Is Social Media a fad or a force to be reckoned with? Here are just a few statistics taken from the Socialnomics social media blog http://tinyurl.com/rbcm2p Not my sources so you decide.

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network

2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

4. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction

5. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

6. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%

7. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama

8. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

9. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

10. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English

11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

12. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

13. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements

14. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

15. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

16. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

The above statistics and video tell the story. Social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.  Please feel free to share with any non-believers!