40 Remarkable Things About Social Media
Posted on 23. Feb, 2010 in Blog, Social Media
It can take a major effort to convince CEOs (and some marketers) of the power and value of social media to further your business and your brand. Here are 40 facts, quotes and stories about social media that can bolster the argument.
40 Things You Wouldn’t Have Guessed…
1. Social media can severely damage your brand: “In videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere this week, a Domino’s employee in Conover, N.C. prepared sandwiches for delivery while putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches.” New York Times, April 16 2009.
2. Brands can become the conversation: “Brands are now becoming conversation factors where academics, celebrities, experts and key opinions formers discuss functional, emotional and, more interestingly, social concerns.” Simon Clift, Unilever
3. Companies avoid social media because they want to retain control. Consumers flock to social media because they want control. For companies, “they only think they are in control.”
4. 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology and two thirds of the global Internet population uses social networks. Use of social sites increased 82% globally from 2009 to 2010.
5. There are 4 billion photos on Flickr alone.
6. There are now 50 million Tweets a day.
7. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and spends almost an hour a day on the site.
8. Three quarters of Digg users are male, in a household earning $85K on average. 99% of Digg users access the Internet every day.
9. The #1 social network in 25 countries is hi5, offered in 26 languages primarily through mobile devices.
10. Facebook has over 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs, and over 140 applications added each day.
11. Pepsi invested $20mm in a social media campaign in preference to Superbowl ads in 2010, breaking a 23-year dominance in Superbowl TV ads.
12. Best Buy has hundreds of employees interacting on Twitter to sell promotions and solve problems.
13. Over 40% of users have “friended” a brand on Facebook or Myspace.
14. Traditional success metrics don’t reveal ROI. Loyalty, trust and qualitative factors are more important than “number of followers”.
15. The “Whopper Sacrifice” application causes 233,906 friendships to be canceled before Facebook banned the application (and a wildly subsequent petition to revive the application failed).
16. The most popular viral video in 2009 was Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent, with 216 million views. The Muppets’ Bohemian Rhapsody received only 15 million.
17. Twitter and LinkedIn have quickly become major recruitment channels during the recession.
18. Conversational marketing is replacing the mass marketing which has dominated advertising since the 1950s.
19. Email marketing generated an ROI of $43 for every $1 spent in 2009, outperforming all other direct marketing channels.
20. A Forbes media survey showed email and e-newsletters to be the second-most effective tool for creating conversions, just behind SEO.
21. A MarketingSherpa report showed that pay-per-click (PPC) ads provide the best ROI of any type of marketing or advertising. Only 18% of TV ads generate positive ROI (Socialnomics).
22. Google Social Search, which started as an experiment last year, is generally believed to now have a greater weighting in SERPs ranking – and will probably be considerably more in the future.
23. Benjamin Franklin understood social media: “Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.”
24. “If content is king, then conversion is queen.” – John Munsell, CEO of Bizzuka.
25. “Social media makes it impossible to hide bad customer service.” – James Beswick, Founder of One Uproar (you’re welcome).
26. To succeed in social media, you have to be a tummler (from @debs).
27. Toyota’s “Rock The Space” Myspace contest received over a 1,000 song entries in the first day.
28. From the plane in the Hudson to the death of Michael Jackson and the car crash of Tiger Woods, Twitter broke the news first to an audience larger than all traditional domestic media combined.
29. Social media provided wind in the sails for President Obama’s election: 13 million people on the email list, 3 million online donors, 2,000 YouTube videos with 80 million views, and 5 million friends on 15 social networking sites.
30. The localization revolution, seen with the success of applications like FourSquare, has started to make the Internet personal, local and relevant again – advertisers be warned.
31. More than half of the the world’s busiest 20 websites are either social networks or contain substantial elements of social networking platforms.
32. Adaptability and rapid repeat failure are key elements of the social media business model: “As you start building the product… Listen to the community and adapt… We saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn’t see anyone using our product that way” – Chad Hurley.
33. Social media can succeed for small businesses just as well – and sometimes better – than for big brands. Kogi’s BBQ taco truck in LA has 45,000 followers on Twitter waiting to see where the truck arrives next.
34. ”People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.” – Seth Godin.
35. “Stop looking at the Web as merely a display opportunity and not a way to interact. That does not create a new business model, it just shifts one that isn’t growing and is outdated. The reason sites like Google are stealing advertisers from daily newspapers is not because Google has more eyeballs. It’s because Google used the interactivity of the Web to deliver a new, better way to advertise.” – Sarah Lacy
36. John Maeda: social media “let’s you connect with more humans. Not more computers, as was the earlier goal of computing.”
37. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
38. There are over 200,000,000 blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or Tweet daily (Socialnomics).
39. 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
40. “Social media is like any good social interaction, it starts with listening, followed by observing and connecting and finally making a contribution when you have something to say that others are interested in hearing.” – Elizabeth Ferris.
Do you need a social media strategy for your business? Contact One Uproar at social@oneuproar.com.
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