One of my first blog posts I created in 2011 featured a video that challenged the question “Is Social Media A Fad?”
Hult International Business School recently put together another similar video using 2014 statistics from Socialnomics, and my how the social media landscape has changed.
One misconception that you must understand before watching this video is that social media is only Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. The term social media is actually very broad and is generally defined as the interaction among people in which they create, share or exchange user-generated content, information, and ideas in virtual communities and networks (source).
Check out the 4-minute video below and see how the social media revolution is still changing how we do business.
Some Social Media Statistics That Stuck Out To Me
- Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old
- 95% of Millenials (birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) have joined at least one social network
- If Facebook were a country, it would the world’s 3rd largest…and get this, it barely has a presence in the world’s largest country, China
- 80% of companies now use social media for recruitment
- With over 15 million articles, studies show that Wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica
- There are over 200,000,000 blogs (although I question how they arrived at this number and how they defined a “blog”)
- 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content (i.e. blogs, forums, videos, etc.)
- We will no longer have to search for products, the right products will find us via social media (this one is definitely true as I’ve seen this in my own life, first-hand)
Like the video states, I don’t believe that social media is a fad, but instead, it’s a global shift in the way we as humans communicate and interact with other people as well as brands.
-Lance Brown