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Goodies Social Media

Is social media a fad? Nope.

It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Great video full of interesting facts and well worth sharing.

A few tidbits:

  • It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users while Facebook achieved the same number within 9 months
  • 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
  • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old women
  • Gen Y consider email passe. In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to new starters
  • YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
  • 78% of internet users trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements
  • 1 in 4 Americans in the past month have watched a short video… on their phone
  • More than 1.5m pieces of content are shared on Facebook, daily
  • Listen first, sell second

The most amusing I thought was: “What happens in Vegas now stays in Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Orkut, Digg, MySpace and YouTube”

9 replies on “Is social media a fad? Nope.”

y’know, I was also blown away by the stats thrown at us on this video. Even before seeing this video mind you, I’ve been one of those that is wholeheartedly convinced that social media is the way forward. No doubt, whatsoever.

However, upon having a deeper think about the video, I started to sober up from it and reverted to viewing it from a *healthy-skeptic* point of view. Seeing it from this *healthy-skeptic* point of view shot up some red flags in my head – most notably that this video may be the culprit of generating a great degree of *hype* around social media. If you come to think of it, it’s very easy to take in these statistics for fact without even questioning where they come from (especially b/c we are already convinced that Social Media is in fact not a fad, etc).

I go on to think that: hey, we’ve been here before, right? mid 90s, internet/e-commerce hype, and sure there was equivalent media that made us drunk with promising stats. Are we applying the learnings of the past when it comes to distinguishing *hype* from reality?

As of now I think the truth will be somewhere in the middle – yes some truly disruptive changes in behaviour and business models are bound to happen, but maybe not to the extent the mind blowing stats thrown at us on the video may lead us to believe…

what do you think? like Andy, I’m just putting it out there…!?

Radio took a very long time to build it’s audience but it’s decline has been equally as slow and steady.

Could this be something to bear in mind with social media..? It has been phenonimally quick to build an audience, will it decline at the same pace when the next wave of technologies comes into play?

Who knows, just throwing that out there..?!

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