Guest post by Ken Myers
Social media is a huge part of our lives.
Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, and even YouTube connect us, amuse us and keep us feeling like part of the global community.
What we overlook, however, is just what our use of social media says about us. What do we value? What do we talk about?
What do we watch and share and like?
All these questions can be answered by simply looking at our actions online. What scientists have uncovered might shock you. Here are some interesting, weird, and definitely cool facts about social media:
- 1. 85% of women are annoyed by their friends- What I do not understand is why they have those ‘friends’ in the first place. No one said you had to agree to every friend request and unfriending someone is very easy. I also note that men were not mentioned here, that is probably because they have no problem unfriending people.
- 2. 90% more links were shared about sex than any other topic–Well, that is not surprising. Considering the porn industry is one of the most successful things ever online, I do not see how it would be anything else. I wonder what they consider to be links about sex though? Just porn or health issues or teaching kids about sex or…
- 3. More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome–I do not think it is a good sign that a syndrome is named after a social media site. I get more and more afraid for this generation with every passing moment and new illness.
- 4. 25% of users do not bother to have any kind of privacy control on their page–Well, that is just stupid. No wonder privacy is so poor online and so many people are getting their identities stolen!
- 5. The average Facebook user has 130 friends–I wonder how many of these people know each other in real life. Are Facebook friends considered real friends or just acquaintances? How do you draw the line on who you accept friend requests from?
- 1. There are 750 tweets shared every second- That seems like a lot to me. I wonder when the peak times are?
- 2. The original Twitter beta was launched on the birthday of CEO Evan Williams – Nice birthday present, isn’t it? Especially when it gets as big and profitable as this!
- 3. If Twitter was a country it would be the twelfth largest in the world – Can you imagine a country that communicated via Tweets? Maybe the government would actually get something accomplished.
- 4. 30% of Twitter users have an income of more than 100,000 dollars a year – That is pretty cool! Who knew that Twitter users were so wealthy? However, I do not understand why their grammar is so terrible… and their spelling.
- 5. Twitter handles more searches per month than Bing and Yahoo combined – Wow that is a lot of searches. I wonder what the top searches are for? And doesn’t Microsoft own Yahoo and Bing now anyway? So they are technically one company, right?
- 1. Two new members sign up to LinkedIn every second –That is more than a hundred new members every minute!
- 2. LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities – I wonder how many languages they speak and what sorts of jobs they have?
- 3. LinkedIn’s revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years – That is a great success rate, especially in the current difficult economy!
- 4. Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012 –Wow, I wonder how that measures up to Twitter, Yahoo, and Bing’s number of searches for this year?
- 5. There are more than one million LinkedIn groups – That is a lot of groups. I wonder how many are repeats and how many members each group has on average?
YouTube
- 1. Over 4 billion videos are viewed every day –Billion! That is a ton of videos and more are uploaded every day.
- 2. The most watched commercial video is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance with 470 million views – I wonder what makes that video so popular? Is it just Lady Gaga’s name, her strange outfits, the catchy tune, or am I missing something?
- 3. The most watched non-commercial video is Charlie Bit My Finger Again with more than 458 million views – I have seen that one! I think it is the cute kid’s accent that really makes you laugh when you watch it.
- 4. The average visitor spends fifteen minutes per day on YouTube – I am pretty sure I spend more than fifteen minutes on YouTube when I visit. I get sucked in by the links and just keep going and going and going.
- 5. 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the United States –That is pretty astounding! I wonder what percentage of the YouTube videos are in languages other than English or have subtitles?
These cool facts about social media are eye opening. These are so many things we could learn about how we communicate and cooperate with others through social media. If only we could harness all that invested time and effort and do something really worthwhile with it!
Author Bio:
Ken Myers is the founder & contributor for http://www.longhornleads.com. He frequently researches and writes about a variety of topics like education, Technology, Health and many more.He welcomes your comments.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting article, although the first time I read the Facebook facts I read 1.85% of women… and thought “big deal”. After reading it through again it made more sense seeing it was actually 85%. Anyway, made me laugh, thanks for the information, very interesting.
Mr. Degree recently posted..Your Ally in the Aisle
Very useful article on social media!
I think these are very handy facts regarding social media as it has now become very famous part in internet marketing. It is used widely all over across the world and help in building a huge network on it.
One can clear his / her mind about social media by this post.
Loved the information, I guess one can see everything at one glance in this post, and it surely does remind us how much our presence on the social media is required, though I wonder how and where all can a person be at one single time! Thanks for sharing.
Wonderful facts about social media, I’m using since days but didn’t know so many facts. I would like to add one thing, if Facebook was a country and its users made up all of the population, then it would be the 3rd largest country in the entire world just behind China and Russia. Social media has become really important, it is fun, money, connects people & more.
A great article on social media. The above mentioned are the real facts of facebook. Nobody has the right to force someone to accept the friend request. We can change or set our privacy settings accordingly. Linkedin is really a great and helpful site for the jobseekers.
Heena Soni recently posted..Managing Negative Content Online
wow, very informative article and i have seen the facebook fact no.3 the most. Thanx for the post