Social Media – Impact on our lives

Social media is a form of interactive dialogue and a social instrument of communication, thus allowing a better and more fluent exchange of user-generated content. This tool plays a huge role on the online industry, adding more outlets to the already versatile streams of information and the flow of electronic commerce. Its user base ranges from bloggers, to advertisers, to reviewers or even people who just want to communicate with each other via web-based technologies.

As you can see, the entire social media world is so immense and has a huge variety of fields that you can reach, if you are business driven and looking to expand your customer base.

Social Media Statistics

Just to provide you with some statistical data of its startling growth— recent studies (2010) have discovered that social media sites have had steadily increasing growth rates in user base. Here are some numbers:

• 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
• 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
• 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
• 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
• 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
• 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Although media sites have the core of their user base in the young population (13-40) these websites have integrated versatility into their platforms, like facebook with its gaming apps (Farmville by Zinga attracted many mothers and children to join the site).

YouTube now displays high definition commercials before watching a video on certain networks of heavy traffic, or twitter with a more simple form of breaking news alerts, hasthtags, and ‘’trending’’ . There is really no boundary or border to join and enjoy the advantages of social media, and of the opportunities and segments by the marketers, which is why your company MUST have some form of campaign using social media to capitalize on the growing trend, the wide range of expanding segments and its cost efficient ways.

How We Use Social Media

It is now common to see small icons on virtually every website we go to that say ´´share´´. By clicking on them, we expose our interests to our ´´acquaintances´´ via different networks, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube, Digg, etc.

Choosing to share our interests is most likely to target search engines to direct us to related advertisements, if we click on them, it directs us to an actual website where we can obtain the goods that we first ´´shared´´ as interests and then the process would flow into an eventual purchase and ultimately a delivery.

Social media can also become a less direct form of marketing; any given individual can accomplish a certain degree of ´´authority´´ online by providing accurate contributions such as yahoo answers or useful articles. This person would then be influential in a consumer´s decision of making a purchase. Let´s use amazon.com as an example (one of the fastest growing companies, and leading online retailer in the world) they have a system called “customer reviews”.

If a consumer has purchased, tried and is experienced with a particular product, they may submit a review and depending on their degree of accuracy the other reviewers will give them a rating, and whenever that high-rating reviewer posts a feedback on a product, it is very likely for another potential buyer to become persuaded to obtain this good just by looking at that review.

Important Facts

• Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the US.
• 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.

Conclusions: Social media is potentially the main stage of nearly all interactions in the future, specifically in the fields of advertisement, sales, streams of information, newscasts etc. It’s your choice to capitalize on the opportunities of this growing movement.