-disclose who you are in a short paragraph, this is a significant behavioral shift from private to public action. There is still a large percentage of registrations who don’t use the service, but for those who do this is a big win for transparency and connection.
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Friday at 4p EASTERN is the most retweetable time each week
HubSpot’s Dan Zarella has invested a great deal of time in tracking the behaviors of link sharing in social media. His work typically looks at the aggregate picture, however, to show in chart form why it is better to craft your viral-friendly microcontent on Friday or Saturday afternoon, instead of Monday morning. While you can learn a lot by looking at the aggregate (e.g., Twitscoop), most Twitter networks are local in nature, reflecting existing offline and geographic connections. 4p Friday may be a great statistical time to get a retweet, but it may not be your best target for your audience. Ultimately, success in getting others to rely on you as an information source is tied most strongly to the relationships and trust you cultivate.
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4 percent of adults on the Internet use location-based services
The current interest in place-based community started in earnest with Dodgeball, a service aimed at creating awareness in major metropolitan areas about who was in the same vicinity you were. Launched in 2003 as a thesis project in an world without smart phones, Dodgeball was later bought (2005) and then scrapped (2009) by Google. A month later, the same team launched Foursquare as a replacement, this time with a growing user base armed with iPhones, Blackberries, and Androids. Last December, the company reported 6 million users and information from over 380 million check-ins. With other services (Gowalla, Loopt, Google Latitude, Facebook Places) in this space, this 4 percent stat ought to grow significantly as companies learn to leverage the local context.
